Steyn hits.

From Mark Steyn’s “12 Zeros” (National Review). I just love the “garage business” observation. How true!

Barry Ritholtz, author of the forthcoming book Bailout Nation, calculated — gosh, was it only six weeks ago? — that the tab for the bailout by November 24 was already $4.6165 trillion, which looks much more convincing because it’s big but not round…The media coo over Obama’s “new New Deal,” but, as Mr. Ritholtz pointed out, if you adjust for inflation, the combined costs of the old New Deal plus the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Plan, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars, and every NASA project in history — oh, and the S&L crisis — add up to a mere $3.92 trillion. Even as he was totting up his numbers, the Bloomberg news service estimated that, factoring in Citibank and a couple of other Johnny-come-latelies, the bailout bill was in fact up to $7.76 trillion — which is the combined cost of all that other stuff (Louisiana Purchase, etc.) plus the $3.6 trillion of the Second World War.

… “The administration’s number-one goal,” said the new president, “is to create 3 million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.” And that sounds kind of impressive — unless, that is, you’re one of those capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw types who wonder what kind of functioning polity is so structurally decayed that it’s supposed to be good news that a mere 20 percent of new jobs will be government work. Are 600,000 new government workers really necessary to stimulate the U.S. economy? And, come to that, will a $3,000 tax credit really persuade a private company to take on a new employee it wouldn’t otherwise have hired, or will the bulk of the dough just go to companies that would have hired the extra workers anyway?

… If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the golden spike to celebrate the point at which the feasibility commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the zoning board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor. If 9/11 was (as they used to say) “the day everything changed,” that seven-year hole in the ground in the heart of Lower Manhattan is a monument to how hard it is to get anything changed in today’s America. So good luck “stimulating” the economy with infrastructure. One reason Google and Apple and other American success stories started in somebody’s garage is that that’s the one place where innovation isn’t immediately buried by bureaucracy. As to Representative Woolsey’s rampaging forest fires, these days they’re caused mostly by federal eco-regulation preventing traditional prudent stewardship such as basic brush-cutting.