Posted by
Dennis Pemberton on Monday, January 26, 2009 10:38:11 PM
There is a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect. A moving object sounds different coming at you than it does going away from you. The clanging of a train bell, for example, sounds shorter and higher pitched coming at you, then softer and lower-pitched going away from you. In addition, you hear a sound coming at you for a far shorter time than a sound going away. All this is because the frequency of the sound waves are compressed as they come at you, and elongated as they go away.
The President's persistent bleating about an emergency, and that we need to turn the economy over to him jiff-quick, are much like the doppler effect. The alarums are high pitched and frequent, but once the train (bill) passes, it will recede softly into the memory. Like the last stimulus that wasn't, you won't hear about until the next emergency. That will be a really big emergency, and maybe if we make it, say, 10 trillion dollars, it will work. There won't be any recession into memory at that time, though. There will just be a depression, as we realize the train is running over us.