Whenever I reveal that I’m a student of economics, two things happen. First, I hear something like, “Well, it’s a good time to be studying that!” Is it? I’m not sure watching our economy flap around on the ground like a scared fish on a linoleum floor is one of those great learning moments. The question that usually comes next is one of my all-time favorites: “So, Mr. Economics, how do we fix it?” If I knew the answer to that, I think we all would have some better job prospects upon graduation. The most important thing to note in these troubled times is that even the brightest economists are running out of plausible solutions — pleasant thought, eh?

With President Obama now rolling around the Oval Office, there is a proverbial red button that reads, “Economic Stimulus — use only if desperate,” flashing in the corner (if we assume the Oval Office has corners, ceteris paribus). The government’s two main tools in sculpting the economy are monetary policy — wielded by the Federal Reserve — and fiscal policy — voted into effect by Congress. The federal funds rate, the interest rate at which the Fed lends money to banks, is effectively negligent. The Fed’s muscle has been exhausted. This leaves us in the bureaucratic paws of Congress.

Fiscal policy contains the last orthodox approach for all the king’s men to put our economy back together. If you’ve looked at a newspaper in the last six months, you probably know Congress just passed a stimulus package of $825 billion. Roughly 60 percent of that package is devoted to new government spending, and the rest is made up of tax cuts.

The theory behind a stimulus package is to provide a temporary increase in aggregate demand by putting a little extra cash in everyone’s pocket to increase consumer spending, which empties out firms’ inventories, triggering them to increase production. Firms then hire more workers to meet this demand who are in turn paid for their labor only to go out and buy more. More than three-quarters of a trillion dollars should be enough to get our economic juices flowing again, don’t you think?

Now, my memory isn’t great, but at about this time last year I remember a similar, smaller stimulus package trickling out of Congress. Considering our current crisis has been labeled the “worst recession since the Great Depression,” I don’t think that package worked as planned. Well, try multiplying its amount by five, toss in some tax cuts, earmark some funding for education and failing social programs and have a popular president sign off on it — it’s foolproof, I swear.

Casey Wichman is a senior economics major. E-mail him at cwichma1@ithaca.edu.