If the American economy had a dashboard, all the gauges would be oscillating wildly—the engine overheating, the fuel tank empty, the speedometer pinned and the door ajar light blinking.

Let’s run with this auto analogy. Picture a rusted, dented car careening from lane to lane on bald tires that should have been replaced years ago, except we cleaned out the piggy bank buying bullets to shoot at shadows. Maybe we have a dead, rotting passenger in the back seat, nailed by a ricochet. We’ll just call her Katrina. In the driver’s seat we have the ghost of Ronald Reagan on a manic crack high, with the radio crooning out homage to his brilliant piloting skills. George W.’s riding shotgun, navigating with discarded lottery tickets. On the dashboard is a plastic statue of Alan Greenspan—idol god of the magic free market. We have no gas, but we’re not worried because the trip’s all downhill. We’re on our way to buy a new paint job, with the promise that the sacred unborn will gladly pick up our tab.

But this road trip just hit a shit storm and it seems someone stole our wipers. Reagan starts chattering on about some beautiful day long ago on Highway One. We have no brakes. W. starts talking about how it would be better if we all died, rather than force automakers to install brakes on cars. Such regulation, he explains, would kill the economy.

This phantom road trip is our economic nightmare. After a generation of living large on borrowed dimes, after a generation of using government as muscle to guarantee the rich the right to steal from the poor, and after a generation of Taliban-like obedience to the fundamentalism of the free market and the god of corporate deregulation, our deformed, mutant chickens have come home to roost.

Welcome to our upside-down economy. Welcome to the land of McJobs and check day loans. Welcome to the land where more than 500,000 families had their homes foreclosed upon in the last six months of 2007, with another million facing foreclosure in 2008. Welcome to the perfect storm of rising unemployment, record deficit spending, out-of-control, nonequitized consumer debt, upside-down foreign exchange rates, a dollar in freefall, bank collapses on the horizon, a tanking stock market, roulette retirement accounts and a group of untreated psychotics running our fiscal policy.

Okay. Splash some water on your face. I’ll can the metaphoric allegory. Hold on to your hats. Economic stimulus is on the way. We’re each going to get a check for around $550 from the federal government to go out and do our part to reverse a generation of economic mismanagement by—and this is the fun part—spending ourselves into salvation. Five hundred and fifty bucks per taxpayer in a one lump sum should do it.

Let’s put this “economic stimulus” into perspective. The average American homeowner, if such an animal exists, pays upwards of two grand a month for mortgage, property taxes and insurance—that is if your trip hasn’t been foreclosed upon yet. Add in the average minimum credit card payment of $400. And cable, cell phone, electric and heat bills. And health insurance and drug co-pays. And student loans. And car loans. You get the picture. Five hundred and fifty bucks is pissing into the wind. This drop ain’t even gonna make it to the bucket.

Let’s look at the numbers. The federal budget for 2009 is about $3.1 trillion. This comes to a bit over $30,000 per family, with the majority of this money to be spent on military-related expenses. This money is ours. It comes from direct and indirect taxes, and, when Republicans run the show, from wild debt in our names. Of this 30 grand looted from us, we’re getting $550 back. It’s like a mugger taking $300 from your wallet, saying he needs the cash for his posse to buy guns. But as a parting gesture, after spitting in your face, he tosses five dollars on the ground. You then yip and howl in delight, running off to buy yourself a beer, in turn saving the brewery from bankruptcy and rescuing a thousand jobs.

The stimulus package is worth $150 billion. That’s less than the wealth lost in a bad day on Wall Street. Of this $150 billion, $100 billion will get returned to us in $550 increments as the aforementioned chump change. The other $50 billion will go to the same folks who looted the economy for the last 25 years. This government largesse in the form of corporate welfare is ostensibly supposed to stimulate “investment.” A better term for this would be the “skim.” Think Sopranos. No money passes hands in Washington without the usual pack of vampire puppet masters getting their payback for bankrolling perpetually record-breaking campaign war chests.

This stimulus follows on the heels of the recent bailout—government payments not to the victims of predatory loans that cost them their houses but to the loan sharks whose wildly profitable, usurious loan structures just turned upside down. It works like this: Working folks dream of owning a home. They take out attractive adjustable mortgages. George W Bush celebrates this new “ownership society” in his State of the Union. After two or three years, the adjustable mortgages readjust—passive voice intentional. Monthly payments go up 50 or 100 percent. Sometimes more. The wonks remind us that when you play you pay. A deal is a deal. Sometimes you lose. Life is tough.

Housing costs skyrocket. Family budgets go haywire. Then came 2007, when mortgage defaults burst the housing bubble, and the banks that made billions on subprime high rate mortgages suddenly started losing some of that loot. Oh my. That can’t happen. Government has got to come to their rescue. How can they mug in the future if their knives get dull and their ammo clips run dry?

So let’s get back to our magic $550 fix. Here’s our macroeconomics lesson: When consumers spend money, like on Black Friday, everyone gets new stuff and seems happy. Yay. Such spending creates jobs, albeit mostly at sweatshops in China. But some of those jobs go to American wage slaves in the new Wal-Mart economy. They, in turn, buy more Chinese stuff at the Dollar Store. Everyone involved patriotically spends more than they have, doing their best for the economy. During the last five years Americans borrowed almost four and a half trillion dollars against their homes and another few dozen billion on their credit cards. Now they’re not just out of money. They’re out of credit. And in some cases, they’re out on the street.

Here comes the fix: The government borrows more. Since they print the money, their credit never runs out. This begged, borrowed and stolen money finances more consumer spending—your $550. We buy i-Phones, or maybe hold off foreclosure for another month, or maybe pay the heat bill, and the economy is saved. You can take this formula to the bank. In god we trust, because the money’s not worth shit.

Then there are the wacko plans for economic stimulus—New Deal sort of stuff. Putting people to work while building or rebuilding infrastructure for the next generation. Spending money in a way that it all stays in the domestic economy, building a foundation for economic security. Such sanity is absolutely off the table. When Dennis Kucinich dropped out of the presidential race, taking with him his plan to cut the military budget by 15 percent and use the savings to fund free universal public education, kindergarten through college, any semblance of sanity went with him—gone with the UFO-watching runt who once lived in Shirley McClain’s basement. We can’t actually stimulate the economy by investing in education for laid-off workers. That’s socialism. We’re Dickensians.

Then Works Progress Administration was FDR’s answer to our last Depression: put people to work doing useful things. My life so far has been, among other things, an unplanned, half-century spelunk among WPA projects. The most recent one I stumbled upon was in downtown San Antonio, Texas. Or more accurately, save for maybe the Alamo, it is downtown San Antonio. The WPA, back in the 1930s, lined the banks of the stagnant, creek-sized San Antonio River with idyllic walkways, which are now lined with tony restaurants, cafes and shops. This WPA project anchored downtown San Antonio and provided three generations with economic stimulus, not to mention a bastion of beauty and a little bit of urban life in the middle of what otherwise is one of the ugliest infections of sprawl on the continent. A few miles up I-10, god’s interstate, the WPA built Houston’s City Hall. Across the country, the WPA built parks, bridges, roads, buildings, water systems, schools and so on. Most of them are still with us today. Think about the state parks you visit.

That was real economic stimulation. Not a $550 hush money payout to keep us placated and docile in an election year.

Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College. His previous columns are at www.artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com and available globally through syndication.