Bailout is not good or bad, just necessary.
It is infuriating, though.
I liken it to people being upset that a raging forest fire is near them. And they have to spend huge sums to have local and state people’s overtime, and lose beautiful old growth trees bulldozed for firebreaks. When, they reasonably say – that ” better regulation” of people in the fire zone could have prevented 3 of 4 fires that merged into the big conflagration.
They may be right, properly infuriated ..but still..fuck ‘em all, they still have a forest fire that will burn everything down, including them..if they don’t react and stop it – and give up just sitting back, trying to figure out who is to blame.
That said, it is galling to realize that even if you were fiscally conservative and didn’t play the “house-flipping game’, didn’t believe in “regulation-free” government, and opposed no money down 350K homes for illegal aliens or high school dropouts – you will get screwed.
But we have the government and system we deserve.
1. Some Ruling Elites may pay, but only the few in the private sector that committed securities fraud. Most of the developers, finaciers, house-flippers in the early phase of the pyramid scheme locked in their profit and will stay rich while taxpayers cover the “victims” left holding the bag when the Ponzi scheme blew up.
2. Politicians of both Parties will escape significant punishment. They will cover for each other. Charlie Rangel and Barney Framk will not be ousted from their safe districts, not will the Reaganite “deregulators” like Phil Gramm ever pay a cent.
3. Voters put up with DC becoming a den of lobbyist corruption enriching the lobbyists, their clients, and politician’s families. Republicans and Dems alike both gorged like pigs at the trough.
4. Voters cherished political beliefs – in any Party – ought to be strongly reconsidered and reflected on. Democrats should consider if factories and education help more people raise their lot than Villas and other unsustainable government-subsidized consumerism. Republicans face the biggest crisis, as they not only have to repudiate Bushism’s many philosophical failures but face the truth that some central tenets of Reaganism – “Any government regulation and oversight is bad, let unfettered free markets rule!” are malignant and cancerous when left to the discretion of bribing, rapacious greedy people. Libertarians face the truth that that their position that real estate speculators and people owing as much 5th Amendment property as “God gives them” is the pinnacle of what America is all about – is farcical. Their beloved “heroes” in the Kelo Case are almost all “house-flipper” people that bought multiple homes on little or no money down, and who extorted taxpayers.
5. The American public will have to learn to accept that people, even common people, will have to be punished for poor choices – because the alternative is that they will pay to “make those poor choice people whole, again”.
Yes it sucks to be a local dentist couple who went from 2 million in paper profits on 8 homes they owned in a shell LLC to the guy writing passionately and in deep pain “wondering how he will afford college for his kids” unless he gets some help (meaning taxpayers that have less means generally than the two professionals)
Yes it sucks that a black social worker up from welfare a decade ago is “on the verge of losing her sacred 1st home” – a waterfront property worth over 400K she bought just a year ago. Who will pay to keep her “in the home she loves”??
Yes, it sucks to be someone that invested conservatively and lived within their means being put on the tap for yet another bailout of Ruling Elites and their more than complicit “victims”
The question is if America can be fixed structurally such that we don’t decline as a nation….populated by people convinced that hard work, savings, and living within means is now a sucker’s game rigged by Ruling Elites and their “milk the stupid Americans for Gov’t goodies” constituencies.
(If it was up to me, the Board of Lehman Bros, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, Dubya, Maxine Walters, Charlie Rangel, Alan Greenspan, and Chrisopher Cox would be marched up against a wall and shot as examples to the rest of them.)
