News item today: Consumer spending down.

Seems to me that's a good thing. Maybe people have been scared into living within their means. Maybe this will lead to people saving money.

By the way, one way to improve our nation's overall economic health and inject money into the ailing banks: stop taxing savings. How about if we made all interest earned in savings accounts and CDs tax free?

Taxing something is a way of discouraging it. China's savings rate, as reported by CNBC on 10/30/08, is 24%, and they don't tax it. In the US, it's less than 1%, and here interest is taxable as ordinary income.