The economy is in need of some big-time stimulus. What you want to hope is that with stimulus, wages and income (“main street”) can remain strong enough for long enough that the currently underway government interventions to fix the banking system (“wall street”) can work, and then private enterprise can get back to the business of taking out loans to fund new projects. What you fear is that the problems in the banking system will cause job and income losses so severe as to undermine the banking system faster than it can be fixed, leaving us God knows where. This probably means a bigger stimulus than what Democrats are currently proposing — something along the lines of a repeat of the earlier $152 billion package has a bit of a “bailing out the boat with a leaky cup” quality to it.

Brad DeLong says “I would say $300-$400 billion, aimed at least half at infrastructure and state budgets, all to be recouped in the out-years.”

Meanwhile, Roy Blunt is on a crusade to destroy the economy:

Rep. Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican who serves as House minority leader, said he would support a stimulus plan if it did not include massive public works spending and budget bailouts for states that overspent on health care and other social programs.

“A stimulus plan that makes sense is something that I’ll be helpful with,” Blunt said, also on ABC television.

In other words, he would support a stimulus package that doesn’t include the most valuable stimulus measures. Beware any talk of “budget bailouts for states that overspent on health care and other social programs.” What’s happening to states is that when the economy slides into recession, tax revenues fall. At the same time, the demand for Medicaid and other safety net services rises. This creates budget deficits. Deficits that states are not allowed to run. So state government responds to downturns by cutting back spending, which makes the downturns worse. This is a bad feature of American federalism, and it would be good for some clever person to devise a means of forcing states to build up large “rainy day” reserves during the happy times in order to avoid this problem.

But the time to do that is before the downturn, not amidst one. Meanwhile, the victims of Blunt’s refusal to “bail out” state governments will be not state government, but rather you, me, and the rest of the public. And what makes this especially puzzling is that a secondary victim of a refusal to pass a solid stimulus package will be incumbent Republican politicians who desperately need some sign of economic improvement by Election Day in order to hang on to their seats.

IKEA sells a dining room table called “bjustra.” In fact, they sell two different tables by the same name, similar in style but different in size. Each table comes in two boxes — one for the table top, and one for the base. And if you so happen to get mixed up in the store and pick up box one of one bjustra and box two of the other bjustra, well, suffice it to say that “woe unto you.”

They won’t catch the mistake at the checkout line. And when you drive back to College Park to try to make the exchange, they’ll tell you that the thing to do is to go back home and dial extension 1050. Except nobody picks up at that extension! Things only go further downhill from there. Word to the wise. The whole situation is making me skeptical of the merits of a “Swedish-style” response to the banking crisis.

Jonathan Adler tries to inject some skepticism into the emerging rightosphere narrative that Bill Ayers secretly ghostwrote Obama’s book. Adler’s not against evidence-free speculation that Obama had a secret ghostwriter, you see, but to him the evidence-free speculation that the true author is Ayers goes a bit too far. Andy McCarthy, slaps Adler down with some of the old sarcasm.

CAP takes off federal holidays, including Columbus Day, so I’m on a weekend-style reduced blogging schedule today. Ever since coming to DC, I’ve been struck by how different Columbus Day is outside the areas of traditional Italian immigrant settlement than within. In places where good pizza is widely available, Columbus Day is a somewhat big deal with parades and celebrations and so forth. Here in DC, just a stone’s throw from the real northeast and connected to it by the Acela, we don’t have a traditional Italian-American immigrant population and thus we’ve got no real Columbus Day. This even though we (obviously) have a lot of federal employees and people who work for firms that take the federal holiday schedule, so there’s actually rather a lot of folks enjoying a day off.

Now this a journalism assignment I can believe in:

It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, when the faithful fast. It was the only day that Ferrán Adrià, the head chef of El Bulli in Spain, had free. Mr. Adrià was in New York to promote the book, “A Day at El Bulli,” which chronicles his world-famous “molecular gastronomy,” and I had proposed a kind of stunt in which he would visit the Lower East Side with me, shop in Chinatown and cook a meal.

And so with a friend tagging along (a gentile who had no intention of skipping the repast), I met Mr. Adrià at a Chinese seafood market at the corner of Chrystie and Grand Streets. He wore frayed black jeans and reached out to hug me upon introduction. His protégé, the chef José Andrés, was along as interpreter.

José Andrés is, on his own terms, one of the top chefs in Washington, DC. If you’re in a room with him and he’s not the most accomplished chef in the room, you’re probably in a very tasty room. Food journalism definitely seems like the line of work to be in.