Truly massive deficits won't surprise anyone who has looked at the Senate version of the stimulus bill. Much has been made over the "compromises" and negotiations behind the Senate finally arriving at something that garnered enough support for passage. Here are three large categories of expenditures where senators managed to sort out their differences and find a compromise that they can all live with. If only things were so simple for us taxpayers.

And here is one more thing to consider: There is absolutely no evidence that any stimulus package in the past 80 years has goosed economic activity—not FDR’s during the Great Depression, not Japan’s during the 1990s, and not George W. Bush’s in 2001 and 2008. If anything, the economic evidence suggests that such spending packages actually intensified and prolonged misery.