The Arbitrary $700 Billion

I'm generally in favor of some type of restructuring bill from Congress because 1) it will help the economy recover faster; 2) it will help the stock market, in which I have an interest; and 3) the next Administration is going to spend a ton of money anyway, so we might as well get at least some benefit for it.

But the funny thing about this proposed bill is that the details are all sketchy - even the $700 billion figure.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

This plan is going to be around for a few years, so if it take s the government an extra few days to do it the right way, I'm all in favor of it. If FDR had done the same thing, we might not have multi-trillion deficits in SS and Medicare today.