Just give the money back.

787 billion dollars.
That’s what the stimulus plan cost us. But only a small percentage of that money has been used – and that on such worthwhile projects as toilets, road signs (telling people their tax money is being spent), stoves in Iowa, checks for dead people, skylights in a Montana liquor warehouse, repairs on a bridge to a country club in Wisconsin, and some salt marsh mouse in California.

Six months of alleged stimulus has done very little except convince nearly 60 percent of Americans that it is doing nothing at all.

2.8 million jobs have been lost with the unemployment rate sitting at 9.4 percent – just a few ticks away from double-digits. Or maybe it's over 14 percent - I'm just not sure. More on the numbers thing coming up.

Here’s the best part, though. While the health care public option looks like it’s on the ropes, people in our government are focusing on the elimination of Medicare’s Advantage plan. The claim by President Obama is that the elimination of this program will free up as much as $200 billion over the next ten years.

Here’s a novel idea:

Instead of funding more salt marsh mice, bridges to bars, checks for the dead or other idiotic things, why not just give back the unused portion of the $787 billion to the American people?

What would that come out to for each individual American? Well, you have to understand, if you could speak with my high school math teacher, Gloria Isles, she would tell you she:
A. didn’t remember me
B. didn’t remember me exactly, but would bet I was way better at stringing together two words than adding, subtracting or dividing.
C. Then again, she might say that I was totally hopeless.

So, when I try to calculate these astronomical figures I come out with either, $2561.8 per person based on current (non-ACORN based census figures) or $2,561,833 per person. That’s a bit of a gap, I understand, but either way, it’s a win for the little guy.

Then again, the government has spent a bit of that dough on turtle crossings, bar access and the mouse population, so we’d have to take, say 10 percent off the top, leaving something like $702 billion, I think. So, that could cut into our back-pay a bit, either by a couple hundred dollars or a couple hundred thousand, depending on your math skills.

Or, we could just pay for the Advantage Plan out of the remaining stimulus plan , then take what’s left over and distribute that to the regular people, cutting our checks down to either something like $1,888 each or $1.8 million, again depending on the math.

I suppose, looking at this all retrospectively, perhaps we should throw the whole lot of money at public education, so you get more MIT professors, than writers for idiot blogs like this.

And really, if you want more accurate figures, call Mrs. Isles.