Meet Mr. Recession and his friend Mr. Bush

Pawn shop business is up. The rest of the economy is down. Most people think the government doesn't care. They might think this because it might not care, in fact.

Those rate cuts aren't all good:

On the other hand, six-month CDs and money-market accounts are currently paying an annual rate of less than 3%. The cost of living, by contrast, was up 4% last month from a year earlier.

That doesn't bode well for savers like 19-year-old Brittany Green, who attends Pasadena City College while also raising an 8-month-old daughter. She told me she had about $1,500 in savings and wasn't sure what to do with it.

I told her that by slashing interest rates, the government basically wanted her to do one of two things: go out and spend it or invest it in the stock market. Either one would give the economy a little boost.

Green shook her head. "I'm not spending it," she said. "And I wouldn't put it in the stock market. That's like playing the lottery."

Yeah, that's a problem, isn't it. We're finally scared into saving money - something that we should've been encouraged to do (explicitly and implicitly, via policy) and all that saving will now accomplish is further economic decline and more fear and more saving and further . . . you see.

I don't feel like I should be spending the rebate check I should be getting from the government. And I LOVE spending.

The market is going to decline further, isn't it?