To me, this budget has the look of "You want stimulus? Here's your bloody stimulus."
Andrew Steele is a little more charitable, suggesting that it's a "New Deal budget" in which "take a little of everything – Keynesian pump priming, old-school ditch digging, broad-based tax cuts, credit relief, financial regulation – and attempt to restore consumer confidence through the sweeping nature of the plan."
But if he's right, and this really is about restoring consumer confidence more than just staying in power - and of course, it's probably some combination of the two - does that necessarily make it more appropriate to our current challenges?
Promoting consumer confidence is important. But are we going through the same crisis in confidence that we were in the 1930s, and thus in need of the same drastic measures?
We certainly shouldn't be, since as I mentioned yesterday (in a wild statement of the obvious), the hardship of the Great Depression makes our own look laughable. Maybe we are anyway, since we live in an era in which media-driven panic helps fuel our anxieties to an unhealthy extent. If so, this budget - and the hysteria from all parties that preceded it - may or may not do anything to make us feel better, since the messaging around it hasn't exactly been up there with "nothing to fear but fear itself."
But what if a recession is just a recession? That certainly wouldn't preclude running a deficit to accelerate our way out of it and - yes - to encourage the public that the government is doing its part. But it might also allow for some foresight toward what will happen after the recession, which seems to have been absent in the formulation of much of this budget.
A common refrain among economists and finance policy experts, at least the ones I've come into contact with, has been that this response to recession should be seen as an opportunity. Here was a chance, with virtually all corners on side with major new spending on infrastructure, to invest in things that will help modernize our economy and make us more competitive five and 10 and 20 years from now.
The problem is, that would have required focusing on a few things - research and development or significantly improved transit networks or the conversion of hard-hit communities toward more modern industries - and doing them really, really well.
In other words, it would have required priorities. And the government had so many priorities with this budget that, much like the Liberals in their final years in office, it proved not to have any at all - other, perhaps, than getting us all to put our chins up.
