Mark Steyn has an excellent and very funny piece on the stimulus, which he sees as stimulating only one thing: itself (i.e. the stimulus-promotion industry, the stimulus-coordination industry, and the stimulus-supplementary-funding industry).

As he puts it: “But, if you want to stimulate bureaucracy, dependency and the metastasization of approved quasi-governmental interest-group monopolies as the defining features of American life, then ARRA is the way to go.”

His harsh words about California’s state government (“The gangster regime in Sacramento is an alliance between a corrupt and/or craven political class wholly owned by a public sector union-bureaucracy extortion racket.”) could, unfortunately, be applied to other places in the U.S. where unions and other interest groups have come to dominate local politics in order to increase their pay and pensions at the expense of the general working public.

A few years ago, I was very optimistic about the so-called "Tax and Spend Revolution" in the U.S. that started in the 1970s in California (of all places) with Proposition 1 under Ronald Reagan in 1973 and then the famous Proposition 13 in 1978. What happened in the last 30 years? Well, most states have now statutory rules to limit taxation, spending, and debt, in addition to balance-budget requirements. Governors have also more say in the matter and can independently cut spending through line-item veto power. Some states have even constitutional rules (such as Colorado). The latter has worked to a good extent, but for the most part, the tax and spend revolution has come a halt. I believe the culprits are not the states (although most of the statutory rules seem to have been mostly useless), but the federal government, which has opened the road to absolute fiscal profligacy and is now widely engaged in deficit spending. In such circumstances where states are awash with cash, it seems hard for the system to resist. Federalism is on its way out. Next stop: Western Europe.