Free money

There's a recession on. Energy prices are down, and the official cost of living with them. Therefore, you might expect government payments that carry "cost-of-living adjustments" to be dropping, helping to ease the deficit.

Not so. When the cost of living goes up, payments to Social Security recipients -- among others -- also go up. This year they increased by 5.8 percent, the biggest rise since 1982.

But when the cost of living drops, Congress, in its wisdom (foreseeing the squawks that might otherwise arise, presumably), has decreed that payouts will not drop; they will merely stay the same.

Guess what? Social Security recipients started squawking anyway, as soon as they heard that next year -- for the first time since the automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975 -- there'd be no benefit hike.

Enter President Obama, who has called for Congress to send every senior citizen an extra $250 handout before the next congressional elections.

Democratic leaders in Congress -- including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. -- have signed onto the plan. Republican leaders said they, too, favor the payments, but don't want to increase the deficit to pay for them.

The White House said the stimulus payments would cost $13 billion. Mr. Obama didn't say how the payments should be financed. The president is open to borrowing the money, increasing the federal budget deficit, just as Congress did with the first round of "stimulus" payments, last winter.

Many seniors groups applauded Mr. Obama's plan to send checks to about 57 million senior citizens, veterans, retired railroad workers and people with disabilities. This despite the fact that the "real purchasing power of their benefits is actually higher today than it was last year," according to Andrew Biggs, a former deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

But why stop there? If the government can make voters happy by simply mailing out checks whenever it pleases, without devaluing the dollar and thus eroding the value of the stocks or bank accounts of anyone foolish enough to have saved money, why a measly $250 to no one but the retirees and the disabled?

Why not really end the recession by sending $25,000 to everyone with a driver's license?

Thirteen billion, 13 trillion, what's the difference?

College freshmen are often given credit cards "for emergencies" when they head off to school. A few months later, some grown-up often has to lower the boom on the youth who thought his desire for a new stereo or motorcycle constituted an "emergency."

Where are the grown-ups who will impose some discipline on these lunatics in Washington?