“The president of the European Union on Wednesday slammed U.S. plans to spend its way out of recession as ‘a road to hell.’ Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, told the European Parliament that President Barack Obama’s massive stimulus package and banking bailout ‘will undermine the liquidity of the global financial market.’”

There’s “one small problem with Geithner’s plan: It will bankrupt the banks,” says analyst Henry Blodgett, triggering a chain reaction of write-offs. Unless, that is, the Treasury Department deliberately and massively overpays for the toxic assets, fleecing the taxpayer, as other commentators predict. The reason is mark-to-market accounting rules, which require financial institutions to write down assets’ value when similar assets are sold by other institutions at fire-sale prices. Many commentators say these regulations should be repealed, including former FDIC Chairman William Isaac, Congressmen Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) and Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), the Wall Street Journal, John Berlau, Jeff Miller, Holman Jenkins, and Newt Gingrich.

Congress is now moving to enact a $6 billion “national service” boondoggle. Similar spending in the past has been used to hire young people to lobby for rent control and against anti-crime legislation, such as “three-strikes” laws and victims’ rights bills.

It’s hard to understand why the government is wasting money on such things, when it already will incur $4.8 trillion in additional debt from Obama’s proposed budget, and $8 trillion for bailouts (not counting another trillion dollars for the toxic-asset buy-up program) and $800 billion for the economy-shrinking “stimulus” package).

So much for Obama’s broken campaign promise of a “net spending cut.” Even his two trillion dollar “cap-and-trade” energy tax won’t begin to pay for all the new deficit spending.