More on the Bush stimulus plan...

This week's 'toon was supposed to be mainly about the ridiculous decade we're living in and the digital people who live in it (more on that later). However, I couldn't help using the opportunity to comment on our brutal (and collapsing) economy...

Some tidbits:

• Paul Krugman:
  

  Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need.
  
  ...
  
  It has nothing to do with economic efficacy: no economic theory or evidence I know of says that upper-middle-class families are more likely to spend rebate checks than the poor and unemployed. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the Bush administration refuses to sign on to anything that it can’t call a “tax cut.”

  
  
• Krugman again:
  

  Republicans will hold any attempt to help the economy now hostage to yet another try at making the Bush tax cuts permanent — thereby, among other things, crippling future possibilities for health care reform.

  
  
• Charles McMillion:
  

  The foolishness of powerful, self-interested claims of a "new paradigm" is again exposed. The fantasy is that soaring debt and the loss of production through trade deficits are good things and the lack of current savings irrelevant. As a long forgotten advertisement once proclaimed: "If you don't have yourself an oil well, get one!" We can all live well from royalties and asset appreciation.

  
  
• Paul Craig Roberts:
  

  Job growth has been pathetic, with 28% of the new jobs being in the government sector. All the new private sector jobs are accounted for by private education and health care bureaucracies, bars and restaurants. Three and a quarter million manufacturing jobs and a half million supervisory jobs were lost. The number of manufacturing jobs has fallen to the level of 65 years ago.
  
  This is the profile of a third world economy.

  
  
• Joe Bel Bruno:
  

  The subprime [mortgage crisis] wreckage could dwarf the nation's last big banking crisis – the failure of more than 1,000 savings and loans in the 1980s. The biggest difference is that problems with S&Ls were largely contained, and the government was able to rescue them through a $125 billion bailout.