Hilarious article in the LA times today..

Perhaps a bit too stimulated - Joel Stein
The government should not be in charge of the economy. The government is super-insecure and desperate to be liked. So when the government senses you might blame it for something -- such as the fact that you spent $1 million on a three-bedroom house, and now you owe a ridiculous $1 million for a lousy three-bedroom house -- it panics and sends you a small check in the mail. No reasonable person would give us more money after what we've done with ours. They would tell us to put some cash in the bank and stop using the AmEx to make every appliance in our house either flat or made of stainless steel, as if we were preparing to trap "Superman II" villains.

But the government doesn't want us to bank that money. It believes we will spend the money, and that will make our houses worth a lot again. We would then buy clothes at Bebe, and the person who owns Bebe would buy the crappy house I overpaid for and get me out of the financial predicament. This might soften the recession if Milton Friedman hadn't proved 50 years ago that most people base spending decisions on long-term income projections. Unless we find a new bubble to invest in we're not going to spend our way out of this recession. We got here for the same reason people always get in trouble : We got over-excited. We ignored centuries of data saying real estate is a worse investment than stocks, and instead based our investment strategy on the fact that our neighbor just sold his house for a serious ton of money. We need to prevent our government from going deeper into debt, thus further devaluing our currency. So homeowners need to accept that they're not moving into a bigger house in three years, stock owners have to learn that their portfolios are going down for a while, and large tech companies have to stop paying hundreds of millions for social networking sites that kids get sick of after a while. An empire that believes spending is a patriotic act is perilously close to its end. But at least we will have left future civilizations the invention of the 10-year interest-only adjustable-rate sub-prime mortgage.