Benjamin Franklin said, “To be humble to superiors is duty, to equals courtesy, to inferiors nobleness.” President Barack Obama's admission of fallibility last week, "I screwed up," was like a shot heard 'round the world. A president only seventeen days in office, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not do in eight years--admit he'd made a mistake. It was fascinating political theater, as a clearly annoyed president spent way too much time talking about West Wing screw-ups during his stump for his huge stimulus bill NBC Political director Chuck Todd also pointed out Obama's other huge mistake: [forgetting] what it’s like to have nothing left to lose – the exact position the Republicans found themselves in. While I'll stop short of suggesting the president's stimulus package rollout has been bungled, it is, by any yardstick, a wobbly start: two many balls in the air, and the president perhaps underestimating the unfathomable gall of men willing to play politics with the literal future of the American economy. There are millions of unemployed persons, suffering families, who should be rightly angry at both the Republicans for grandstanding and the administration for not seeing that coming.

It seems to me the main point of any stimulus package is to change the way the American public perceives their economy. The more Americans fear economic collapse, the less they spend. The less they spend, the slower the economy grows. The slower the economy grows, the fewer goods and services are exchanged. The fewer goods and services are exchanged, the more businesses fail or default on their bills. The more businesses fail or default on their bills, the more banks fail. The more banks that fail, the less credit becomes available to businesses and the public. The less credit is out there, the less cars and houses are sold. And so on. It's like an enormous three-card Monte game, an inflated lifestyle we--all of us--have built on a pony premise of consumerism. That we, as a people, will buy, buy, buy ever more, ever bigger, ever newer. Our entire way of life is predicated on jamming our closets and garages full of junk, full of unnecessary stuff we think will make us happy or fulfilled, all of which seems more of an attempt to fill a space in our lives where God should be. The best thing about this financial nightmare may be people, most especially the middle-class and well-off among us, coming to realize they can actually go without having the new car, the bigger house, the latest status symbol. America is learning, as we learned during the Great Depression, what is actually important. The bad news is, learning that lesson may change us, as a nation, forever. Surviving a painful lesson in values may make the economy that much harder to restart as people, burned by the old system, adopt new patterns and embrace new values.