I'm still working on taxes and haven't had the time to look at the details yet. The release is here, but a quick sweep over it this morning was not helpful--I need to look at a lot more background information if I'm going to follow all this.

But it sounds like they're close to making the same mistake they did with Homeland Security, which is bunching a lot of functions into one huge organization and giving it way too much to do.

Alarm bells should go off whenever you see a major function of government or society being essentially run by one person. When the head of the Fed sneezes, everybody in Wall Street craps their pants as it is. Is giving this organization even more power wise? You get a good person in the position, things are swell. How often do you get that lucky?

Once the government steps in to keep market forces from actually working, i.e. causing pain to those who have done something stupid, the rest of it is pretty much adding one kludge after another to try and keep things stable. We've been doing this in banking since the New Deal.

Naturally, the more you suppress natural corrections, the bigger the feedback tends to get, and the harder you have to work to prevent a crash.

I have a good idea of the basic principles of how an economy should work, but I don't have clue one how to walk the cat back from where we are now. It's too far down the road. This is why I don't have a problem with more regulation at this point--I don't think the country could stand the corrections required to self-stabilize any more. The problem is I'm almost sure they're going to do something amazingly stupid and make things even worse, because they have to be seen as Doing Something.