Economists are predicting that the recession will end after the second quarter of this year, and that the "bottom isn't falling out" of the economy. Kind of makes me wonder about the real reason behind this $825 billion stimulus package.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/26/news/economy/job_cuts/

Brusca said he agreed with many economists' predictions that the recession will end after the second quarter of 2009. Americans might feel the job market start to bounce back a bit sooner than expected, he said.

"These recessions are like geometry," Brusca said. "It looks like we'll have a V-shaped cycle, in that we're going into this with very sharp losses. This intense-phase recession will probably recover fairly quickly, with the job market coming out it at the same angle it came in."

In the short term, the economy and the job market are in trouble, Brusca said. But "it doesn't look like the bottom is falling out of the economy," he said.

So if "many economists" are predicting the recession will end after the second quarter (i.e., after June), and the CBO is reporting that the recession will be over before two-thirds of the stimulus package even makes it into the economy, can someone please explain what the hurry is to pass this stimulus package and why it has to be almost a trillion dollars?

I think it's pretty clear that the real reason is that the big spenders in government feel they have a blank check to spend all the money they always want to spend--and they can do so under the guise of an emergency stimulus package that congressmen will, unfortunately, be a little more hesitant to block. How else do you explain hundreds of millions of dollars for condoms and family planning being inserted into the "stimulus" package , along with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars for ACORN ... the advocacy group that was accused of voter fraud in multiple states in the last election.

The stimulus package is almost twice as large as the total annual non-defense discretionary spending in the federal budget. And they usually haggle over that during budget negotiations for the better part of a year. Yet this stimulus package is nearly twice as large and is being rushed through in a matter of weeks, presumably so we don't have time to notice the condoms and ACORN and other wasteful pet projects.

The stimulus bill is one big barrel of pork. It must be defeated.