“If,” said Rudyard Kipling,” you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs… If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same… If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…”

If you can do all of these things, and a few others, “You’ll be a Man…” Or, at very least, a wiser investor.

Tuesday, international markets plummeted on fears that the U.S. economy was about to slide into a recession.

Good grief. We’ve gone from Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” to irrational consternation.

Meanwhile, politicians are having palpitations over the prospect that things will get worse before they get better… and that they will be blamed.

They will get worse. Bet on it.

But they will also get better.

It’s not as if we have never been here before. This economy runs in cycles. Every five to 10 years, events conspire to send markets, and sometimes our economy, into a tailspin.

And, just as certainly, after six months or a year, the markets and the economy begin to right themselves.

That’s not to say governmental intervention isn’t important. It is.

Tuesday, the Federal Reserve announced an unusually large funds rate cut of three-quarters of 1 percent. And, politicians are correctly thinking of priming the pump with tax breaks. It’s all been done before, and it’s worked.

Unfortunately, the pump priming is, as critics have already begun pointing out, usually too little and too late.

The president and congressional leaders seem determined to send income-tax-paying Americans tax rebate checks. Unfortunately, the Internal Revenue Service says it couldn’t even begin to send checks out until late June, five months from now.

By that time, the economy may already be in recovery and the rebate checks, while nice to see in the mailbox, won’t provide the economic bump they could deliver right now.

There’s a quick-and-easy solution called a “tax holiday,” which is basically an immediate, short-term tax cut. Simply allow employers to stop deducting income taxes for a week or two.

This could be adjusted in all sorts of ways. Middle-income workers could get complete cuts. Higher-income workers could get partial cuts. Self-employed workers could simply deduct their tax break from their next quarterly tax payment.

Bang! The money would be in their pockets on Feb. 1 rather than July 1. They could be out spending lavishly on Super Bowl parties – or paying their oil bills – now rather than five months from now.

The downside: Politicians couldn’t take personal credit for collecting your money and sending it back to you.

The upside: Immediate economic stimulus.

One question: Which is more important?