Dr. Occult and Voodoo Crisis Economics

I’m headed out the door for an early-morning bus to DC, not merely to see wondrous girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer but for a whole Rittelmeyer family reunion. While I’m in the area, though, I think I should try offering the DC establishment some advice (not to be confused with offering the DC Comics establishment some advice, which I tried in vain again last night at McGee’s Pub, suggesting a 75th-anniversary Dr. Occult one-shot to Dan DiDio, who didn’t go for it).

In the wake of the G-8 summit — not to mention columns by Paul Krugman complaining that the stimulus spending is too small (keep in mind his Nobel was for pro-market research he did in his twenties) — my advice is this: If we’ve basically decided that deficit spending (now that it’s not Bush doing it) is a helpful thing and that we don’t care that we have no imaginable way of paying it back, why stop at a couple trillion dollars? Just fix everything by spending twenty hundred quadrillion billion thousand million trillion dollars. Then raise the minimum wage to thirty dollars an hour in case anyone’s been left out of all the resulting prosperity. And if you can’t see why these ideas make no economic sense, please stop voting.