George Rebane

The above chart is getting a little boring as the weeks roll by.  Nevertheless it continues to be more and more revealing – ‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’

To add a little interest to this weekly stimulus posting, I thought that a vignette or two from real life might be of interest.  We just got word from a British friend in her late sixties that she has been diagnosed with diabetes.  Appealing to the fine British socialized healthcare system for treatment, she was told that there will be no insulin or other medicines prescribed that we would consider normal here.  Instead she got a pamphlet telling her to join a health club for exercise, and a list of foods that she should now eat.  I presume that there will be some compensation for the health club fee, and that the pamphlet ended wishing her good luck with her new regimen.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is our intended low cost Obamacare future.

Moving right on, yesterday afternoon a knock on the door revealed a PG&E technician telling me that a very large part of one of our digger pines on the other side of the house just fell off and crunched up our fence.  He and his crew had been working on the power installation for our new neighbor when they heard this 60 foot long behemoth come tearing down.  I had not heard a thing.

Upon inspection, we all confirmed that ‘yep, that was one helluva widowmaker’, and making things right is gonna provide some real fiscal stimulus to Nevada County.  I immediately called Curtis Roberts (Roberts Tree Care) who has done a great job handling our tree work for several years now.  Curtis came over right away and confirmed that this indeed would be a great fiscal stimulus for our community (multiplier effect and all that), and pointed out that the stimulus will probably be much bigger given that the remainder of the giant digger should also come down.

After some noodling on how that would be done, I agreed on the scope of the proposed stimulus package, which at this stage had expanded to hiring a crane to gently lower the huge limbs of this giant tree that stands almost a hundred feet tall and is about fifty feet from the house.  More good news for local businesses, and I had yet to include the stimulus for the responsive gentleman from Gold Country Fence who also arrived, and promised that he could make the whole thing look like it never happened.

I wonder if I can put in a proposal for a wee bit of that $787 billion for which Obama seems to have trouble finding stimulating projects – talk about shovel ready.