Do the opposite of whatever they want to do

Caveat: I know full well that the policies of President Bush and others got us where we are today. I was against all of his fiscal policies. I also know that the democrats sat idly by and said nothing about the explosion in spending. They certainly did nothing about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Sure they protested the Iraq war, but I never heard them complain about the other $4 trillion Bush added to the debt.

There are many within the “intellectual” elite circle and ruling class calling for more stimulus. Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, and Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, are among those that support such thinking. President Obama appears to be listening to these wunderkids and is making rumblings of more stimulus spending coming our way. They say we need more stimulus than Japan had in their lost decade. Really? Have any of them stopped to think about what that would mean? If you compare the size of the Japanese and American economies and extrapolate we would need a stimulus package worth more than $20 trillion. Now does that pass the sniff test? I don’t think so. Most people in their gut know that this, just like bailing out AIG or GM, is the wrong course. Unfortunately for us, those people are not in charge.

Many of these people wanting more stimulus spending subscribe to Keynesian economics. Keynesian economists believe that government spending is the only way to get an economy in the doldrums going again. Please someone explain to me how the path we are on is sustainable and will not have long-term consequences. Let’s sum up where we are today:

National debt: $11 trillion and growing.
Budget deficit: $1.5 trillion this year and likely $1 trillion for years to come.
Unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security: $60 trillion and growing.

Looking at those numbers I cannot fathom how spending more money will help. Sure short-term, it may do some good, but then how are we going to pay the tab? It is the height of irresponsibility to push this bill onto our children and grandchildren. President Obama wants more programs and more spending. How is that possible without completing destroying the dollar and creating a Wiemar Republic scenario? Even Keynes pointed out that “governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance.” Sound familiar? That’s where we are at now folks. But there are some people out there that have no problem with monetizing our debt. While small, short-term monetization may not pose a problem we are well beyond that. And I think they know it and are trying every stop gap measure hoping that the economy will turn around enough to naturally get us out of trouble. Of course they will claim that it was their massive spending that lifted us out of this recession. BULL SHIT.

Frederick Soddy, a 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry turned economist, understood how bad debt was. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, wrote that Soddy

offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist
whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.

Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used
once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”

Following Soddy, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach) and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim
on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”

Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.

Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.

It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset
the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.

Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth.

Now I agree that Soddy and Georgescu-Roegen were on to something: too much debt is bad and our economic model based on consumerism and loose credit hurts us. But Soddy could not leave it at that. He had to develop his own five policy principles that he thought would combat that. His first four were once considered eccentric but are now conventional practices.

1. Abandon the gold standard
2. Let international exchange rates float
3. Use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends
4. Establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort

I would argue that these principles have led to the situation we are in. Abandoning the gold standard has led to the ability to print money and fund government programs that are unsustainable and allows trillion dollar deficits and an $11 trillion debt – the fiat currency.

Letting exchange rates float has hit Greenland and the former Eastern Bloc countries particularly hard as loans made in a foreign currency have created havoc as loan amounts increased as a result of a floating exchange rate – the owners of those loans cannot afford to pay them now. This has also allowed people like George Soros to speculate on currencies and make billions by gaming the system.

Soddy’s third principle is the most nefarious of them all. This principle has produced the mindset that cyclical trends are bad and government intervention is good. This is a very dangerous idea in my opinion. Cyclical trends are natural and we want them; they naturally regulate economies. The idea that a government can manage an economy is ridiculous – that should not be the role of government in the first place. Yes, you can provide some monetary policy, but controlling the economy like he suggests is the same stupid notion that we can control the climate. When people like Paulson or Greenspan meddle they make things worse, not better – like keeping interest rates artificially low. Government debt also takes money away from other private entity capital projects that create real jobs and not the government ones that leech money from our economy (made up work that has little to no value). Government surplus should be used to pay down debt and if it is not needed for that it should go back to the people so that they can use it how they see fit.

The stock market and our lives are now ruled by economic statistics thanks to Soddy’s fourth principle. We hear how the markets react to various economic statistics. Bad stats lead to bad days on Wall Street. Good news and the markets go up. More data manipulates the system and places value on short-term outcomes rather than long-term reality.

“Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing.” Well, this runs counter to his first principle above anyway. The Federal Reserve has long been creating money out of nothing. If you want to stop them from making money out of nothing you need something like the gold standard. This has led our ruling political class to seek our favor by showering us with fake money in the form of inefficient and incompetent government programs we can’t afford. The more they sink their talons into our lives the less likely we are tell them to go to hell.

Lastly, Mr. Zencey, probably as much of an economist as I am, claims that we need a “100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits”. This is unworkable and would unnecessarily lock up capital in banks and make investment onerous. Please leave the economics to those with common sense. The intellectual elite that include Krugman, Reich, and Zency, should shut themselves up in their offices and leave us alone. Please keep your intellectual workouts to yourself. Have you not done enough damage already? We do not need more of your meddling. You and your ilk landed us in this mess in the first place.

Finally, one last anecdote to dispel the notion that we need more stimulus or onerous regulation (some regulation, yes, not what Reid, Pelosi, Frank, or Schumer want). On a radio program here in Kansas City they were talking with a local bank president. His bank is largely unaffected by the whole subprime mess because he followed two simple rules:-1) they did not make risky loans and 2) they did not allow loans to exceed 70% of their deposits. He claimed that the banks now suffering had loan to deposit ratios greater than 100% and they invested heavily in the subprime market. Damn that Midwestern common sense.

The fix is pretty simple when you get down to basics and let common sense guide your business model. What the brain trust in government does not understand is that we are paying for years of negligence. We cannot simply make a 180 degree turn and suddenly everything is sunshine and lollipops. We need to let the markets correct themselves. Will it be painful? Yes. Will it be better this way and not place a huge burden on our children? Yes. There is no need for complex economic models or scraping our economic system; we just need to do what makes sense, and that does not include what the ruling class is suggesting we do. A better approach may be to do the opposite of whatever they want to do.

Really as Bad as You Think

“One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.” -Thomas Sowell

If you think I am some rethuglican, guess again. I opposed the Bush tax cuts. I opposed the Iraq War. I opposed the Bush stimulus in early 2008. I opposed TARP 1. I also opposed Obama’s stimulus. Why? I see ineffective and dangerous governmental policy behind each one. I look beyond the short-term effects to the long-term consequences. Looking at the result of the first four I can state with some confidence that I was right in opposing each and every one of them.

The stimulus touted by Obama to create 3.5 million jobs (funny how that number keeps increasing) provides a paltry $16 extra per paycheck this year ($400 dollar credit divided by 26 paychecks) which drops to $8 per paycheck next year. NPR was interviewing some so-called expert. The interviewer asked if the “expert” really thought that extra $16 per paycheck would be stimulating. The “expert” actually said that he thought it would. You have got to be kidding; what freaking planet was this idiot from? The only thing an extra $16 per paycheck will stimulate is McDonald’s. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for creating jobs. But this is not the way to do it.

The stimulus is nothing more than a spending stop gap to hide the underlying issues of our economy and delay the inevitable real pain (You can put your finger in the dam to stop the leak…). It does very little to stimulate innovation which creates real jobs. True stimulus would have been a massive $500 billion+ investment in energy of the future and a rehab of our electric grid - I could have supported that because I understand the need for it and I can see how it would benefit our economy. The little dribs and drabs towards an investment in infrastructure in the current stimulus plan fall far short of providing a healthy footing for an economy beyond the next election cycle. As one comment put it: “[The stimulus is] like eating more food to lose weight!”

We had the tech bubble, the housing bubble and next we will have the government spending bubble. When the government money runs out, what then? Will we be told that we need another porktastic spending spree because the first one was not large enough? Can’t we see that this is simply no longer sustainable? And here I thought the progressives were all about sustainability. It is obvious that their idea of what sustainability is does not translate to the pocket book. Of course, if they really adhered to the idea of a sustainable society they would kill themselves because the majority of what humans do is not sustainable. But I digress.

Do not believe for one instant the pundits when they say that the national debt is still only a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP). They forget to add in the debt held by business and you and me. That total is $52 trillion – three times the GDP of around $14 trillion. Adding more debt is a very bad idea. Some pundits want us to do what Japan did in the 1990s. If only it were that simple. We would have to have a stimulus package worth more than $20 trillion to match what Japan did because we have a much larger economy. And I am not including the unfunded liabilities of social security and Medicare that is an estimated $60 trillion.

Even scarier is what the Federal Reserve (Fed) is doing to straighten out the mess the banks are in. The Fed has committed trillions to the bail out of insolvent financial institutions. Robert Reich in his blog recently wrote:

“To date, the Fed has already committed some $2.5 trillion to rescuing the financial ystem, yet no one outside the Fed knows exactly how or where this money went. The Fed is subject to almost no political oversight. Yet if the trillions of dollars the Fed has already committed and the trillions more it's about to commit can't be recouped, the federal debt explodes and you and I and other taxpayers are left holding the bag.

In other words, Geithner and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke continue to do pretty much what Hank Paulson and Bernanke did: They hide much of the true costs and risks to taxpayers of repairing the banking system.”

And we should trust Turbo Tax Tim? Why am I and others like me marginalized for speaking out? We are raising the alarm and the sheeple simply would rather watch American Idle. Congress voted on nearly a $1 trillion spending plan that contained more than 1,000 pages of text and had less than 24 hours to look it over before voting on it. We are simply to take on faith that politicians are looking out for our best interests?

The dumb are leading the dumber towards the cliff. The sheeple look idly by without a clue as to what is going on. We the Idiots deserve every bit of what we have sown.

Question everything and everyone. Trust no one.

Photo by KCThinker, Butterfly at Ohama Henry Doorly Zoo

Repeating Mistakes of the Past

Probably one of the most frustrating things about the financial crisis we are in is that the response is eerily familiar to past crises. Yes, I am talking mainly about the Great Depression. The history we learned in school that FDR’s New Deal brought us out of the Great Depression is patently false.

World War II did end the Great Depression, as revisionists are apt to claim, in a manner of speaking, but not in the way you may think. The U. S. did benefit from the massive war building effort, but after the war was over all that manufacturing had to be turned somewhere else, it simply could not keep churning out guns and ammo for a war that did not exist. When WWII finally came to a close the majority of countries with industries similar to ours before the war were in shambles. The U. S. was intact, had the manufacturing infrastructure and was able to quickly start producing. Another key was that the war effort led to considerable innovations which spurred more job growth. In conclusion, FDR’s New Deal did nothing. In fact, Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in May 1939:

“We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.”

Of course the economists today (and even presidents) don’t let the truth stop them from making idle claims. It is interesting to note that, like psychologists, economists adhere to different schools of thought (or ideology if you will). There are the Keynesians, the Austrian School, and others. Frederic Bastiat, a French politician in the 19th century wrote:

“Essentially, economics is the science of determining whether the interests of human beings are harmonious or antagonistic.”

In a way, economics is like psychology because much of it is based on human emotion and interaction, so it should not come as a surprise that economists rally around different schools of thought than reality.

The idea that the government is like Superman coming to save the day is absolutely ludicrous. Time and time again, history has shown us that the government is inept. Yes, they are necessary, but only to a point. The role of government is not to be some big brother making sure you don’t fall and if you happen to fall not only picking you up, but dusting you off and carrying you to bed to rest. Government may provide some programs for people to better themselves by, but for the most part it is not government’s responsibility to make sure you have a roof over head and food on your table – that is called personal responsibility, something that seems to be a foreign concept nowadays. The role of government is to provide a safe environment for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; to ensure there are sufficient, but not burdensome, laws to protect society. Government is at its best when it gets out of the way of commerce. Government also wastes a lot of our tax-payer funded time on moral issues like homosexuality, abortion, and gay marriage, and non-political issues like steroids in baseball and the NCAA football championship.

What is now going on is the perversion of the idea of government. President Bush presided over a doubling of our national debt and was at the helm of largest expansion of federal government in decades. Republicans insisted that regulations on financial institutions be relaxed. Democrats forced banks to make bad loans. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to rock bottom levels. You and I spent more money than we had. Everyone wanted everything now. People borrowed against a home with an inflated value. They ran up their credit cards. People bought houses with no credit, no job, and no money down. Financial instruments like Credit Default Swaps were created. Banks bundled the loans and sold them off only to be sold again by others. The result: a combined $56 trillion debt - $12 trillion for the government and $44 trillion for businesses and individuals. That is approximately four times our annual gross domestic product. How is something like that sustainable? It simply is not.

The government’s response? Pump billions (soon to be trillions, mark my words) into insolvent banks. Spend nearly $1 trillion to get the economy going. It did not work in the 1930’s and it won’t work today. Why? Even though the circumstances are somewhat different, the fundamentals are the same. The banks also don’t trust anyone, especially government, after they got burned for making stupid decisions. They are rightfully (and finally) tightening up credit again. There is no credit crunch. Banks are just getting back to fundamentals. If you don’t have a job you should not be given a loan for a car, let alone a house. The government refuses to understand that the last couple of decades have been built on personal and public debt. The government tries to prop up businesses that should be allowed to fail because they are poorly run (banks and American car companies). The government also refuses to understand that government spending projects do not grow an economy. There needs to be real demand and not more artificial demand based on borrowed money no one has. Once the money is spent to build a road, there is no incentive for that employer to employ that person any more. Once the food stamps are spent, more are needed. Yet, the government, in its infinite wisdom (more like denial), is galloping to the rescue of an empty burning building.

As usual, the government is blind to the consequences of its actions. It cannot think beyond Stage One. “In the Economic Sphere,” Frederic Bastiat wrote:

“An act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.”

To prove his point, Bastiat described what happens when a vandal breaks a shopkeeper’s window. The seen effect is that repairing the glass creates economic value in the payment to the glazier, who then has money to buy a new suit or hire a part-time employee. What is unseen is that the shopkeeper has to pay the glazier with money that he would otherwise have used to buy a suit or add an employee. “The broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics,” wrote the economic journalist Henry Hazlitt in 1946. Another similar parable is Uncle Sam, Cousin Maynard, and the miracle seeds.

There is a hidden cost to everything. It is in the stimulus package and it will be in other legislation that the Obama administration will try to ram through Congress. This so-called stimulus will cost each and every household approximately $6,700 in additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren. That does not include the $12 trillion of debt we already have - add each citizen's share of that debt is more than $35,000!

The longer government keeps its blinders on, the more likely the real problems will never get solved and the more likely the future integrity of the U. S. is in doubt. Of course, historians will probably take creative license with Obama’s story and undoubtedly shape it in positive nature, much like they have with Lincoln and FDR.

Photo by KCThinker. My daughter walking along the beach.

Why the Stimulus is a Bad Idea

I may just be a simpleton from "fly over country" who sees this stimulus as an utter waste of money. Only about $100 billion is for true infrastructure. You might as well as throw the rest in the fire along with the TARP money. That’s trillions of dollars we will never see any benefit from and that my children will have to pay for now. Why is no one asking how this largesse will be paid for? They simply take it on face value that we need to rush headlong into unwisely spending nearly a trillion dollars. The same crap was pulled with TARP and the Patriot Act and look at where it got us. I am tired of the fear mongering. I thought that would be over when President Bush left office. However, President Obama obviously took a page out of Bush’s playbook and is using fear to get this travesty of a spending bill passed.

What will creating a massive spending government spending bubble actually do? The way I see it, once the money is spent the jobs go away. Government spending as a means to create jobs is not sustainable from my perspective, especially when you have to borrow that money in the first place. How does the stimulus provide long-term sustainable job growth, if at all? That is not change I can believe in.

A good number of jobs were created under during the Clinton Administration because there was innovation in the form of the internet boom. Innovation leads to positive job growth. Under the Bush Administration there were far fewer jobs created because there was no innovation behind the government’s deficit spending. The majority of the stimulus is deficit spending. Little in the stimulus package is geared towards innovation. Sure there is a portion directed to renewable energy and increasing broadband accessibility, but the vast majority of the $800+ billion package is directed to short-term jobs with absolutely no innovation.

The whole idea of getting back to where we were is ridiculous. It was all artificial in the first place. Just when we are finally coming to our senses after decades of spending like sailors in a whore house and now everyone wants to once again spend money no one has. Have we learned nothing? How can that possibly be a good idea when we have so much debt in the first place and we are nowhere close to addressing the long-term fiscal problems associated with social programs such as Medicare?

My gut tells me that this is a bad idea and we will regret it. I look at it and I shake my head because it seems common sense has left the building. You can quote all the economists you want, cite all the job creation numbers from one president to another, and compare it to Sweden or Japan, but ask yourself if you can truly make those apple to apple comparisons. Something tells me that the situation we are in is far worse, much deeper, and far more complex than any of those other situations. Throwing money at it is not necessarily the answer to every problem. Taking a step back and coming up with the right response is always better than merely responding quickly.

We need to feel some true pain. And an unemployment rate of 7.6% is not true pain (yes, those without a job would disagree, but let’s be realistic and look at historic jobless rates and we must also consider ourselves fortunate when looking at the state of the rest of world). All we are doing is providing temporary pain relief but not looking at the symptoms. We want to give aspirin when we may have to amputate a leg.

Please keep in mind I am no economist, I am just a simple civil/environmental engineer who has not knowingly cheated on his taxes so obviously I am not qualified to have made any of the comments above.

Photo by my daughter. Winter weather in Iowa.

Under Cover of Darkness...

Disgust and revulsion are only a couple terms that come close to describing how I feel about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, also known as the “bail out plan”. This terribly crafted and short-sighted legislation is being rammed down our throats. Thankfully, a good number of democrats and republicans voted against the “bail out plan”. Please thank your representative for voting against it if they happen to have done that. If your representative voted for it, well you know what to do on November 4, 2008 to show your “appreciation” for their stupidity.

The same President Bush that cried out that Iraq was a major threat to the United States came on the radio this morning on my drive to work and claimed the sky is falling. He claims we need to implement immediate measures or we will suffer dire consequences. You really have to question his motivation here. So what if the Dow dropped 777 points in one day (an estimated $1 trillion in paper money – all I hear are crickets chirping); it went back up 485 points the next day. The markets are based on emotion not reality and not a good indicator to base economic policy on.

Most folks in the know look at the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) to determine how the credit markets fair. The LIBOR is the interest rate at which large international banks are willing to lend each other money on a short-term basis. Many home equity lines of credit, small business loans and student loans also use LIBOR as an index, and this interest rate has been increasing which makes loans more expensive.

I do not believe President Bush. How can you trust Secretary Paulson after what is coming out with regard to the AIG bailout? Speaker Pelosi is utterly clueless. I have no faith that Senator Reid knows what he is doing. They are politicians first and foremost and care more for their own backsides than what is best for America. This is a housing bubble of an estimated $8 trillion of which only $4 to $5 trillion has been lost – meaning more losses to come. We should be very skeptical and extremely suspicious of anyone using the argument that we will make money from this deal. They screwed up and we are supposed to look the other way and pick up the stinking pile of crap they left for us? No thanks.

Dean Baker from the Center for Economic Policy Research was on C-SPAN talking about the failed bail out. He penned a plan that makes more sense than what Bush and company are proposing. There is absolutely no reason to rush into this. Most reasonable economists agree and would rather see a fiscal stimulus such as investing in infrastructure and direct intervention by trying to work with home owners on the edge rather than sending hundreds of billions through the financial institutions. Let the failed financial institutions hang.

Now the Senate is set to vote on their plan (read: push their failed policies) on Wednesday, 1 October 2008. The Senate will call up H.R. 1424: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, the text of which will be substituted with the economic rescue plan (a Dodd amendment which must have the consent of both the Majority and Minority Leaders).

Other than the bailout, what does their plan include?

• Raises federal deposit insurance (FDIC) limits to $250,000 from $100,000
• Adds a set of popular business tax breaks
• Adds legislation to prevent more than 20 million middle-class taxpayers from feeling the bite of the alternative minimum tax

A little bit of sugar with a whole lot of poison. Please call your senators and send them a message loud and clear that we do not like this plan and would rather see it defeated.

Photo by KCThinker, Butterfly - Omaha Zoo