While you were recovering from the holidays and while you were enthralled with the football play offs and championships….lots has been happening in Washington that you need to be aware of….you are about to be caught with your winkie in the play-doh…..

First, it is Obama’s attempt to halt bank bonuses:

Barack Obama announced his plan to impose a tax on banks that would “recoup every last penny for American taxpayers.” The move was a political gesture—with no real substance—aimed at distancing himself from the banks as they prepare to announce multi-million dollar year-end bonuses.

Obama is seeking to convince the public that by paying back the TARP money, the banks are fully recompensing taxpayers. But TARP is only one among dozens of government handouts to the banks, ranging from free and unlimited access to credit, guarantees against losses, easier regulation, and cash handed out indiscriminately in late 2008 as the financial system collapsed.

The Obama administration is fully implicated in and responsible for the resumption of “obscene” bank bonuses. The administration has refused (and continues to refuse) to set any real limits on executive payment. There are only a handful of firms, including American International Group, that are required to submit their bonus payment proposals to the government, and even among those, it has approved multi-million-dollar payouts.

Then there was the attack on Social Security……

Obama administration officials and Democratic congressional leaders reached agreement Tuesday on the establishment of a bipartisan commission that would put recommendations for drastic budget cuts to a vote in Congress before the end of 2010. The commission would have unprecedented legal authority to propose changes in both the tax code and major entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with Congress required to hold an up-or-down vote on its recommendations.

The exact method for establishing the commission depends on congressional action. The Senate and House could vote to establish the commission, as an amendment for legislation to raise the national debt ceiling to $13 trillion.

The dimensions of the cuts being prepared is suggested by the commission’s mandate to propose a path to reduce the federal deficit from the current level of 10 percent of gross domestic product to 3 percent by 2015. This would amount to a reduction in the annual deficit of about $700 billion—an amount, not coincidentally, roughly equivalent to the bailout of Wall Street—to be subtracted from federal social spending every year. (go figure!)

All this is just crazy but the real story is that nothing is improving on Main Street….the middle class continues its slide down to poverty….

The “Great Recession” of 2008 and 2009 has spread poverty to millions more US children, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institute. The report, “The Effects of the Recession on Child Poverty,” estimates that a large number of states witnessed marked increases in child poverty in 2009.

In 2008, one in five US children under age 18 lived in families below the official poverty level, according to Census Bureau data released in September 2009. The figure now is significantly higher, according to Brookings researcher Julia B. Isaacs. The census poverty statistics for 2008 “lag considerably behind current economic conditions,” Isaacs writes. “Job losses and wage reductions occurring in 2009 were obviously not captured. In addition, many adverse events in 2008 were only partially captured.”

There is even more bad news for Main Street….

The Labor Department announced Thursday that first-time requests for unemployment insurance increased by 36,000, instead of falling by 4,000 as expected. The number of new claims hit 482,000. The four-week moving average of unemployment claims also rose by 7,000 to 448,250.

The scale of the jobs crisis has further strained state budgets. After 20 million US residents collected unemployment benefits last year, 25 states have run out of money for their unemployment insurance funds and have been forced to borrow money from the federal government or raise taxes.

Look for the Prez to try and counter this bad news in his State of the Union address this coming Wednesday….he has got to get the people back in his corner if he is to cxontinue his attacks on the middle class…..he will undoubtedly give some minor concessions to small businesses as a token of his commitment to reviving the economy through the creation of jobs…..thge problem for me is that I am not convinced that that will help create the number of jobs needed to fuel the recovery…..

Maybe we will have better luck next time…..eventually the middle class will wake up and realize that they are being humped like a sex starved dog…..