Why should you bother?

FreedomWorks has a great Top Ten list of reasons to oppose the stimulus. I learned another one at breakfast this morning: the bill contains various and sundry provisions that get us significantly closer to state-run health care. It does such things as provide the funding for the oversight board that Tom Daschele recommends in his health care manifesto.

Look, let's get something clear. It isn't that I and thousands of other conservatives are oppose a stimulus package of some kind. But I, along with thousands of others, am oppose to this so-called stimulus bill because it won't achieve real stimulus.

You want to stimulate the economy with targetted jobs programs, targetted handouts, and targetted tax cuts, fine. Let's have a debate about a bill focused on that. Let's set up benchmarks and let's set up a process and let's get it done.

But if you want to pass an overhaul to our health care system, make that a separate bill and let's have a debate on it. You want to give handouts to "green" energy sources and pick the winners and losers in the energy world, that's your perogative, but let's have a debate about. You want to give away money to Hollywood, pay to build (and furnish) a permanent home for Homeland Security, pay to renovate the Commerce building, or give lots of money to universities and other public institutions so long as they agree not to allow religiously affiliated groups to use their buildings, um, ok, but let's debate those things on their own merits in their own time. Let's not lump them all into an unrelated bill.

Passing this bloated bill is not the kind of change we were promised. This is taking all the bad things Democrats got mad at the Republicans for doing for years and multiplying it times ten. And this certainly is not stimulus. It's handouts to favored interests at the great expense of Real People.

Kill this bill. Start over. Do it right or don't do it.