As you know, when DMers plan, everything falls under one of five headings: Background, Objective, Strategy, Tactics and Budget.

When we execute a plan, we tend to do it in stages: Test, Track, Fine tune, etc. That way, we can’t lose big but we sure can win big. The people who run our federal government never heard of this approach.

They went straight to maximum rollout to give away hundreds of billions of our dollars (000s of 000,000,000s of our $s) in “stimulus” money. Unemployment has since soared from about 8% to 10.2% and nothing has actually been stimulated.

At the same time, we took on more debt in the last nine months than we did under all previous administrations combined – from the first George W. to the next George W. – as if drunken illiterates with expensive tastes had run amok with every credit card in the country. And we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, perhaps when we learn why the mint has been working overtime.

If the people who did this worked for you (actually, they do, in theory) they’d be out on their asses faster than you can say “I told you to test, you idiots.”

Then our totally open and accountable civil servants reported, um, waffle-y numbers for the jobs the “stimulus” created and saved. Turns out it created mostly government jobs and, of course, there’s no way to count jobs saved so they can say anything they like. (We’re not allowed to do that in direct marketing.) If our civil servants lived and worked in the real world, Madoff and the Enron crooks would be looking forward to an influx of new roommates.

Next up? The we-know-what’s-good-for-you whizzes are coming after our healthcare system with a 2,000 page House bill nobody has read but which, rest assured, has not a line about: Background, Objective, Strategy, Tactics, Test, etc.

The odd thing is that they could test easily.

California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts have a total population of about 90,000,000 – about 27% of the country – and they’re states with apparently insatiable appetites for this kind of stuff.

The Larry-Moe-Curly feds could try their Brave New World programs in any or all of CA/IL/NJ/NY/MA. The rest of us could watch to see how things shake out. Or we could ignore them, knowing perfectly well how things are going to shake out.

Cap and trade could be voluntary. If people and companies like the idea, they can just do it. Some of them already are. For instance, if you fly out of the San Francisco Airport, and you feel guilty about it, you can just slide your credit card into a machine and buy some carbon credits to offset the devastation you’re about to wreak on the environment.

Just don’t ask where your money goes.

Heck, the coming massive income tax increases could be voluntary. The government would introduce a flat income tax, like Russia’s 12%, and anyone who thinks we should pay more, could just do it. There are more, many more, multi-millionaires (and multi-billionaires) in the tax-increasing camp than in the tax-decreasing camp. Being rich doesn’t guarantee sanity or even common sense. It probably helps to be nuts.

A well-written direct mail letter could explain the concept to the likes of Ted Turner, Barbra Streisand, George Soros, Sean Penn, Al Gore, etc., with suggested levels of voluntary contributions to federal and state coffers. They’d leap at the opportunity to lead the way and set a great example, wouldn’t they? Sure they would.

I might even kick in a couple of bucks, just to encourage them.