Tennessee's excellent U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander is rightly deploring the failure of the $862 billion "stimulus" bill that President Barack Obama signed into law two years ago.

"The so-called stimulus plan ... not only failed to create the jobs that would keep unemployment under 8 percent, as taxpayers were promised, but also added over a trillion dollars to our already-staggering debt, which is now the most urgent problem facing us today," Alexander said in a news release on the anniversary of the stimulus.

The senator, who voted against the "stimulus" in 2009, added, "There is no doubt about the fact that it increases our national debt." The stimulus, he said, increased our national debt by an amount of money greater than the cumulative debt amassed "from the beginning of the Republic until 1982." It is adding $10,000 to the share of the debt owed by every U.S. family.

Don't you wish a majority of the 100 U.S. senators were as sound as Alexander, that all 435 U.S. representatives were as sound as our Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, and that President Barack Obama were not convinced additional spending is the solution to our economic problems?