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I suppose House Republicans and the Obama White House thought it was in the spirit of the holidays to give Wall Street banks the gift that will keep on giving.

From now on they will get to keep all the money they make on risky investments with no worries since the American people will be paying for anything that goes south.

Now that’s a Christmas present all of us would like to have.

But it doesn’t stop there. The budget bill also contains a provision raising the limit of contributions to political parties wealthy individuals can give, buying them even more influence than before.

But the budget bill isn’t generous to everybody, like retirees dependent on their multi-employer defined benefit pension fund. Their monthly income may be cut as much as 50%. Watch out. Social Security may be next.

And then Scrooge himself showed up, I’m sorry, I meant to say, Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa, who decided Congress should cut $303 million from the Pell Grant program that funds most student loans and use it to pay for the heavily criticized private student loan servicers whose role is to “help” students repay their loans.

So this year Christmas has come early for the rich and the powerful. It’s the rest of us that got the bucket of ashes. If this is compromise, who knows what will happen come January when those who have no needs will have even more friends in Congress to protect their wealth.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you scream, or maybe cry, since the budget deal comes on the heels of the release of the Senate report on our country’s torture program, followed by a stream of defenders who have been insisting that unlike other nations the U.S. can define what is torture and what is not for itself. And on the heels of almost daily news of another killing by police of a black kid, youth, or adult male.

The hard reality is that every sign points to the fact that America has lost its moral compass, the consequence of which is that we now live in a Plutocracy wherein wealth is the final arbiter in public policy and doing what is right because it is right is seen as weakness.

Whether or not we can regain our balance as a people remains to be seen. Perhaps drawing upon the wisdom of the past might give us a chance to find our way through the fog of uncertainty and extremism that has enveloped us.

I’m thinking of the wisdom of people like Thomas Paine, one of our country’s first great thinkers, writers, and idealists. What he wrote to the American Colonists who in the face of the overwhelming wealth and power of England were determined to gain their right to be a free people is an example of the kind of wisdom that might inspire us as it did them.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”