Wednesday night, I saw Megan McArdle at an America’s Future Foundation Roundtable event in D.C., where she explained that she had voted for Barack Obama, but also warned that we are in for a tsunami of “massive and stupid government spending.” Here she is expressing her disdain for the House Democrat “stimulus” proposal:

The rest of the bill is about what you expected–a lot of probably useless green energy spending that I fairly confidently predict will come to nothing, some stuff we should have done anyway, and a bunch of pandering, porky highway spending. The better the projects are, the less likely they are to be stimulative, because they’re complicated and time consuming, like healthcare IT and high-speed rail. If we do them on a stimulus timeframe, we’ll screw them up, waste an enormous amount of money, and likely make American voters worse off in the long term by locking them in to bad solutions–we won’t get a second bite at high-speed rail between LA and San Francisco. Mostly, Democrats took their wish lists, called them “stimulus”, and look set to inflict them on the American people in badly done drag.

Ah, the yawning gap between Hope and reality! Well, if massive and stupid spending is going to be inflicted on the American people, at least let Democrats do the inflicting, eh?