Finally some good news, but only if you make wooden arrows that do not measure more than five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and are strictly designed for use by children in the United States.

If you are just an ordinary family man or woman, or if you work at a bank – even one of those bailed out in Ireland last week – you're out of luck.

But thanks to the hard work of the US senate, the plucky toy arrow makers of America will no longer have to pay excise duty on said projectiles and they have their very own section of the 450-plus page $700bn bail-out bill.

Scrapping the controversial children's arrow duty – I am not making this up – is just one of dozens of tax breaks included in the latest version of the bail-out that were supposedly crucial to getting the final version through congress.

The 39-cent arrow tax repeal was proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith and it will save Rose City Archery – a business in their constituency – some $200,000 a year.

Other lucky winners of last week's political debacle include makers of rum in the US Virgin Islands, stock car race-track owners, Hollywood producers and people who received payouts after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Passage of the bill was held up all week while politicians deliberated the inclusion of these "vital" measures that were supposed to help what they call "Main Street USA". To hear them sounding off on the steps of the Capitol, you would think they were fighting to divert the cash being used to bail out Wall Street for a much-needed public healthcare system, or to build new homes for those people displaced by a hurricane. But no, the politicians just couldn't bear to see a bill go by without including in it some nice fat handouts for the wealthiest members of their constituencies, who will no doubt be on hand to provide financial assistance come election time.

There are those who still argue that delaying the bill from a speedy passage was a good thing and that, while some of the recipients of tax breaks were big businesses and special interest groups, it was crucial for congress to oversee such a massive piece of government spending.

That would be fine and dandy if it were true. True supervision – real checks and balances – are good things. But this is just another example of greedy politicians fighting to get their hands on the crumbs falling from the bail-out table.

Even worse than that, the delay actually caused ordinary people a great deal of harm. More than $1 trillion was wiped off the value of shares last Monday alone when the House of Representatives kicked out a previous version of the bill that did not contain such peculiar handouts.

As the stock market sank, "Main Street USA" lost hundreds of billions of dollars of value from mutual funds, savings accounts and pension plans while politicians deliberated these special interest measures. If ever there was proof of politicians making matters more complex and more costly, it is this bill.

The first version of the bail-out bill given to congress by US treasury secretary Henry Paulson two weeks ago was just three pages in length. The bill before the House of Representatives on Friday had expanded to 451 pages. What is more, the extra tax cuts for the toy arrow makers and the rest added another $150bn to the total cost of the bill.

Who then will provide the crucial supervision to ensure these measures – which increase the cost of the bill by almost a third – are actually needed and in the best interests of the taxpayer? Of course, the answer is nobody.

Once all the appropriate palms have been greased and the cheques have been signed, the party chieftains in congress will slap one another on the back for another job well done.

Henry Paulson has taken an awful lot of flak in recent weeks for crafting the bill and demanding that it be passed speedily for the sake of the market. But I think the Wall Street veteran is perhaps one of the only honest men in Washington. There were no flabby pork barrel handouts in his original Bill. Just a proposal – granted a very expensive proposal – to get the world's credit and stock markets working again.

Let us hope and pray that the congressional prevarications were not so long-winded that this crucial goal has been lost.