a few stray observations about bo's speech last night. he said that over the next ten years (um) he can identify $2 trillion in savings, moving toward a balanced budget. dude. you spent $2 trillion last week. and though he indicated some places to trim, he proposed whole new gigantic swathes of spending, in medical care, for example, education, veteran's benefits, growth of the armed forces and increase in their salaries. for example, he said if american kids will commit some time to public or military service, we will pay for their college. sounds nice of course, but costs mega-bucks on both ends. surely, surely this budget depends on massive obfuscation of the sort he explicitly repudiated. and didn't i hear him propose a massive set of loan programs direct from the government to individuals for al sorts of things? now, if he wasn't folding that into bank nationalization (which again he repudiated) he was surely suggesting that the fed open shop as a massive provider of direct banking services. any way you look at it, i believe, he is annexing whole regions of the economy into the federal government, and enthusiastically launching a host of new spending initiatives into perpetuity. ("we are creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.")