I’m not sure what the notorious $25 to the unemployed has to do with relief, stimulus, or economics, while AIG gets billions, but I’m reading HR1 anyway. The billions to Citigroup is taxpayer money but it boggles me why the “common share” question is just an easy decision (see second to last paragraph below). The shares will either be preferred or common, right? This money goes to shareholders.

ARRA is, as most bills are, a tangle and weave of complicated relationships and references to places in the world that are as obscure as the moon’s surface, written in the language of “WLLEBI” (what looks like English but isn’t). In addition, it’s a little scary because if it has veracity then we are in a pretty doomed state to start (what gets lost in political arguments). What the bill appears to do is lay the ground work for more to come and provides a path way for making things move more efficiently or, probably better, at least move. It appears to argue that hefty infrastructure dumps can’t happen until some sort of “new communication and information infrastructure” is in place. Maybe I’m incorrect, but this is how the bill reads. In addition to pumping money into items I have no clue how to understand, the monster reads as lots of thumbs in the dike and as a floor plan.

The politics that surrounds the bill is naked, however. Some are scripting for how, in a few years, they can claim that they fixed their own problems despite the legislation, while using most of its funds; others are arguing that future generations will pay for HR1, which is false, as the future has already lost trillions in “valuations.” Above, money will flow to Citigroup but not to what matters: actual investment.

I’m going to take a practical position and try to help as I’ve leapt to conclusion before about how Obama’s mind works and learned better.

And the cranky economics talk show hosts: that’s all about rating boosts. Not good.