... may be that the Obama plan slows, but does not stop, the correction in the housing market. In other words, by keeping people in their homes, those homes may not go on the market, which means the precipitous drop we've seen in home values may simply change to a more gradual downward slope.

That's all fine and good if the goal is to keep people in their homes. Personally, I have mixed feelings about that because I think it's pretty obvious that plenty of people bought houses they couldn't afford. I'm not thrilled, as the owner of a small, modest home, to be bailing out people who have larger, fancier houses than mine.

Homes had gotten way overvalued in 2005-6. The question is: do you want a sharp, but hopefully brief, correction, or do you want to keep people in their houses at the risk of delaying a recovery potentially by years or even decades? There are no magical solutions. I think we have to choose one or the other. I predict that, should the Obama plan succeed, people will be complaining about stagnant or even still-declining home values in five years. They'll forget the part about how the government helped them to stay in their unaffordable home.

I believe Reich is correct that the immediate priority is to get the economy growing again. However - and this is the crux of the issue - we need to be actually getting something of value for all this public money being spent.

So far we've subsidized million-dollar bonuses for failed bank and insurance company executives, and of course we continue to spend vast amounts on imperial follies like Iraq and Afghanistan. When is the average American going to get something for all the taxes he pays? When are we going to get a high-speed rail network or national healthcare or a more robust educational system?

The unfortunate truth is that the dominant group of politicians - and I'm leaning toward including Obama in this - doesn't seem very interested in spending money in ways that will help average people. They're only interested in fattening the coffers of the military-industrial complex (thank you, Sen. Feinstein) and the pockets of their wealthy campaign contributors. Running up the national debt on wasteful spending is worse than doing nothing.

Ms. Levine begins the article with a lot of extreme cases - boiling and re-using dental floss, etc., which are convenient straw men to battle against for the rest of her screed. (See how crazy these thrift advocates are!)

Beneath all the trendy, faux-Foucault bloviating about the cultural history of Puritanism, what lies unaddressed are some highly relevant, basic facts of economics that actually prove that reasonable and rational thrift (e.g., NOT the dental floss example) is good for individuals and society.

For example, when Americans save, we make ourselves less dependent on China and Japan to buy our debt, which gives us more autonomy as a nation and a people. We can then lend (or give) our money to other nations as we see fit. Thrift is a partner to independence. You don't have to give a damn what anyone else thinks if you pay your own way through the world. Since when is the opposite of that, whether personal or national, attractive?

In the context of recent American culture, where the savings rate was NEGATIVE, advocating the notion that financial incontinence is somehow healthy is like buying a fifth of cheap vodka for a drunk. Prettying it up with a pseudo-intellectual slap at that ever-popular historical whipping boy, Puritanism, doesn't make it any more respectable.

... that Coleman should heed his own advice and concede.

Rant: Is there any more offensive locution in current usage than "folks"? When a politician uses that word, you know you're about to get screwed. Its pretentious affectation of familiarity is simply revolting. You know... we're just plain "folks" all living down here in Mayberry... even when we're military-industrial complex boot-licking former senators with a reputation for philandering and keeping our nose to the wind to sense the latest change in direction. Yep, good salt of the earth types down here.

Readers may rightly wonder why I am lingering over this sorry tale of a bad hard drive combined with bad backup habits when there are much more important matters to discuss. Don't we all have our horror stories of accidentally deleted manuscripts and other digital era malfunctions?

You're right. We do. There are a million interesting stories out there about the global economy, trade, and the politics behind it all. Instead we get navel-gazing and half-baked Consumer Reports.

My hard drive crashed recently too, and I spent two hours on the phone with a very competent technician in India who helped me get the thing started again. It cost me more than $69, but it worked. Perhaps you'd all be interested in the minutia, along with a dollop of shallow philosophizing that serves as a quasi-justification for my laziness in not backing up files?

Ponder for a moment, dear readers, if Glenn Greenwald would ever write a post as inconsequential as this one.

Notice that when the government finally did give a tax break to savers (defined broadly) under Dubya, they gave it to people who own stock and other investments in taxable accounts. In other words, they gave the break to the wealthiest segment of American society.

It would have been a much wiser policy to cap the taxation of interest received at 15% instead of stock dividends and capital gains, as that would have provided at least modest encouragement to average people to save for a rainy day. Obviously our government does not work for the average taxpayer in any way, shape, or form. The higher taxation of interest is just one small example of that.