Ok, here's the deal. The government is going to send you some money in May, about $600 if you're single, and maybe $1200 if you're married and meet a few other minimum qualifications. This little windfall is not just a thoughtful gift from a wise and benevolent government. Though this money comes to you with no particular strings attached, the government is rather hoping you'll go right out and blow it at the mall ASAP.

See, this money is part of what is called a "stimulus package." George W. Bush, who used to refer to himself as "the decider," has decided that he now wants to be known as "the stimulator." It's a good name for the President, actually, because he's been very good at stimulating things for quite some time now. He's stimulated much hatred for the United States throughout the world, and he's stimulated a great deal of fear among the citizenry of the nation he leads. He's stimulated the richest people in the country to grab more and grab faster. He's helped stimulate a huge spike in the cost of gasoline at the pump, and he stimulated those who were entrusted to serve as watchdogs over the financial markets to look the other way while lending institutions ran amok. And he stimulated the country's war spending to new heights while simultaneously stimulating places like China and Saudi Arabia to loan us back some of the money we've been spending in those countries in order to cover all that war spending, a figure currently running up toward $200 billion a year just for the war stuff alone.

So successful has Bush been as a stimulator that we now live in a country that shows every sign of being thoroughly over-stimulated, a nation on a Red Bull cocktail of media manipulation, political spin, talk show hysteria, lies, and a new crisis in every news cycle.

But, in his never-ending quest for new things to stimulate, Bush now wants to stimulate the economy here at home because, contrary to earlier rosy scenarios painted by those in charge, it turns out the economy is in the most serious trouble it's seen since the days immediately preceding the Great Depression back in the early 1930s. Clearly, then, this is a job for "the stimulator."

And here's where you come in. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to cash that stimulus check "the stimulator" sends you, then go out and buy more Chinese imports as fast as humanly possible. That way the money borrowed from the Chinese to give you your little dildo of dollars will stimulate trade, with most of that money going right back to China from whence it came. Once you've blown that wad, the theory is that the economy will right itself and everything will be hunky-dory. The idea is to get money moving through the system, because money in the system is like blood through the veins; if it ain't movin', we're dead. However, once we've been revived by the stimulation, the stock market will become orgasmic. Tax revenues will spike, small businessmen will have more money to buy presents for their wives and mistresses, divorce rates will decline, and pigs will fly over contented American hamlets chock full of satisfied consumers who no longer fear the "R" word (recession), let alone the "D" word (depression).

Besides all of those blessings, the stimulus package is dirt cheap. It's only going to add another $150 billion or so to our collective debt, which is about the amount we've been spending annually in Iraq trying to stimulate that country back to something akin to post-Medieval upgrades in water and power delivery systems, public safety, and explosion-cessation exercises.

Currently, we're in the hole about $9.2 trillion (with a T) or about $30 grand for every man, woman, and child in the country. The interest on that debt costs us over a billion a day which isn't quite as much as we dump daily into Iraq, but it's still a pretty sizeable chunk o' change.

With a debt like that, it only makes sense to spend like there's no tomorrow. So, when you get your gift from the stimulator-in-chief, do your patriotic duty and go out and spend that dough PDQ. The economy you save may be your own.

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