Oh Brother Can You Spare a Dime....

Or better yet 700 billion dollars? On my way to work Wednesday morning a 20 billion dollar bailout was being considered. As my lunch hour rolled around, NPR was talking 40 billion. During my commute home it was up to 60 billion. Friday it was up to 85 billion. This fine Saturday morning we are now up to a $700 BILLION bailout. Jeeze. Who is coming up with these numbers? It doesn't matter. I just balanced my checkbook. I ain't got it.

$700 BILLION?! Hell, why not just provide winning lotto numbers, pixie dust, a pony, and a rainbow to every American citizen?

My grandfather, a Great Depression survivor, keeps a lockbox of cash and gold coins underneath his bed and a loaded hand gun in his nightstand drawer. I've always thought it a quaint, naive, sad, and paranoid practice. After watching Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and industry giant AIG either bite the dust or require government intervention in order to avoid doing so, Grandpa's lockbox is looking like the most sound financial policy of them all. The beauty is in it's simplicity and the fact that Grandpa's plan is rooted in the rarest of all commodities: COMMON FRIGGIN' SENSE.

I'm disappointed that McCain's answer is more and bigger government. The financial market is collapsing. The answer? Another government agency. Not very Republican of McCain. Don't we have a few regulatory agencies that are suppose to be preventing this sort of massive downfall? SEC? FDIC? The Justice Department? On the other hand, Obama is far worse, his answer seems to be to completely take over and oversee the financial market. Might as well vote for Nader.

Huh. What everyone seems to agree upon is that this crisis was brought about by poor lending policies. Why not learn from our mistakes and apply minimal regulations at lower levels so that the whole thing doesn't super nova later down the line? Why not make a law stating that only X percent of a lending institution's loans can be high risk. Why not tell AIG that they can only insure only X percent of high loans? Why not tell loan officers that if they give loans to folks who have bad credit, no assets, and no job that they will be shot on site? Is anyone on Wall Street over the age of forty? Do any of them remember the savings and loan crisis of the 1980's?

Don't get me wrong, high risk mortgages have a place. People who scrap their way up from welfare to work, low income but responsible individuals starting a new business, bright students who come from poor households seeking a college education. As a taxpayer, these are high risk loans I'm willing to back.

I am not willing to subsidize some greedy fat cat who doesn't understand that a leveraged buyout is debt, pure and simple. I don't appreciate bailing out a company that was allow to grow so huge that as a society we cannot allow it to fail. Wall Street brats should understand capitalism. Seriously, if you graduate from Wharton Business school, shouldn't you know that as a player in the free market, failure is most certainly an option?

Future generations will likely be financing the biggest bailout since the Great Depression. Heads should roll. I look forward to seeing some indictments. In the meantime I'm off to Walmart to buy a lockbox and a gun.