Mine is bigger than yours

Is this a “mine is bigger than yours” contest?

Anxious to jolt the economy back to life, President-elect Barack Obama appears to be zeroing in on a stimulus package of about $850 billion, dwarfing last spring’s tax rebates and rivaling drastic government actions to fight the Great Depression.

If they want to play games, how about instead making it a “mine lasts longer than yours” contest? The way to do that is with permanent tax relief. Nobody is going to make long-term plans based on a short-term stimulus. In fact, this kind of wild stimulus behavior only adds to the uncertainty that is killing the economy now.