Please don't construe what follows as an endorsement of the richly flawed Paulson Plan, but… Over the years, we've all gotten accustomed to Democrats referring to every single spending boondoggle as "an investment." You know the drill - we need to invest in infrastructure or we must invest in midnight basketball. Of course, such things were never investments but rather expenditures. Perhaps they were good expenditures and perhaps not, but they certainly didn't qualify as "investments" unless you wanted to torture the definition of a well known term. It thus comes as no small irony that the Paulson Plan which actually calls for literal investments is instead routinely referred to and calculated as pure expenditures in the media. Perhaps decades of John Kerry-types endlessly braying about "investments" in education or whatever other spending plan caught their fancy has hopelessly corrupted the language. Or perhaps some purportedly wise people really don't understand the difference between investing and spending.