Remember the jokes about medicine in the bad old days where they'd bleed the patient and he'd get weaker so they'd bleed him some more until, for instance, George Washington lay dead? Well, today's news from the New York Times is that the financial firms and car companies that have slurped tens of billions of dollars out of the healthy economy now desperately need to slurp down tens of billions more or the economy will get sicker.

I've always treasured a crack by Rose Friedman about the illusion of precision in economics. Her husband Milton was half-way through declaring that if you can't measure something you don't really understand it when she interrupted with "If you can't measure it, measure it anyway". Which brings me to Michael Ignatieff's latest swaggering statement that he and his party will support the Tory budget provided they get quarterly updates including how many jobs it is creating. The trouble is, you can only know how many jobs it created if you know exactly what would have happened in employment markets if the budget had been different or absent. And since we can't run history two different ways we can't even if we have really fast computers that let us pretend we've somehow created a spreadsheet that completely accurately captures every interrelationship in the economy and accounts for chance as well. (To test this proposition, plug 1980 data into the spreadsheet and see if it predicts 1985.) On the plus side, this approach lets talking heads sound wise and politicians talk tough while acting weak. If you think that's good.

During the campaign, the Tories said no deficits; wouldn't be prudent. Now they insist that only hair-raisingly huge deficits are prudent. As, apparently, is leaking your budget so it won't terrify people on the day. It's as if "prudent" were a magic word that justifies anything you decide to do. Except they didn't really decide to do this. Spending rockets up in good times and bad and when revenue drops off big deficits gape and none of it is the result of financial or political calculation. It's structural features of the budget the politicians neither control nor understand so they babble gravely in an attempt to look relevant. Happy budget day.

I see that Michael Ignatieff is double-talking tough on the new Tory budget, telling his first caucus meeting as leader

"This budget has three simple tests that it must pass. Will it protect the most vulnerable? Will it save jobs? And most important of all, will it create the jobs of tomorrow?"

The Ottawa Citizen added that "While Mr. Ignatieff did not directly threaten to defeat the government over the budget, Toronto MP John McCallum, the party’s economic policy critic, told reporters that Mr. Ignatieff has frequently said a Liberal vote against the Jan. 27th budget ‘is still very much a possibility.’”

Such appalling verbiage manages at once to be substanceless spin (what sort of infinitely flexible ruler is "protect the most vulnerable"? Especially when you're dug in on the hill of "very much a possibility") and to contain a grievous error: Does anyone now seriously think governments, rather than entrepreneurs, "create the jobs of tomorrow"?

Barack Obama's "stimulus" plan now includes, "advisers said", $300 billion in tax cuts because he seemed too focused on making government bigger to help the economy. Which means it's not really a "plan" because sudden kluges on this scale would undermine its structural integrity if it had any. But as long as politicians keep hurling hundreds of billions of dollars about in a weirdly self-satisfied panic, market participants are unlikely to recover their confidence. Would you?

Now that the car industry has its (first) financial crisis bailout package, guess what? Big Steel has joined the queue, asking for a huge infrastructure program with massive "buy America" provisions that might risk trade wars that worsen the global crisis and raise costs for everybody else but on the plus side would send money right to them. As everyone gets bailouts, though, some question must arise as to who's going to pay. Will homeowners fund autos, autos fund steel and steel fund homeowners? It's like that Battle of the Bulge joke about the Sarge saying "Men, I have good news and bad. The good news is after a week in foxholes you all get a change of socks. The bad news is, Harry you change with George, Sam you change with Fred..."

So it turns out the experts didn't actually know what the economy was going to do after all. No really. Thomas Homer-Dixon said it so it must be true. Gosh. I guess we'll all be driven back to hoping for the best and preparing for the worst by keeping ourselves flexible, spending less than we earn and trying to diversify our savings in case life has unexpected ups and downs. Weird.

As you sit amid the wrapping paper and debris on Boxing Day, picking your teeth with a wishbone, I want to ask: What if that was it? Would it be enough?

I don't mean what if you were struck down tomorrow, or if you never saw another Christmas pudding consumed by flames. I mean what if, from now on, there were as many gifts equally good (or tacky) and the same Christmas dinner, in houses as nice and warm as this year and so on, but not more. Would Christmas still be worth it?

OK, hands down all the Grinches who think it's not worth it now. This is a thought experiment about public policy, not odd seasonal customs. And there is a curious cross-party, trans-ideological consensus that the answer to my question is, "No! Certainly not! If things don't keep getting better it's all just dust and ashes."

Seriously. Look at political manifestoes and punditry across the spectrum and you'll discover that no one even debates wealth. All they talk about is growth. Public discussion takes place as if it were incontrovertible that a man with $400 million would be unable to sleep nights were he not convinced next year he'd have at least $412 million.

I realize, incidentally, that this man had $700 million back in August and will be lucky to reach Easter with $200 million while the rest of us worry that we won't be able to afford needles next year, let alone trees. And I certainly hope things get better not worse. I'm not advocating penury as a solution to a slump. My view of voluntary poverty is that it's fine provided it's voluntary. All I'm saying is that there's something very peculiar about the way we frame public policy questions and this peculiarity risks extending deep into our personal lives.

Consider this throwaway line from a recent Fraser Institute book on taxation: "Economic growth is a widely used indicator of an economy's health. It is measured by the annual percentage change in a nation's gross domestic product (GDP)." I cite it not because I think the Fraser Institute folks are weirdos but because whatever their sharpest critics might find to dispute in this book, they'd get to the substance used for the binding before picking on this line. Why?

I'm not against wealth and gadgets and should confess up front that I currently own the coolest car, and phone, I've ever had. My current vehicle is cooler than all the other cars I ever owned put together. So is my phone, now that I come to think of it. And my laptop.

If gains in wealth bought as much happiness as you'd expect then people in the Middle Ages should all have been so miserable they'd have committed suicide if anyone had rope.

But if money could buy happiness it should have by now. King Henri IV of France supposedly said he hoped to see the day when every peasant had a chicken in the pot on Sunday. Fine. They do. What is the aspiration nowadays that requires us not simply to preserve what we have but to keep stuffing fowl into the pot until it bursts?

There is a legitimate national security impulse to have more and better stuff than your enemies. And dynamic growth will probably bring medical advances that matter enormously to those they affect. But not, surely, quality of life elsewhere. Must every book we get for Christmas be bound in Corinthian leather? Do we need cell phones that let us levitate and beam holographs to distant planets? When is enough enough? And if the answer is never, then what good is more?

I can see important arguments for preserving the way of life we now have, so that as people move through the cycle of establishing themselves, accumulating wealth, having families and eventually downsizing as they age, they can capture their special moments with a 2-megapixel cell phone shot rather than daubing them on a cave wall in France with a sheep's foot dipped in gunk. But we have that now. So why does everyone think we must always have more?

Possibly because public authorities have burdened us with an array of social programs whose incentives are as perverse as their financing is unsound, so our only hope is to outgrow our own stupidity and they do not want to focus discussion on the matter and we don't want to either. I'm just saying.

Or maybe everyone is convinced that a free market economy must either expand or die. But I've never seen this case coherently argued and Adam Smith didn't believe it so it's a bit weird that even people who hate him now seem to.

When you get right down to it, how much turkey can a man eat?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]