OK, who feels economically stimulated? Raise your hands, please. Eeeyeww, put ’em back in your laps, you filthy bastards, they’re all sticky.

The notion of going further into debt — credit cards, auto loans, what have you — leaves me feeling fiscally flaccid, frankly. I just don’t think I can get it up for buying a bunch of crap, no matter how shiny it is, if it means that in six months when VeloNews gets sold to Condé Nasty and Bicycle Retailer becomes a quarterly online newsletter some repo’ man name of Guido is gonna kick in the door of my refrigerator box down by Fountain Creek and take it all back.

Maybe I can get a job running off thousand-dollar bills at the Denver Mint. That seems to be where all the action is these days:

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.

Oh, goody. Make that a bicycle box down by Shook’s Run.

Meanwhile, my buddy Matt reminds me that the bailout so far amounts to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, according to Bloomberg. That’s enough money to pay off half the mortgages in the country, conduct nine times the warfare we’ve already laid on Iraq and Afghanistan, and build a gold-plated escalator to the International Space Station.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it sounds about as sensible as propping up an elite class of paper-hangers so they can hose us all over again once we dummy up and resume buying shit on credit.

But enough about our crumbling economy. We’ve got a real crisis right here — cops rousting body Nazis from Santa Monica’s medians. Oh, the humanity.

If you’re bound for Congress to sing the poverty blues, it helps if you’re not traveling by multimillion-dollar corporate jet. Good God. No wonder the U.S. auto industry has the collective net worth of a roach coach in East LA. Thanks and a wink through the aviator goggles to Steve Benen at Political Animal.

Late update: I’m no economist, as Herself will be only too happy to confirm. I don’t even play one on TV. But I’m having a hard time feeling any sympathy for the Big Three automakers, who seem likely to ride their private jets back to Motor City without fat wads of the taxpayers’ cash tucked neatly away in their vest pockets.

I’ve owned exactly two American-made cars — a ’64 Chevy Biscayne, which I loved, right up to point at which I drove it into a train, and a 1996 Ford F-150, which proved so evil a vehicle that an exasperated mechanic told me, “Mr. O’Grady, you don’t need a mechanic, you need an exorcist.”

Something happened in the three decades between Biscayne and Beelzebub, and it wasn’t good. That’s why Herself drives a 2002 Subaru Outback and I drive an ’05 Subaru Forester. My ’83 Toyota 4WD is still functional, but in need of repair, which it will not get anytime soon. Even so, I’d rather push it than drive that piece-of-shit Ford.

Sure, if one, two or all three of Motor City’s titans collapse, a lot of people will be going ass-first into the blades. But they’ll have plenty of company. My own line of work, journalism, is shedding workers like a dead dog sheds fleas, and for the same reason — the folks running the show have been too busy cashing checks to come to terms with a changing world. I don’t see anyone trying to money-whip us back to solvency.