By Mitch Daniels

Ronald Reagan enjoyed telling of the elderly Blitz victim rescued from her demolished London flat in World War II. A fireman found a bottle of brandy under the ruins of her staircase and offered her a nip for her pain. “Leave it right there,” the matron ordered. “That’s for emergencies.”

A look around the American economy suggests that it’s time to break out the brandy.

President Obama may have hit upon some decent proposals now, finally. But if he has, why did he have to burn through 20 months and trillions of taxpayer dollars to get here? It’s a bit late to come up with a “new” plan now. If he knew the right thing to do all along and didn’t do it because of ideology, fire him for putting his ideology above the country. If he didn’t know, fire him for incompetence. Employees have been fired for squandering a lot less of the company’s wealth than he has.