This is depressing. Kristi Noem hasn’t even taken office yet, and she’s already defending home-grown pork as “stimulus”:

Newly Elected Congresswoman Kristi Noem of South Dakota says that ethanol subsidies are important to her state and the nation.

Speaking on the Scott Hennen Show Noem says “Ethanol has been very good to South Dakota.” She said that this is not the time to repeal the subsidy “when you look at taking away that subsidy it is the wrong decision.”

She says that supporting the ethanol industry with subsidy promotes investment and continued hiring “In the long run it will get the economy back on track faster.”

Will someone please give this woman an economics lesson? And you can bet she’ll trade her vote for others’ votes to keep the subsidies coming. This is why both parties are the party of big government.

The Democrats applied exactly the wrong medicine to this recession, poisoning the economy instead.

The only good news:

The next few years are going to be grim, and those in charge do not inspire confidence. Would you entrust your welfare to Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, Pat Quinn, and Barack Obama? We have to hope, however, that these men wake up, swallow their preconceptions, and without delay move decisively in the direction of balancing the budgets of California, New York, Illinois, and the United States.

I myself very much doubt that they will do so. Unless these men – our President above all – demonstrate qualities that they have never before evidenced, we are in for a truly terrible ride. There is only one silver lining; and welcome though it might be in ordinary circumstances, it is hardly worth the cost. Politically, this means that Barack Obama is likely to be remembered for having done to the Democratic Party what Herbert Hoover did to the Republicans.

As he says, a good outcome, but not worth the cost.

Well, not entirely. Ed Morrissey has some thoughts.

This is what happens when you put in place either economic incompetents, people who actively want to wreck the economy for their own political ends, or both. There are, after all, people who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.

[Update a few minutes later]

Liberal math:

John Kerry was extolling the stimulus effects of unemployment benefits, as in more money returns to the economy for each dollar paid out to the unemployed. If so, why not simply put us all on unemployment benefits and watch the economy grow?

Or perhaps Kerry could advocate a national boat sales tax to collect the sort of revenue that he so carefully had tried to avoid. Or perhaps he might look carefully at zillionaire family trusts and the billions they divert from the strapped federal Treasury. Or perhaps he could take away the tax deductions on third or fourth homes above a certain square footage, maybe ending the deduction for property taxes on multiple homes?

My point? Why do Democrats always go after the orthodontist, electrical contractor, or insurance agency owner, and never the Buffetts, Kerrys, or Gateses? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will defer more money from the federal Treasury by avoiding inheritance taxes (to channel their profits into their foundations) than all the billions lost this year by keeping tax cuts for small businesses.

Part of the problem is that these new aristocrats aren’t really liberals.

So I was complaining the other day about how Warren Buffett and Bill Gates don’t think were being taxed enough. Peter Foster has the same complaint. Though I’m not sure I’d call Bill Gates a “former capitalist.” It’s not clear to me that he was ever one. Businessmen are not necessarily capitalists (or to be more clear, free marketeers).