Bailing Out Wall Street

It's the politicians that just don't get it, or maybe they did but they decided to milk any available money they could from the populace any way. Let's look at it in a different way.

Say I buy a car from a dealer, the dealer wants to make big money off me so the price has been jacked up to the point where it is really over-valued. I drive it off the lot and it's price devalues a couple of thousand dollars, but that's not all. It turns out that the car is a real lemon requiring lots of money to be constantly stuck into it to keep it running, it gets to the point where I can not afford to keep the car because it has ate up all my money keeping it running, and if I sell it I will have to take a big loss because I can not recoup what I have stuck into it. Eventually I lose my job cause my car is not dependable and I'm late too often.

But it's not just my car with these problems, it's everyone's that has bought this particular make and model. Eventually word gets out and everyone quits buying this particular make and model. The dealer, having bought this make and model in huge numbers, even though he knew of the car's short comings, because he figured that he could make the most money from selling such high priced cars, is now stuck with a lot full of them and they are not selling. The dealer now is losing money and decides to file for bankruptcy. The government now steps in and says, "Oh this is bad, this dealer is really going to lose money and probably will have to go out of business. He will have to lay off mechanics, sales people, other people working in the office all of which have benefited from the high price of the car and the high commissions. This is going to have an effect on everyone, the people at the car washes, the people selling gas, people who sell tires and service, not to mention all the people who get money from the dealer and his employees like when they go to the bar, grocery store, buys a house, etc. We have to do something to protect the dealer's interests because it will affect all these other people and wreck the economy."

So the government comes up with the idea of collecting money from all the broke people who have been taken by the dealer's bad cars and they give that money to the dealer so that he can stay in business selling over priced crappy cars to other unsuspecting customers. At the same time the government, even though they know the car is over-valued and crappy, doesn't do anything for me, the person who is stuck with an expensive car that is not worth anything. This does nothing to make my car not a lemon, it doesn't get my job back, and it doesn't get my money back from all the repairs etc.

The dealer has a big fancy home, vacation home, mobile home, boats, ATVs, cars, SUVs, eats out a lot, gets paid vacations, and bonuses. I am stuck, broke from making repairs, no job, no 401s, and no running car........

Ok, it's maybe not quite the same thing, but in many ways it is. Wall Street has got itself in a bind. It's not because they didn't know it was coming, it was because everyone thought they could make their ungodly profits and get back out before the shit hit the fan. The financial people in Wall Street knew this, the president of the United States knew this, but everyone thought they'd be long gone before the ship went down, or maybe they figured that the government would not allow them to fail and bail them out. The president thought that he'd be out of office before the pumped up markets fail and he would leaving this mess on the next president (most likely a Democrat) and then the Republicans could use it against them in the next election. The failing market happened a bit too early, so now the Bush Administration comes up with this plan to give the very people who took advantage of deregulation to gouge the American public 700 billion dollars, from the very people that were taken advantage of, so that they can stay in business as usual.

This 700 dollar bailout does nothing to cure the problem at hand. All it will do is bring the market back up temporarily to give share holders a chance to get their money back and jump ship. After the share holders jump ship the country will be back to this same spot it is in now, except that the tax payers will be 700 dollars poorer. I believe that we need to demand from our leaders to let the market adjust itself back to responsible financial policies and reinstate regulations to keep this from happening again.

Got Lipstick?

What a sad state of our times when we reduce the presidential elections from platforms from which to preach solutions to our country's biggest problems, to the point of arguing about lipstick on a pig. I kind of doubt that my life will change much either way whether that pig, or pit bull, has lipstick or not.

I think that there are many more, more important issues than lipstick on a pig. Maybe the legalities of fighting a war in Iraq, illegal wiretapping, with holding and destroying evidence before they can be subpoenaed, picking people off the street in foreign countries without that country's knowledge or permission, keeping prisoners in foreign prisons, and we still don't know about the illegal firings of prosecutors or the big one, torture of prisoners in the war against terrorism. These are past failures of the present administration that no one wants to tackle.

Instead of lipstick on a pit bull or lipstick on a pig, why don't the candidates tell us about how they are going to tackle the problems we face in our government and the problems that are affecting the American people? I could give a rat's as* about lipstick on any kind of animal, doesn't strike my fancy, but apparently it's high on the Democrat and Republican list of important things that the American people need to know. How about letting me know how I'm going to afford to heat my house, or put gas in my car, how are they going to improve our infrastructure, how will we move into the future as a provider of high paying technology jobs in our own country instead of providing low paying jobs for people in third world countries? Apparently none of these things are very high on either candidates list as being important to the American people.

I would think that the first candidate that comes up with a workable budget plan for our country, the first candidate that speaks truth and shows out unfounded lies, the first candidate that promises to run the government openly in front of everyone for all to criticize and debate, that candidate should be our clear choice for president, not the candidate who tells the biggest or the most lies.