Stimulus spending: Handle with care

Talk about the audacity of hope.

The economic stimulus bill unleashed upon the nation Tuesday by a stroke of President Obama's pen contains much of both - audacity and hope.

Take into account the resounding claims from each political party on both the legislation's appeals and its shortcomings and you may well be forgiven if another adjective comes to mind - confusing.

In short, it seems to us that the great success of this legislation is that it will not be as devastating as its detractors claim. Its great failure is that it will not be as successful as its promoters would have us believe.

For our part, we might like to see more tax cuts in the $787 billion mix and a little less spending. But it also seems incumbent to point out that if anyone commenting on this legislation today had an inside line on its success or failure, we wouldn't be in this mess. We could have followed the advice of that genius from the beginning.

Unfortunately, when it comes to economic forecasting, the only genius is in hindsight and sadly, the one thing we know today is that we are many months, if not years, away from having sufficient genius to assess the fine points of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2009.

What we can say is that we have done something. And now, we'll all watch to see how the sudden torrent of money flows out across the nation and, specifically, into the suburbs. If we are to take the act's Democratic promoters - like Melissa Bean and Bill Foster in separate stories in today's Daily Herald - at their word, we soon should see people buying up foreclosed homes in the far Western suburbs; laborers at work on public buildings, streets and bridges across the region; and scientists and technical professionals back at work inventing new medicines and technologies at labs in DuPage and Lake counties.

Wall Street clearly has not shared such optimism. At a time when business ought to be leaping at a wealth of new opportunities, the stock market has steadily tanked in the past week, the Dow closing down nearly 300 points on Tuesday alone. Nor can we look to the nation's financiers for a source of confidence; they've done precious little to improve things with the $350 billion staked them by the Bush administration last fall.

With tens of new billions soon to come coursing through the economic veins of the suburbs, the only sure things to expect are immense opportunities for government waste and tantalizing temptations for corruption - alas, situations that Illinoisans have grown wearily familiar with.

So, we plead with our elected leaders at all levels to handle this money with the respect and thoughtful dispensation it deserves. As audacious and hopeful as the federal stimulus package is, it may in fact be something much more - a sacred trust in our future.

If viewed that way, it has a chance of fulfilling its substantial aspirations.