By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

I usually do this job (writing this column) better when I’m agitated. “Back in the day,” before my temporary retirement (which will be over in two short months), agitation came pretty easily. Each workday brought a host of agitations and many of those agitations became the subject matter for this column and my radio show.

While many other agitations went un-vented, they served as catalysts to drive the rants I did publicly air. Therein lies my problem; until recently the “Just For Men” beard dye ads and the release of yet another Rambo movie, starring a 106-year-old Sly Stallone, were the two biggest problems in my life, and I was wont for something to bitch about. I’ve been too un-agitated to be happy. I’ve even been yelling at the television 90 percent less than I used to, the remaining 10 percent is reserved for a couple of local television news anchors, Fergie videos and Juicer infomercials.

I guess agitation is my Muse and she has been distinctly absent from my world for the last few months, but thankfully she returned last week riding on a magic carpet called Bush’s economic stimulus plan. You could almost hear people scrambling to get in line to get that gubment money, which, if you’re a tax payer, is yours in the first damn place, even though the details of how the program would work were still a little unclear.

As it has now unfolded, Bush’s stimulus package (uh, can I even say Bush’s stimulus package without sounding dirty?) will serve as a $145 billion cash infusion to our anemic economy. So where is the problem in that you ask? The problem is that the program has bi-partisan support; so both parties agree that giving taxpayers (and on the Democrats side all citizens not just tax-payers) some of their money back will stimulate the economy.

So my elected friends, why in the Sam Hell did you take the money in the first place? With the admission that giving tax-payers their money back makes the economy go round-and-round then we the people can be sure that our elected officials and their tax policies are the reason the soft economy started in the first place. Just a little hayseed logic here, if y’all didn’t absolutely need the tax revenue in the first place why did you take it?

The current Republican administration has been spending money like a meth-addicted lottery winner for the last seven years and the Democrats are no better, but at least a little more up front about their desire to spend your money, with Democratic presidential hopefuls touting all the creative ways they would re-distribute the citizens’ wealth.

On a side note, the one speed bump in fast tracking the tax refunds is that Democrats want the money to go to all citizens, even those who didn’t pay taxes in the first place and if that doesn’t reek of socialism then grits ain’t white. People getting tax dollars back when they didn’t contribute in the first place is like someone getting a Katrina relief aid payment check when they didn’t receive any damage from the storm…uh wait a second, people actually did that.

Once we cut through the trimmings on this deal we will get back to its core – if you let people keep more of their own money they will spend it. They will spend it at a retail level or they will use it to hire people or firms to provide services or they will buy more Mardi Gras throws to further junk up the parade routes meaning overtime money for the folks that clean up downtown.

Even if people save some of this money, and I realize what a foreign concept saving money is in 2008, the saved money will make more money available to business and entrepreneurs and they will do crazy stuff with the new capital like hiring people and buying stuff. The concept is very simple and it seems like the blowhards on both sides of the aisle understand that it works and that is why we should be enraged that only when the economy is stumbling, bad economy=bad election time juju for incumbents, do they actually do what they know works.

This whole thing agitates me so much I’m actually starting to feel like my old self again. Wow, it feels great not to be happy anymore. Thanks Feds.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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