The Wall Street Journal this morning has two great pieces on the “stimulus” package Congress is expected to give final approval any minute now.

The first is an editorial titled “The Real Stimulus Burden.” It’s not just the massive amounts of pork in the package that has conservatives (and some liberals) up in arms over this boondoggle. Congress is passing this thing, and President Obama is hailing it as our savior, without a second thought as to how the nation will pay for it.

It’s as if Washington, D.C., has been replaced by Sacramento. Here’s some excerpts (there’s going to be a lot because the WSJ says it much better than I ever could):

The bill will mark the largest single-year increase in domestic federal spending since World War II; it will send the budget deficit to heights not seen in 60 years; and it will establish a new and much higher spending baseline for years to come. Combine this new spending, and the borrowing it will require, with the trillions of dollars still needed for the banking system, and we are about to test the outer limits of our national balance sheet. …

The original economic theory behind this bill was to spend the money quickly to create jobs fast. But even the most talented spenders on Capitol Hill couldn’t find enough projects to fund in such a rush. So they spread out the largesse over several years — long after everyone hopes the recession is over. Some of these “timely” stimulus payments won’t hit the economy until after the 2016 Olympics.

Even under CBO’s conservative estimate, the Senate bill increases outlays by $546 billion over 10 years. But to get this low a figure, CBO assumes that the half-trillion in spending will be a one-time wonder. We are thus expected to believe that Democrats will let these additions to their favorite programs vanish after two or three years. To believe this, you have to ignore the last half-century of budget politics. Spending never declines; at best it merely fails to grow as fast as the economy.

Far more plausibly, Democrats will take the stimulus increases and make them part of a new, higher baseline for future spending growth. Anyone who proposes to cut from that amount will be denounced as “heartless” and Draconian.

The second piece, by Daniel Henninger, explains the theory behind this massive, unnecessary expansion of government. “Exactly How Does Stimulus Work” not only makes the wacky ideas behind this somewhat understandable, but Henninger takes the administration to task because they’re not even following their own model.

The theory beneath the $800 billion of spending is called the Keynesian multiplier, first posited around 1931. One suspects not a voter in a million knows how this is supposed to work. Barnstorming in Elkhart, Ind., Tuesday, Mr. Obama took a shot at it, calling the weatherization of homes “an example of where you get a multiplier effect.”

The administration’s primary technical explanation for how spending these hundreds of billions revives an economy is in a paper prepared during the transition by Mr. Obama’s economic advisers Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. To arrive at the number of new jobs the bill would create, the Romer-Bernstein paper attempted to “simulate the effects of the prototypical (stimulus) package on GDP.” The multiplier, as they explain, is applied to a given amount of federal spending to arrive at the likely effect on GDP. Then using a “rule of thumb” that 1% of GDP equals 1 million jobs, they come up with a total jobs figure of 3,675,000. They said their multipliers “are broadly similar to those implied by the Federal Reserve’s FRB/US model” and leading forecasters. …

The Romer-Bernstein study for Mr. Obama itself admits “the obvious uncertainty that comes from modeling a hypothetical package rather than the final legislation passed by the Congress.” Do Ms. Romer and Mr. Bernstein believe the current bill will produce their January study’s job numbers? Is the bill in Congress now a strong-form stimulus or a weak-form stimulus? If the latter, then it’s a waste of money. Martin Feldstein, an early supporter of stimulus, now says that the bill’s effects are weak and need a redo even if it takes a month or two.

If the Obama team won’t consider this, then why shouldn’t one conclude that their case for stimulus, as Mr. Obama suggested with his famous “stimulus is spending” remark, is indeed the crude cartoon version of Keynes, who suggested digging and refilling holes?

If this is true, that “this detail or that detail” don’t matter, then a number of conclusions follow:

The whole congressional effort is an irrelevant sideshow; only the final spending number matters. The economics don’t matter, because the real political purpose of the bill is to neutralize this issue until the economy recovers on its own.

After the vote, anyone feel like going to Vegas?