It was quite a year. Taxpayers are now shareholders in most major U.S. banks, a massive insurance conglomerate, and three failing car companies. After years of debating whether the government was implicitly or explicitly guaranteeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt, Washington settled the argument by buying the mortgage giants. I know George Bush liked to talk about an ownership society, but I never imagined this is what he had in mind.

We had fun ridiculing the idea of suspending the gasoline tax for the summer, but the gas tax holiday was minor mischief compared with the newest idea for dealing with the financial market meltdown: a two year holiday on capital gains taxes.

Senator McCain proposed today to suspend the 18.4 cents per gallon federal excise tax on gasoline between Memorial Day and Labor Day this year. For a moment, forget about whether encouraging fossil fuel burning makes sense during a time of global warming, whether we should raid the highway trust fund when bridges are collapsing for lack of maintenance, or the disconnect between the proposal to cut gasoline taxes and the candidates’ endorsement of “cap-and-trade” limits that would raise gasoline prices.

Why is it that the biggest problems always seem to encourage the worst possible solutions? The latest case in point: The Senate's housing bill, grandly titled “The Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008.”