"It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said."

Update:  Lest anyone attempt to justify the spending package with unemployment, read Brian Wesbury's excellent piece here.

So what should Congress do?  Make capital more liquid inside the private economy.  That is the quickest and surest way to get it to people who need it.  Let families transfer money to each other without a capital gains or inheritance tax.  Let workers have more money and employers hire more people by a stiumulus reduction in the payroll tax.  The tax side gets more money into the economy more quickly than the spending side.

Greg Mankiw has other great ideas here.