Obama to America: "Don't kill yourselves...yet."

Obama Economic Speech: Warns Of Dire Consequences Without Stimulus

President-elect Barack Obama said Thursday the recession could "linger for years" unless Congress pumps unprecedented sums from Washington into the economy.

"I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible," Obama said in a speech set to be delivered at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., outside Washington. Excerpts from his prepared text were released in advance by his transition team.

It was the fourth day in a row that Obama has addressed this front-burner issue and it was the highest-profile appearance yet on an issue that can define his early months in office.

You hear that? It isn't too late. Take the noose off of your neck, pull your head out of the oven, back the car with your kids in it out of the lake and just forget that story you concocted about a generic ethnic minority kidnapping them. There's still time! All we need is to come together and pass an economic stimulus. Which of course means we have to turn it over to Congress, which of course means we'll have to watch Harry Reid get dicked around by Mitch McConnell so that we can get more top 1% tax cuts and a capital gains cut into this stimulus.

Of course Obama has already seen this eventuality and thus has decided to make tax cuts up to 40% of his proposal. A plan that Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman sees as more than a little troubling. More specifically, he says we'll have an 8% gap in GDP that the stimulus has to fill, Obama's plan only calls for 3%, and the fact that it's taken up by "ineffective" (for a stimulus) tax cuts is a problem. But Obama's plan is to get 80 votes in the Senate, which is nice and an absolute fantasy. Shouldn't the "greatest crisis since the Great Depression sexed up the eighties collapse" be more concerned with....I don't know...fixing the problem instead of providing a plausible "They voted for it too" cover for 2010 and 2012 elections?

So there we are, there's still time to avoid the apocalypse (financial, not robot) if we pass the stimulus that expert economists say isn't enough and too cluttered with ineffective incentives in a sure to fail attempt to get a minority party to jump on board. Excited?