A Rant on Bailouts

It started with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the nation began to open their eyes, and the masses largely wondered who these institutions were, and why they were being protected by the government. It started to become clear that our free market ideology was fading away, but this was not as interesting to people as making fun of Sarah Palin, or rushing to her defense. I got caught up in it too, because its not too common that someone appears on a presidential ticket that makes George W. Bush seem qualified, or intelligent.

Then comes the market crashing, the nationally ignored gasoline shortage crisis in Tennessee, and now Bush is pushing Congress to pass another bailout of subprime mortgage lenders to the tune of $700 billion dollars. Thats billion with a B.

I struggle to understand the logic behind this kind of thinking. Not only does it completely seem like an anti-capitalist move, but it inherently rewards unnecessarily risky business practices. The whole idea behind free markets is that when you succeed you succeed freely, and when you fail, you crash and burn.

Perhaps its because Bush realizes that his rhetoric, along with the desperate attempts early in his presidency shortly after 9/11 to paint our economy as "strong" by touting how many people were moving into new homes as the highest ever, and urging those people to do so with historically low interest rates, maybe this was perhaps the reason why we are in this mess to begin with.

To bail out the companies who were taking advantage of the ridiculous propaganda of "buy a house, to keep our economy strong, or the terrorists win," is a further smack in the face of the American consumer. The ones who should be bailed out are the people with the foreclosures happening on their homes, the people who truly stand to lose it all. After all, they aren't the ones who are supposed to know better.

Let's for a minute ignore the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae business and focus only on the money which hasn't yet been appropriated, the 700 billion dollars. Should this go to bail out a bunch of corporations, which would have only a stabilizing effect, if that, on our economy?

I am of a different mind. I see that we have an adult population in this nation of roughly 225 million people. These would be the taxpayers who would foot the bill for this bailout, while many of the taxpayers lost their homes. Doing some simple division, that rounds out to a bit more than 3,000 dollars per adult in this nation. As long as you're spending 700 billion dollars to provide economic relief, why not give it to those who know how to use it!

The way I see it, if they took that same money and put it towards a true economic stimulus package of $3,000, not this weak $600 bull, then people would probably be able to make good on these mortgages. If not, there would definitely be a ton of extra money to start flying around in the market, and this outdated concept of "trickle down economics" would be replaced with what I call "gush up economics." You give the middle class a bunch of spending money, it builds business for and goes directly back to the corporations, and stimulates the economy in a real way, and helps people, improving confidence in our nation and our government.

Let these huge companies who screwed up in a major way go down in flames, and make room in the market for smaller corporations and upstarts! I guarantee most Americans would watch it happen with popcorn and a soda, especially if they were getting a few thousand dollars in the mail. We as Americans know that when we make stupid decisions, we deal with the consequences. Its called personal responsibility. We may get government assistance from time to time if we are in poverty, but our assistance doesn't generally cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars apiece.

Of course, the corporate elite would say that would just be socialist and unAmerican. Well, if that's so, crash and burn like you're supposed to, because bailing you out would be even worse. You people don't know how to run a successful business, you got greedy, you got stupid, you belong in the welfare line. Now piss off. America's business market doesn't need losers, and we sure don't like them.