The Senator from Oregon boasts that his tax proposal will benefit an energy company based in his home state. While it is possible that tax subsidies that benefit a legislator's state, district or constituents are also good for the nation, such specific tax subsidies raise broad public policy questions. They also reflect some of the forces at play in the debate.

The economy is a seamless web. This is not to say that all regulation is bad, but it is to say that the costs of regulation (good regulation, bad regulation, and punitive regulation) are inherently spread throughout the economy, not confined to the particular sector on which the regulation is directly imposed. The results of this survey demonstrate that the political rhetoric asserting that punishing Wall Street will help Main Street is nonsense.

For other apparent "good news" from FDIC Chair Gruenberg, see, e.g., 

Mr. Gruenberg states accurately that some measures of liquidity have in fact steadied or improved. He is, no doubt, aware that some measures of liquidity look materially worse. The question of which measures of liquidity are "better" might be the subject of some debate, but what should not be debated is the reality that the numbers are mixed. Anyone who is interested in a more…

Perhaps the questions that Congress should ask are these: Why are so many states, cities and municipal entities approaching insolvency? What factors drive governmental entities to run at unsustainable deficits? These are not trivial questions, since it is reasonable to expect that numerous governmental entities will go bust in the coming years. To borrow a phrase from the pols, "investors will not regain confidence in [governmental] debt" until the governments themselves prove they can…