Pun Salad

I, like Mike Allen of Politico can't resist putting the snark-quotes around "Emergency" when typing about the latest proposal from Barack Obama. (My guess is the "emergency" here is McCain closing the gap in polls at a time when Obama expected to be pulling away.) The key provision would:

… give families a stimulus check of $1,000 each, funded in part by what his presidential campaign calls “windfall profits from Big Oil.”

Shorter: vote for me, I'll give you money.

Reactions are varied. Pejman headlines his discussion: "Worst. Economic. Plan. Ever?" On the other hand, IBD says it sounds "more like the rantings of an extremist fringe candidate than a serious contender for the presidency."

But my favorite quote on the scheme comes from Don Boudreaux:

In other words, a critical part of Sen. Obama's strategy for reigning in high gasoline prices is to subsidize gasoline consumption and more heavily tax its production. This plan - which increases the demand for gasoline and reduces its supply - makes as much sense as trying to put out a fire by dowsing it with jet fuel.

John McCain and Hillary Clinton came in for a decent amount of derision for proposing a Federal gas tax moratorium, which approximately 100% of economists considered to a dumb idea. It strikes me that Obama's plan is an even more economically illiterate boob-bait gimmick, so I wonder if Obama will be held to the same standard of scrutiny? Isn't it pretty to think so?