Evidently, now is the time to panic

According to the WSJ, it's time to cancel your cable and brown bag it:

Cut everything.

Drop your cable package and TiVo. Say goodbye to Applebee's and Starbucks. Cancel the ski trip.

Slash every single penny you possibly can from your household budgets and start building up cash.

Yes, I'm serious. The shocking collapse of the rescue package on Capitol Hill threatens a disaster on Main Street. Unless this gets reversed almost immediately, it could turn a slowdown into a slump, and a slump into a depression.

It's hardly possible to make any sensible recommendations about investments or other financial matters until we get a better sense of what will happen next.

Ordinarily in a panic like this I'd be urging people to invest. My usual approach is that the worse people are panicking, the more aggressively you should buy. And that might still be the right thing to do.

But the political and financial situations right now are chaotic.

I think that many of us have been brown bagging it since gas hit $4.00. My daughters used to eat lunch at school five days a week, now they only get hot lunch twice. Who can afford lunch now that gas takes so much of our budget?

BTW, it looks like others decided to invest anyway even though the WSJ is running around yelling that the sky is falling.