By E. Thomas McClanahan, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

White House economist Christina Romer was on TV today, saying the administration wouldn't rule out a second stimulus package. A second stimulus? Whoa. That's exactly what the country doesn't need.
Former Clinton Treasury man Roger Altman had a troubling piece the other day in The Wall Street Journal, saying that quite soon we'll be facing a big tax increase.
The budget deficit and the national debt is increasing so rapidly, he wrote, that perhaps as early as next year Main Street and the financial markets will "exert irrestible pressure to reduce the deficit."
His prediction had a chilling plausibility -- even moreso if you consider the extra debt that would be loaded on with another stimulus package full of wasteful pork like the last one. Even more troubling was Altman's preferred levy: A European-style value-added tax.
That would be the perfect capstone to accompany President Obama's mad drive to replicate the massive tax-and-regulatory structures that have made the European economy so sluggish for the last few decades. An apt word was coined to describe the overall problem: eurosclerosis. Europe built a welfare state it cannot financially support, and its costs and rules suffocate economic dynamism.
In 2005, a writer in The Times of London noted that in Europe, "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."
We are now headed down the same path, thanks to the fiscal recklessness of this administration. A second stimulus, indeed. These people have to be stopped.