I don't know enough about the bill on its merits to say one way or the other whether it's good, although on the surface it makes sense to me to put money into the economy where it's needed most, and certainly education and health care are two top candidates for that. And I certainly feel better about my tax dollars going toward Pell Grants and rebuilding decrepit schools than to John Thain (formerly of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America), say, who saw fit to use $1.2 million of our money to redesign his office (including a $1,405 waste basket). Or to Wall Street, more generally, which used it to pay out bonuses many multiples larger than my annual earnings.
On the point of an addiction to federal funds, I can say this: there's a really simple and effective tool against making the federal government's temporary expansion permanent. As a parent, I use the same tool all the time. It's the word "no." And I know all about addiction. Over the winter break when we were visiting my family in Atlanta, Sam experienced a similar expansion of TV-watching hours, and it's been a bear of a habit to break since, at home, we're stricter than the 18-hour maximum he enjoys in the face of an ailing relative at his grandparents' house (no TV on school nights and 2 hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). Sometimes we have to spell out "N-O!." Sometimes we have to resort to "No, no, no!" (The glitch in my argument, I realize, is that at home we enjoy a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy, and our two parental votes carry more weight than the Republicans' votes in Congress these days.)
Still, it goes without saying that if the country had said no sooner and more often, we wouldn't be in quite this deep of a predicament.
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