I was reading this article in Newsweek while eating my toast this morning. I thought the last two paragraphs were extra poignant. I thought I'd share.

The article is refering to the bank stimulus package last fall, not the stimulus that is ready to pass today. The $18 billion that is mentioned is the number supposedly spent in bonuses paid to the higher-ups of all the big bank companies that Presiden Obama called, "shameful," last week.

"The Stimulus That Didn't Stir" by Jonathan Alter

Actually, $18 bilion smacks of, well, $18 billion. That's almost five times as much as we spend each year trying to cure cancer, which kills 500,000 Americans annually. It's twice what's in the stimulus for building mass transit, which creates thousands of jobs and cuts our dependence on foreign oil. The simplest thing would be for the banks to just collet the money back from the six-, seven- and eight-figure-income employees and lend it out to help get the economy moving again.

In the land of trillions, $18 billion might seem like a rounding error. But, let's review what happened to the average person in the last six months. First, these financial geniuses made a series of bad decisions that cost us a least 30 percent of the value of everything we own. Then we gave them $700 billion of our children's money so they could stay afloat. And now they're rewarding them selves for their incompetence with our tax dollars. This is what our casino culture has brought us, and it cannot stand.