spend, baby, spend

President-Elect Barack Obama, obviously heedful of the threat of deflation, is proposing a big economic stimulus package, focusing in infrastructure and energy.

We need it. You know things are bad when inveterate optimist Tom Friedman writes, I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”

But boy, is this a bad time to have a lame-duck president, especially one like de facto President George W. Bush, who appears disinterested in actually trying to do much of anything.