This morning NPR was talking about the current state of the stimulus package working its way through the Senate, and how the various factions are arguing over the best way to spend/stimulate. Somebody mentioned there was an amendment to help homeowners refinance their mortgages with federally-underwritten loans at somewhere around 4.5%, which sounded like an excellent idea to me. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest our household could be saving about $250/mo. if we qualified, which we could be putting to excellent use for important things like childcare (keeping someone else employed) or paying down debt (making our risk of foreclosure that much less).

I personally would much rather spend the money we all don’t have on shoring up the inheritors of all this debt instead of flushing it down the toilet that is the current banking system; hearing that Wells Fargo suddenly canceled a million-dollar bacchanal for its “top employees” because of the public furor just reinforces the perception that these fucknuts just don’t get it. I think it might have been more fun to let them all gather in Vegas for their frat party, and then interrupt the whole thing by busing in a couple hundred thousand laid-off Americans to crash the events. That would be some news coverage I’d love to see.

I was also happy to hear the President place limits on corporate pay for any bank who received bailout money; this obviously should have been part of the first legislation passed, but wasn’t.

Whatever the case, it’s nice to hear that this administration, in some part, actually gives a fuck about the rest of us.