Since Congress is pretty much on-board with this kind of stimulus and timing is supposed to be important — why bother cutting checks? Couldn’t Congress just figure out what size stimulus they want and then tell employers to rebate the income tax deductions people have taken from their check for 2 weeks or however long it takes to “stimulate” the economy?

It seems comical to have Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid talking about how urgent the problem is in one breath and then say that maybe they’ll have legislation done in a month that will start cutting checks in June. Since we’re borrowing all this money in the first place…why not just stop collecting the taxes for a few weeks and tell everybody to go out and buy stuff. And if it’s so urgent…why not have a special session in Congress and just hack it out in a week instead of a month?

This has been a long time coming, I’m only surprised it’s taken this long to hit. I think, w/out drastic changes here at home (that aren’t on the horizon), from the US POV we’re not looking at an “adjustment” rather a global realignment… the US brand just ain’t what it used to be.

Beranard @ MoA wrote this on 12/3… a bit more realistic IMO.

Now they want the Federal Reserve to manipulate interest rates and the Federal government to institute tax rebates to stimulate consumer retail. (Look around, how far will $800 go and who hasn’t spent it already?) More to the point, aren’t the markets correcting themselves already with the same magical powers they’ve always had? And how did we get here?

If you think about it, it looks like the major use most people have is to repay some of their debt. In other words, we lose tax revenues to help bail out the holders of the big shitpile.

The market isn’t responding very well. No one knows just how great their exposure is to the big shitpile. No one really knows just how badly things will go as people start defaulting in the potentially huge numbers being suggested, not only in mortgages (including but not limited to sub-prime mortgages), credit cards and auto loans and leases. No one really knows what will happen to all those loans banks made for going private transactions, expecting to be able to syndicate them to other banks and private lenders and now find that they cannot. And no one knows just how much debt in off-balance sheet financing vehicles will have to be taken back onto the balance sheets. That might happen because of guarantees written into the transfer documents. Or it might happen because those vehicles issued commercial paper which was bought by mutual funds run by the banks, and to maintain value, they have to buy the securities back. Of course, that last one wouldn’t have happened if the ideologues of the republican right hadn’t gotten rid of Glass-Steagall.

Naturally enough, given that they think they bought the current administration, the greedheads who caused this mess want a bail-out. They’ll get it, at your expense.

Though I’m more worried about the pain that having the US encounter fiscal reality is going to bring about.

That’s the bad part, and one has to think there will be damage and pain to people and families that don’t deserve damage and pain.

Like the energy feeding frenzy that drained California dry, this shitpile was avoidable. In this case, sensible regulation, and consumers who are educated sufficiently that they can’t be suckered in, would have prevented this I believe. Easier said than done, I realize. But that would be government regulation, and Washington “on people’s backs”. And we all know that Government Regulation is never the solution, but rather is always the problem. So said Saint Ronald of Shining City–it must be so.