By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Now that it turns out the Obama administration has been sitting on most of the stimulus money — they’ve handed out about $44 billion of the roughly $750 billion requested — it makes me wonder what he is saving it for.

Maybe he has put the $700 billion or so he has left in a sock and buried it out behind the White House, near Mrs. Obama’s organic garden.

That is what a lot of people are doing these days, because they still aren’t too sure what is going to happen.

That can cause a lot of problems, though. If I bury something in the back yard, pretty soon I forget where I put it. That is even true with rose bushes. If I plant a rose bush, I’m likely to forget it’s there, and after it grows awhile, I am likely to say, “Hey, where did that rose bush come from?”

I imagine $700 billion can be like that, even when you’re trying to save the economy with it. It’s easy to forget about it if you’re busy with other things.

Did you ever have a bank send you a new credit card, one you’ve never had before? You call the number on the card from your home phone and activate the card, and then forget you have it. All it does is make your wallet bulge more. You keep using your old credit card because that’s the one you’re used to, and pretty soon the bank that sent you the new one writes you a letter and wants to know what the heck’s going on. Come on, spend, the bank says.

Well, you ignore that letter, and before too many months go by, the bank sends you another letter, and tells you to throw the card away, it has been cancelled, and that the cancellation will be reported to the credit bureaus. I guess that’s why nobody ever accuses banks of having a sense of humor.

Anyway, Mr. President — get spending or we’ll cancel your card.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 1:45 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.