The headlines around the state and nation touting how much money local governments would receive from the proposed $825 billion “economic stimulus” package now before the Senate are nothing but fool’s gold.

As more and more are figuring out, this stimulus package is nothing more than the largest piece of pork probably ever assembled and it does little to address the nation’s economic crisis. In fact, it likely will only exacerbate our recession.

Some 200 economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, from across the nation, took out a full-page advertisement in several newspapers to dispute the idea that the government could spend our way out of a recession.

They argued in the ad, “we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s.

“To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

With “stimulus” funds originally targeting everything from get-out-the-vote groups like ACORN to funding sexually transmitted disease projects and climate modeling studies, this looks more like the largest political payback in history to liberal support groups.

Cynicism isn’t helped by the President’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s comments on governing after the November election: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”

Because this bill does little actually to address the housing crisis and banking crisis at the heart of all this, there’s no doubt that Congress and the White House will be back for even more funding. What this bill does have in infrastructure programs wouldn’t even be able to take affect without several years of planning anyway during which in a normal recession the economy would already be rebounding.

Much of this goes back to the old proverb about giving a man a fish and feeding him for a day. Teach him to fish and he can feed himself the rest of his life.

We need to create real jobs, real careers, not just temporary employment. Instead, Washington wants to just dump a load of fish on us and send us the bill.