Like you, I am watching the drama unfold about the biggest bail-out in the history of the world. We are gonna print up a bunch of money and buy up all those bad mortgages so the guys that made those bad mortgages don’t go out of business and drag down the entire economy. The theory is that unless we do this, the credit markets will dry up, businesses and individuals will not be able to borrow money, your credit card line of credit will disappear, your home equity loan will disappear, businesses will be forced to cut back or close, unemployment will rise and we will find ourselves in a downward spiral that will cause a lot of pain.
The problem is that no one knows whether this particular bailout will work and the same guys that got us into this mess want to preserve their golden parachutes, obscene salaries and equity in these companies. The thing of it is that the plan calls for you and I to foot the bill. Throwing around numbers of $700 Billion or a Trillion like it was spare change hides the fact that this bailout amounts to about $10,000 for each family in the USA. If you stacked a Trillion in $20 bills, it would be about 150 miles high!
They’re saying, “hurry up—we gotta do this right now or something is going to hit the fan!” The last time I heard this from the Bush Administration it was “hurry up—we have to invade Iraq.” I find it strangely comforting that both the conservative Republicans and some Democrats are asking serious questions about this plan. It used to be that a conservative was someone who balanced the budget and was careful with spending. What we have seen for the last decade is decreased regulation of banks and wall street financial firms, bizarre financial instruments, nutty mortgages and huge corporate profits and executive compensation while we ship most of our wealth overseas to people who don’t particularly like us to buy their oil.
Frankly, I think that Al Gore has the right answer for the environment and for the economy. Instead of shipping our wealth out of the country, we need to launch the kind of ambitious and outrageous plan that only Americans can do to eliminate our dependence upon foreign oil, to create thousands of good paying jobs creating power from renewable energy sources and from a massive energy conservation and efficiency operation. If we do this, we create real wealth in our economy, real growth and solve environmental and economic problems simultaneously.
I have a lot of trouble mortgaging our economic future to provide more benefits for the top and none for the basis of our economy, the working people in our country. It is clearly time for new economic leadership, but it is also time for leadership that doesn’t rely upon the false promise of trickle-down economics and tax breaks for the wealthy.
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