The powers that be have seen fit to make my cover story from the last issue available on the home page. Here’s the lede:

The Democrats are pushing for yet another stimulus package to revive our moribund economy. As of this writing, they have been unable to round up the requisite 60 votes to push the package through the Senate. President Obama has urged deficit-wary moderates to get on board, calling the bill “essential” to addressing the ongoing economic “emergency.” A handful of senators stand in his way, unopposed to the spending in principle but unwilling to vote for another bill that adds to this year’s $1.3 trillion deficit.
If the Democrats prevail, it will be the third time that Congress has extended provisions of the 2009 stimulus bill since its passage in February of last year. Counting the stimulus bill that President Bush signed into law in 2008, it will be the nation’s fifth round of fiscal stimulus since the first flickers of the subprime-mortgage conflagration began to appear at the edges of the economy. It will bring the total amount we have spent on such measures to $1.085 trillion — more than we have spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
From 2008 to now, the composition of the stimulus bills has changed, from mostly tax rebates intended to boost consumer demand to mostly income transfers from the employed to the unemployed and from the federal government to the states. Though the stimulus machine’s architects would be loath to admit it, this transformation represents the failure of its stated purpose, which is to create jobs and to jump-start sustainable economic growth. The unemployment rate is stalled out at around 10 percent, and no growth model that relies on continued infusions of borrowed money is sustainable. The stimulus machine is designed to provide the illusion of growth in the absence of a solution to the jobs problem, and since no one in Washington seems to know how to solve that problem, it is going to be very difficult, as a matter of politics, to turn the machine off.