Bailout

[meghanchavalier]

I love that nobody is really talking about the extra 140 billion dollars that was tacked onto the already huge 700 billion dollars. And what about the 25 billion that was given to the auto companies to help them?
This bailout will cost every person in america 2300 dollars. My plan would've been much easier...give the money to americans who actually need it.

[yodajazz]

I agree. Those people would be buying cars, homes and everything else. That's what drives the major part of the economy.

[Justawannabe]

Sadly in this case I think it wouldn't have worked just sending it out. To many jobs would have been lost waiting to get the checks out and cashed.

I hate that they did it this way, but we did need to dump some capitol into the credit markets.

That said, the extras that got thrown in is the way government works. If you want to do something, you have to wait until you have the opponent over a barrel. Save the car industry (again) and you can get Michigan to sign on to spending their portion of the taxes on the bail out, so that fewer jobs are lost in that industry due to no cash to pay the workers until spring starts car buying season again.

Just saying that while I do have a lot of issues with what has happened, don't throw the baby (regular folks jobs) out with the bathwater (wall street money manipulators). The real work will be finding a way to make those bastards pay for what they did when they were given free reign.

Whether or not the next congress will do any of that work remains to be seen, but I'm not hopeful. Best way might be to have a short term tax on high income folks to pay for it... but taxes don't work that way. Government never likes to give up what it has, and a short term tax wouldn't be short term.

If they wrote it as '... until this tax recoups x dollars adjusted for inflation' it might work.. heck even just x dollars and skip the iffy adjusted formulas.

(and yes, I would be paying that high end tax, so not just sniping at the top. Reality is you had to have wealth to benefit from this free reign market, so the folks who had it should be paying for the fix. In a way they do, as they pay the majority of taxes... but maybe they could pay more given the percentage of gpd they benefit from)

Sean