With fears of a recession haunting the U.S. economy, all the presidential hopefuls-as well as the man now in the Oval Office-are advocating "stimulus packages" to jump-start the American economy.

Walter E. Williams, Ph.D., the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, has correctly labeled all this "stimulus nonsense."

Professor Williams points out that money for the stimulus packages can only come from three sources:

• from taxes (which will certainly un-stimulate the spending of those who are more heavily taxed);
• by borrowing (which has the effect of taking money away from everybody, thus un-stimulating most of the economy in order to stimulate those whose votes are being bought by the new grants); or
• by inflating the currency (with the same harmful impact as borrowing).

Or, he says, Congress can ask the tooth fairy for money.

Economist Russell Roberts said of these "stimulus packages", in a recent NPR broadcast: "It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end… the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper."

The best way to stimulate an economy, as President Reagan's successful "supply-side economics" showed us (in spite of a Democratic Congress diluting the effect by overspending), is to reduce corporate and individual income taxes: that both encourages investment in technology (which enhances productivity) and actually increases revenues as the economy surges.

Taking money out of the economy by reversing the tax cuts (as the Pelosi Congress plans to do in 2010) is exactly the wrong way to stimulate the economy.

Maybe the U.S. Congress-like all four free-spending parties now in Canada's Parliament-knows something about economics that Walter Williams and I failed to learn. But we also have news for them: there is no tooth fairy. And the Conservatives' bigger-than-the-Liberals vote-buying budgets are still stealing money from our children.