You say potato.  The elite say patattah.  Some of our fellow citizens, practicing efficiency of language, just say tater.

Since government practices no efficiency (or responsibility or shame) spending taxpayer money, the real question is whether you are planting any, whatever you call them, because after the government finishes “fixing” the economy, you’re going to need everything you can grow just to eat.

This week is a milestone in American history.  Our new president, his bumfuddled tax cheat treasury secretary and his Congress are busily committing roughly $3 trillion, in just one week, without a clue as to whether any of it will do any good, and almost certain knowledge that most of it won’t – and is not intended to.  Who knew the President could wield the politics of fear even more successfully than he derided same?

Since the devil is in the details, Secretary Geithner conveniently doesn’t have any, or won’t reveal any, for the second round of bank bailouts, which is more than twice the size of the first round, the details of which are still being hidden from the people – you – who are going to pay for every round and shouldn’t think for one minute that we are anywhere near the end of all this.

We daresay that not one Member of Congress can explain beyond predictable one-size-fits-all sound bites the specifics of the stimulus package.  They know they won’t have to, because the journalists asking the questions are as ignorant as they are and equally complicit in the rush to shovel the money out the door as soon as printed.  Is that a million or a billion for...what program was that again?  Is it in the House version, the Senate version or the final version?  Does any of that matter in a bill that Senator John McCain has called “generational theft?”

If only it were just that and nothing more.  Social Security is generational theft.  This is the financial gang rape of a country.  Newsweek titled its cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.”  No!  We aren’t!  Our government now is, but we will pay the price for it and pay and pay and pay.  What took Europe generations to become is here being compressed into a few strokes of a presidential pen in a few weeks.

Think of $3 trillion this way.  Three trillion seconds of clock time equals 94,638 years.  If there is, in that distant and unfathomable future, still something resembling documentary history, this will not even warrant a flyspeck on the page.

But for those of us who only have the here and now, for a country that was founded and developed on the basis of individual striving and individual responsibility, within a generally recognized social framework, this alien paradigm, which has indeed been creeping up on us, has now sprung from the shadows fully grown.  And that will be writ large for as far out as mere mortals can realistically see.

Yes, you can throw some of the bums out in 2010.  President Obama seems all too willing to be thrown out in 2012 if his economic policies do not “work.”  If that were enough to even then curtail this national disgrace, then so be it.  It won’t be, because the roots will have been planted too deep, the deficits will have become too great.

Elections have consequences, those of the last one now almost as incomprehensible as the sum total of trillions.

Have you read your Marx today, Comrade?