People are not going to agree on lots of things, but actions taken based on certain controversial ideas must be evaluated by their outcome. Remember what they told us before the first bailout: that this 800-plus billion dollars was needed to save the economy. They rushed through a bill telling us there was no time to waste.

What has happened since then? Things have gotten much worse than at the time of this first bailout… so… did this bailout work? Did the money given to Wall Street bankers help the people of America (aside from the executives at the companies saved from bankruptcy by taxpayer money, so they could still give themselves millions of dollars in bonuses)?

No. This huge welfare-for-rich-people program only seems to have benefited a few people. Can we at least remember that experience now?

Maybe we should try and learn a bit about how the real world works from this experience?

So far it looks like we have learned nothing. A new stimulus program was passed recently by Congress in the same perverse way. We were told again that action needed to be taken immediately or else the sky would fall. There was no time to read the 700-page document listing all the people and organizations that would receive this nearly trillion dollars of taxpayer money. They had to have the money now.

Is this a good idea? All I ask is that we, as a nation, do not now close our eyes to what is happening around us. Please look to see if anything improves because of the stimulus package.

Unfortunately, the first result seems to be that instead of encouraging confidence in business, private employers are now laying people off much more. They see that business is not good and seems to be getting worse, and they are struggling to stay out of bankruptcy.

We are waiting for things to get better.

I just worry that the money that the government is now taking from us in the form of higher taxes and in inflation-causing debt is taking away jobs from the private sector.

That money is now being used by government to create jobs. However, all jobs are not created equal. Some are created by businessmen who need to make a profit to survive. They need to find things that people freely buy from them, things that people want.

The jobs created by government are not designed to produce products that people freely buy. The government is not a for-profit business. It is an entity that takes money from people and decides for them how to spend it, based not on the profit motive, but on political considerations.

This is all may be okay because it has created a job that did not exist before… or did it?

The problem is that the money used to create that job came from somewhere. It came out of the pockets of taxpaying Americans. Those Americans now have less money to spend on what they freely would choose to buy. That spending had supported a job in the private sector that is now turned into a public sector job. There are no new jobs created in this case without jobs being lost.

Is this argument correct?

Please look at what happens over the next few months and years carefully. They are spending lots and lots of our money. We owe it to ourselves to follow the outcome of their actions.