economics

The more I talk a look at what’s going on with our Congress, spending ourselves further and further into debt, the more I realize how politics as usual has run its course. Unfortunately, our elected leaders seem to refuse to accept this and keep trucking on as if their political extremism is doing everything but killing this country in a slow and agonizing manner. Democrat Nancy Pelosi has, in her time as Speaker of the House, gotten away with suppression of debate on at least two occasions, all seemingly out of spite for the Republicans and so she can accomplish her goals on her time schedule. Today’s Democrats, as well as a large group of their supporters on the Internet, seem to be more concerned about lording over their current control rather than about actually getting what really needs to be done done. They’re bullying everyone, including moderate Dems, just so they can get their way.

My fellow Americans, this should not be.

Such behavior is destructive and is doing more harm than it is good. Instead of doing what needs to be done, such as bringing the people who have mismanaged OUR money to justice (Congress included), each individual Congressperson is more concerned with looking self-important and pushing an agenda rather than trying to actually make a real difference. This is why we’ve had multiple bailouts so far, none of which have worked. Congress, in their black-and-white tunnel vision, has lost sight of the ever useful proverb: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

An aside on the bailouts: if the problem is that money is being squandered, does it not stand to reason that throwing more money at the problem will only result in more money being squandered? And isn’t that what we’ve seen happen from the companies like AIG who have been bailed out? The bailout has only served to pour a firehose on the problem of mismanaged money by allegedly smart but apparently greedy people. There should be prosecution, not deluge after deluge. Take the buckets away from the people who are pouring water into the boat.

Returning to the original point: a mindset of “we are right; you are wrong, and we will slap you around until you agree with us” has been causing pain, not healing. What little Congress has managed to get done has only proven to be either a waste of time or, worse yet, worse than the disease it was intended to cure, much like a prescription pill’s side effects. Our country is dying, both in terms of domestic security and in international perception, and why? Because we are letting the political extremists take over.

We are a far cry from the level of political extremism as seen in other countries in the past, where political dissidents were silenced permanently for disagreeing with what was happening. However, it is not unlikely that the United States could well get to this point, though I don’t know how soon. But we can change our course, and we still have time to leave this highway to peril. We haven’t reached the last exit yet. But we’ve got to start changing things now, and we have to do it by insisting that those who are hellbent on pushing their own agendas, those who are determined to be divisive and bullies rather than uniters and peacemakers, those who are extremists should leave office. We do not need people like them in charge of us! Whether they are liberal or conservative, it doesn’t matter; speak with your vote and tell them where they can go (hint: not Congress). The time for extremism is over. If America is to survive at all, we have got to let go of our egos and our selfishness. And we have got to let go of those who know nothing but to be egotistical and selfish.

These days, people love to blame others. Regardless of whether they got themselves into a mess or not, we in this country love to point the finger and everyone but ourselves. From the time that we are kids trying to get out of being punished for breaking the lamp to the time when we are adults who can’t accept their own stupidity, Americans love to say “Wasn’t me.” This can be a bit of a problem sometimes, though, as when everyone’s trying to pass the buck to someone else, it can often be confusing as to where the buck really stops. It often leads to what the Queen of Hearts did to the card who painted her white roses red…everyone gets punished for it regardless. This ducking of responsibility even goes as high as our government.

No one wants to step up and take the flack for the semi-debacle that is the Iraq War. Bush doesn’t want to admit he sent our soldiers off on flawed intelligence, the CIA doesn’t want to admit that their intelligence was flawed, and Congress doesn’t want to admit that they allowed Bush to go to war. Same way with the economy. No one wants to take responsibility for causing our economic downward spiral, not the government, not the financial companies…not anyone. And so we have the bailout.

I’ve mentioned this before, but AIG and all the rest MISHANDLED THEIR BUSINESS. They made bad deals, gave out bad loans to people who can’t pay them off anyway, and gave out huge lines of credit like they were giving money to charity. They screwed up. Why now are people perfectly content with letting these companies pass the blame and the consequences onto the people of the United States?

Despite my best hopes, the bailout…excuse me, “rescue plan”, is still alive because the Senate passed the bill 74-25. This is quite the turnover from Monday’s 225-208 rejection by the House. Whether it was because of the record drop on Monday or the rebound the day after, but mostly because of the media pounding it into people’s heads that the failure of the bailout was a tragedy, enough Senators were swayed to bring life back into Frankenstein’s monster. And just like Frankenstein’s monster, this bailout is going to wreak havoc on our towns and cities…through our wallets.

We are refusing to hold the true culprits for the mortgage and house crises responsible. We are refusing to point the finger at the banks and credit companies and saying, “You mismanaged our money. We demand accountability from you!” Instead, we are letting the same “don’t blame me” culture that sparks frivolous lawsuits put a gun to the head of our economy. We are letting ourselves fall in the very trap that President Thomas Jefferson did everything he could to prevent us from getting into…becoming overly-reliant on the rest of the world. Jefferson’s “let alone” policy lead us to an era of unparalleled expansion and strength, and it was in those times at the turn of the 19th century that forged a fledgling country into a world-effecting nation. In the last half-century or so, however, we have undone everything that was done in the first century and a quarter to make us strong, and now we have become as dependent on the world as the world has been on us.

We have allowed this country to become weakened all because we can’t take responsibility for our own problems. To compensate, we have to get ourselves involved in everyone else’s problems so no one recognizes just how screwed up we here in America are getting. The way to begin getting ourselves out of this hole begins with realizing that we are our own worst enemies. Not terrorists, not socialism…the problem lies with us. Once we own up to that and decide to clean up our own messes, that’s when the US will begin to regain not only its internal integrity but its relationships with other countries…relationships that we forged while we were learning to be a self-reliant republic. And one of the first steps to that is to go to the people responsible for the mortgage crisis and telling them where they can go and what they can do when they get there with what uncomfortable object.

Forget introductions. I’ll just get right on track.

When Congress first came out with this $700 billion bailout plan, Americans for the most part were outraged. They were worried about their taxpayer dollars, worried about giving them to big greedy CEOs on Wall Street who screwed up 100+ year businesses and are counting on the government to just hand them a blank check to solve all their problems.

Then came the media. Yeah, I know you’ve probably heard it all before. The mainstream media’s bias. The media’s too conservative. The media’s too liberal. Naw, we aren’t talking about simple conservative or liberal talk here. The media went from being about split in the number of stories they covered on this abortion of a bailout plan to ALMOST COMPLETELY SUPPORTING IT!

I used to flip channels and be able to get both sides of the story. Now I’m only getting one side, Bush’s side. The side of the neo-conservative Republicans and hyper-liberal Democrats who support this piece of trash they call a bill. They sit and tell me that this bill is going to help the economy be better again. Obama said in a recent rally that “this isn’t the end of what we’re doing to save the economy, it’s only the beginning.” (More on that later.) What nobody is telling us, however, is how much this will cost the average American taxpayer.

Think about it for a second. $700 billion (and estimates from some business gurus claim it could be even higher) divided by… let’s say 200 million taxpayers. That’s $3,500 for the average taxpayer. Some will pay more, some less. However, this is $3,500 for not an improvement, not a social program, not something that will help our roads or parks or help on the war. No, it’s just to give to the corporate CEOs and the debtors pray that it’ll trickle down back to them so they could refinance on loans and homes they won’t pay for anyway. For someone who has learned the value of saving his entire life, this is the equivalent of telling me that my opinion doesn’t matter, simply because I don’t have a hand on Wall Street.

When the bailout bill failed yesterday 228-205, news outlets all over the place started creating stories of panic, stories of how this will bring about a financial armageddon. Seriously? Has anyone been sticking their heads out of the sand long enough to see what the immediate affects a plummeting Wall Street has had? Oil prices have dropped. The dollar is at its highest against the Euro in YEARS (.71 Euro/dollar) and the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso in months. The value of our money is going back up because people are spending less and being thrifty. In the long-term, food prices will drop. Oil will drop even further. Services will start dropping as demand drops. Houses will be affordable again. The value of the dollar would only keep going up. Savers will finally get to see beyond the 5% at-best interest that they have been seeing since the Clinton era.

After the media has reported our complaints about high gas prices, high food prices, turmoil amongst wages, high prices of rent, people having to choose between a gallon of milk and a gallon of gas…

…you’re suddenly starting to tell me that dropping prices is suddenly a bad thing?

Just because Wall Street falls doesn’t mean Main Street will too. We might get a few bumps or bruises in the short term, but overall, if people went back to basics, saved money, quit living beyond their means, we wouldn’t have to worry about this debt, and our own debts in the first place! The government could use the bailout money instead to make social jobs that are just being stalled from losing ANYWAY because of this bill. The wages may stay the same, but as prices go down, the working class will be able to afford both gas and milk again.

So next time, before you’re one of the 20+% of Americans who have suddenly changed their minds about this bailout bill, ask yourself… is the media really speaking for me?

Considering that the media is suddenly backing behind something President Bush says, I can surely say no.

Ladies and gentlemen, greed, for lack of a better phrase, is killing our country. Greed isn’t working.

Pardon the movie paraphrase, but I’ve got a good reason to pull out the “Wall Street” routine here. Namely, the fact that Wall Street has recently been more up-and-down than an average New Orleans Saints season. Financial institutions are collapsing left and right thanks to questionable business practices and sketchy mortgages. The dollar is falling faster than Wile E. Coyote off of his 37th cliff. And yet, our government wants to take anywhere from 700 billion to one freakin’ trillion dollars and spread it around to big financial companies that are, to quote a Creed song, “six feet from the edge.”

Obama and McCain want to see the bailout happen. Congress is arguing over it, with some people even claiming it a necessary evil. It’s moving forward, and it’s likely going to happen. There’s just a few slight problems with this picture.

We can’t afford it, and most Americans don’t want Wall Street bailed out anyway. And I can tell you why.

This extravagant amount of money isn’t going to come out of nowhere. This green paper doesn’t grow on trees; it’s technically more of a fabric, anyway. There is no vast ocean out there of untapped money like there is with, say, oil. The money for the bailout has got to come from somewhere, and any thinking person knows where the money’s going to come from. The wallets of taxpayers.

Every single one of us who buy things, run to the Post Office every April 15th, fuel up our cars and update our vehicle tags pay some sort of tax. Heck, most of us have taxes taken directly out of our paychecks; I myself have the maximum taken out of each paycheck. That money goes into the government coffers. So when the government needs money to do something like fight a war or buy out Wall Street, the first place they go is to that taxed revenue. If that’s not enough, then they take out loans from other countries (and hike up our National Debt), but mostly it’s our money that funds whatever Washington wants to do.

The thing is that the whole reason for the bailout is because the institutions involved are mostly credit companies and mortgage dealers. So everyone who has a credit card or a mortgage backed by Lehman Bros., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and all the other companies that have recently been in financial trouble will essentially end up paying twice over for their credit cards or mortgages. Those of us who have neither (the only credit debt to my name is student loans, and they get paid on time) are having to pay for services we never use. Hardly fair, isn’t it?

The majority of American people are beginning to see this, and they don’t like it one bit. But aside from the money flow issue, there’s another problem with the bailout, one of bigger importance. The fact is that none of the companies being bailed out are being held to any standard of accountability for their actions. They messed up, and somehow, they’re getting rewarded for hornswoggling people all across American with their sketchy mortgages and easy credit. The CEOs of these companies are getting paid x millions of dollars because their companies are failing. Call me crazy, but the way I was brought up, you take responsibility for your actions, or you get in double trouble for lying about it.

AIG, Lehman Bros, Merrill Lynch, etc….these companies made bad decisions that lead their companies to the precipice. It is not our place to say “we’ll help you to get back on solid ground” when they put themselves there in the first place. If these companies cannot fix their own danged mess, then maybe they should fall. Maybe other companies can learn from their mistakes. But instead, by throwing money at them, we are essentially letting the financial institutions get away with murdering our economy.

Make no mistake: this bailout WILL NOT HELP THE ECONOMY. In fact, it may only make the economy worse, and I will honestly be surprised if when it passes (which seems inevitable at this point), there is not a riot. Whether you live off of credit or whether you don’t, there is no justification for throwing away money like this. In fact, it’s honestly shameful that we ever came to this point, because this could have all be easily prevented. And I’m going to tell you how.

I honestly believe that this will work and will help teach people enough financial responsibility, especially consider how close to a second Depression we are. as soon as you leave the parents’ house, do not get any credit cards of your own. Don’t go and mortgage a house; rent an apartment. Go out and get a job that starts out at minimum wage. Pay all your bills, and try to save a little in a savings account. If you can manage to make ends meet or even live comfortably of of the money you have after, say, two or three years, then you are ready to manage money you don’t have…which is essentially what credit is. Don’t bemoan the fact that your credit may disappear; LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT IT. It’s doable; I should know, because I’ve been doing it ever since I started working and living on my own when I finished schooling.

I make $7 an hour, and that’s before taxes. I’m buying a house, mortgage free, by making payments I can afford to make to a very understanding seller: my brother-in-law. I live 16 miles from where I work, and thanks to a 20 mile per gallon truck with a 15 gallon tank, I can fill up my truck once a week and still be able to pay all my bills, buy food, and put a little in a savings account each paycheck. Sometimes my debit card gets me in trouble, but I have no credit cards, and I’m able to rebound easily. All-in-all, I live comfortably, although granted, I only take care of one person and no pets. Living without credit is doable. We don’t need this bailout. It’s a waste of our money. It’s a trillion-dollar screwjob.

(Update 9/29/08 5:00pm CDT: The House voted it down, 205-228. No re-vote today. Miracles do happen.)