Moderate Democrats have grown wary of big spending bills, fearing that support for such measures could haunt them on the campaign trail this year.

Instead of shutting down, payday lenders in some of the same states that passed reforms are making loans at higher rates than before the laws were enacted.

“This ‘legally obligated’ stuff is a lot of nonsense,” says one expert on the Wall Street bailout.

“I never met a spending freeze I didn’t like,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), the chairman of the Republican conference.

“The public is mad, and they’re prepared to take it out on the establishment,” says Tony Coelho.

“There was no reason to pay off these parties at 100 cents on the dollar,” said Bill Black, a leading critic of the government’s bailout managers.

A plan to update the Community Reinvestment Act comes amid charges that the legislation was responsible for the subprime crisis and the collapse of the residential real estate market.

“In retrospect, they were overly optimistic,” Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group, said of the previous efforts to stimulate the economy.

The American economy was swept up in a rising tide of foreclosures this year as credit continued to ebb. These six players from the public and private sectors struggled to steer the country’s financial ship through treacherous waters.

A decade of cuts in federal combined with states mimicking Bush administration tax cuts have led states to fill revenue shortfalls with regressive tax policies.