Nah, We Trust You

This is a joke, right?

The Bush proposal that would dole out huge sums of money to Wall Street firms and bankers is a mere three pages in length and fails to specify which institutions would qualify or say what — if anything — taxpayers would get in return.

We're giving them 700 billion dollars and the paperwork is three pages?!

I don't know about you but when we bought our house there were a whole lot more than three pages and that was a whole lot less money. Oh, and I think it was spelled out pretty fucking clearly who owed what to whom and what would happen if we didn't pay up.

How much is $700 billion? Well first, get a million dollars. Then stack all those crisp bills in a nice, neat pile. Then, make 700,000 more stacks of a $1,000,000.00 worth of crisp new bills. That is how much money we are giving away. For my family of 4 people that comes to roughly $10,000.00 we gave away this weekend - two thousand five hundred dollars for every man, woman and child in this country.

Here's a good part, too. You see, when we - you and I - buy all those companies' bad debt there's nothing in the deal that says what the companies have to do with that 700 billion we're giving them. They don't have to put it out there for loans to ease the credit pinch. They can do anything they want to with it. They can use it to buy up smaller companies, chop them up and put people out of work. They can use it to give their investors bigger dividends. They can use it to give themselves those big Wall Street Christmas bonuses they were sweating wouldn't come this year. There are no rules. We are just giving them this money and the only guarantee is that we are going to get reamed for it.

And those homeowners that are behind on their payments - the ones that are looking at foreclosure? Guess what? They still are. This doesn't do anything for them. I'm not terribly sympathetic about their situation - they bought more than they could afford - but if we're bailing out the companies with no requirements...

None of this debt we're taking on includes the mountains of cash we've divied up in the last couple of months for AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, or the insurance we just added to those previously uninsured money market funds. We talk about homeowners who bought more than they could afford, but all these corporate investors we're bailing out are supposed to be smarter and understand the risks. They are supposed to know that they could lose their investment. They are supposed to eat it if they aren't smart. I'm not supposed take my prudently invested savings and cover their losses.

This whole thing is going to spin inflation out of control and drive all of our home values further into the dirt. We will all have less money and the money we do have will buy less. We are screwed. The people who managed their debt and spending responsibly are the ones really taking it on the chin here. We are going from a "cash is king" economy to a "cash sucks" one in three short days.

This is a Republican administration that is doing this. This is a Democratically controlled congress that is assisting. They have mortgaged my children's future and I have gotten nothing in return. And George Bush, much like in the Iraq war (which for or against, you have to admit was seriously mis-mangaged), is saying to us, "Trust me on this."

At least when the government buys surplus cheese to prop up an industry we get something we can eat.