losses from December through next April if we're lucky. Its flaw is that it's piecemeal: a wad of money for schools, for health insurance for all children, for "infrastructure" – which means good times for cement pourers.

But to clamber out of this terrible economic hole Uncle Sam has to start making things he can sell abroad. That way the nation can offset the problem of running huge deficits importing things from China. "Infrastructure repair" doesn't do that. It causes traffic jams for the next ten years as the highway lobby gets its new overpasses, underpasses, bridges, freeway exits and toll-road expressways, none of which can be sold overseas and all of which won't restore America's near-dead manufacturing economy.

Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tried to sell his bank bail-out plan earlier this week. He deservedly drew an F because in his mumbled prospectus he conceded he didn't really have a clear plan, but was working night and day to come up with one. Markets duly plunged. The $1tr-plus plan has the usual forced perspective of a banker, whose idea of rescue is to lend people money, thus drowning them in even more debt. Americans don't need more debt. They need debt relief.

Who is going to buy $3tr of US Treasury bonds? Not out-of-work US consumers
Obama's bail-out plan, added to the 2009 budget deficit he has inherited from Bush, opens a expenditure hole of about $3tr. As Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan years, points out: "Who is going to purchase $3tr of US Treasury bonds? Not the US consumer. The consumer is out of work and out of money. Private sector credit market debt is 174 per cent of GDP." The sum is too big for the increasingly wary Chinese and Saudis to underwrite by buying Treasury bills where interest yields have been so low that one joke is that the US Treasury is the only institution in the world to be actually abiding by Islamic prohibitions on usury.

Failing everything else, there's the government printing press, which can roll out the dollars and add inflation to unemployment.

The Republicans don't have a plan, and though Obama has been selling his package with his usual eloquence, even his fans are beginning to wonder if he really has a convincing vision either. Americans can understand something big in the way of make-work - like Roosevelt's dams, or the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, or Kennedy's space project or even, in its utter absurdity and waste, Reagan's Star Wars plan which is still unworkable and now consuming 19 per cent of the defence budget. There's nothing rhetorically tremendous in Obama's stimulus plan, just a billion here and a billion there, on and on in an endless array, echoing my father Claud's definition of a book synopsis – "halfway between wish fulfillment and an attempt to gain money under false pretenses."

There's something cloudy about Obama, always hedging his bets. America is broke but here he is, seemingly set on boosting a US force in Afghanistan where, according to the Center for Budgetary Analysis, it costs $775,000 per year to send a single soldier.

This week Obama infuriated his progressive base by twice committing his administration to the same unconstitutional canons of secrecy and claims of executive immunity to the rule of law that made Bush one of the most hated presidents in history. His staff can't seem to nail down safe appointments. In sum, in these crucial early weeks, Obama seems to have trouble setting his compass, as the ship heads towards the rocks.