Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
I may be wrong, as I'm only hearing about this from the UK, but I heard opponents of the bailout from both sides saying that they would have voted for it if it had been the bailout alone, but the proposal's authors couldn't resist the usual practice of stacking it with other measures they wanted to push through - starting with a package of tax cuts, which sounds like a great idea for a Government that's about to borrow like never before.

Unfortunately, in order to bring round the holdouts they will probably now try another business-as-usual tactic and sweeten them by adding in their favourite pork items, thus repelling a different bunch of people.

Over here we call this "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic".
The Senate version of the Bill, which passed the Senate today, has a lot of crap in it. The original Bill was three pages long (this is the one that gave one guy control of $700-billion with no oversight or accountability) -- the Senate Bill is about 400 pages.

In it is a provision to require insurance companies to pay for covering mental illness. Believe it or not, I think there's a connection. See the problem's root cause was people who thought it was okay to buy houses they couldn't afford, okay to lend to people who couldn't pay the money back and people who thought it was okay to create derivatives of those stupid loans that neither they nor the buyers understood. All of this is clear evidence that those individuals were nuckin' futz, so if their insurance companies had been required to provide coverage for their therapy, clearly none of this would have happened. See, the Senate knows what it's doing.

So, instead of working on tight, targeted legislation to fix a serious problem, the idiots are tacking on earmark after earmark.

Yes, this is standard practice and helps legislation get passed ... "vote for my bill and your district gets $1-million ... but is it the way things should work? Shouldn't legislation stand or fall on its own merits, not on how much other crap can be used to buy votes?

As a partisan aside: Maybe we should elect a President who hasn't been porking up on earmarks and promises to veto legislation with the fucking things in it?

Off the topic of the legislation, but regarding tax cuts. It's been historically proven that some tax cuts, specifically capital gains, increase tax revenues to the government. This is because of increased economic growth and churn that results.