We are told that Bush hails tax-rebate deal as ‘robust’, when what we find is another corporate welfare bill that will do nothing for the economy of the nation. They promised Viagra^® and provided a saccharine tablet, not even real sugar.

Paul Krugman has two posts on the placebo that the House is pushing: Why worry about a poor stimulus plan? and Stimulus disappointment.

They cleared the calendar of the House to work on this nothing of a bill that increases the national debt and will be too little and too late to have any effect on the economy. Perhaps if we took the $169,300 annual salaries of the members of Congress and made them live on the $32,140 median income of the American worker, they might have more appreciation of the problems faced by the people in a recession.

As the median income, it means that half of all working Americans make less than that, while half make more. That is the middle of the middle class workers these days.

By the way, that $250 billion dollar deficit they are reporting for this year, that doesn’t include the other $250 billion that was “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund.

Rudy Giuliani was on one of the talking head shows tonight on my Mother’s TV [she’s crocheting a baby afghan for a volunteer group, and turns the TV on when she knits or crochets] spouting the standard Repub mantra about the economic meltdown.

According to Rudy we have to lower taxes to be competitive with other nations. This ignores the reality that the US has had the lowest tax rates of any developed nation for decades – it’s not the taxes.

He also said we have to reduce the regulations on business. The prime reason the banks are in trouble over the sub-prime loans is because no one was enforcing the regulations when it could have been stopped, and Alan Greenspan encouraged people to buy these “creative” mortgages when they should have been locking in low fixed rates. If the Hedgemony had at least attempted to enforce the pitiful regulations that do exist, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

The lesson of the Great Depression was that you can’t trust the banks and businesses to act honestly, you have to regulate them for the survival of society. Reagan took the leash off and we have been paying the price ever since.