Steven Pearlstein, business columist of the Washington Post, does a good job of capturing growing frustration. It worth reading the whole article here.
I’ve snipped out a few paragraphs:
Can you imagine a better way to undercut public support for fiscal stimulus and deficit spending than to report out an omnibus spending bill with nearly 9,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion? But, of course, that is just what the Democratic Congress has done. Americans don’t need to be lectured by the House speaker and the Senate majority leader on the spending prerogatives of Congress. What they need are leaders who can demonstrate, in ways symbolic as well as substantive, that they know the difference between spending that is crucial to the country in times of crisis and spending that is not.
As for Republicans, their stubborn opposition to any increase in government spending in the face of a severe downturn is the economic equivalent of bloodletting. And their determination to paint every initiative of the Obama administration with the broad brush of socialism is the kind of old-fashioned red-baiting that would make Joe McCarthy proud.
It’s not just Congress, however. Key regulators have also been slow to respond to the unfolding crisis with the kind of urgency the situation demands.
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