It's all pretend

The notion that this is a government "of the people" etc., should be dead by now, but many people still believe it. It's hard for me to keep pretending, though, when you see that the powers-that-be blithely take things into their own hands, even if they have no explicit authority to do so.

Buried in a Bloomberg article was this quote:
The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.

From the Wall Street Journal:
Some experts argue that the Treasury has effectively shifted from administering parts of the tax code to changing tax laws on its own. "It doesn't seem possible that they have this authority," said Robert Willens, an independent corporate tax analyst.