Financial bailout? We Don’t Need the Crooks to Save Us

The people that got us into this financial mess are telling us the only way to get out of it is to bail out the same crooks who caused it.  But is that really the only alternative?  Is that really the best we can do?

What if we let the institutions that took big risk just fail?  Poof.  Supposedly it would constipate the credit markets and none of us could get car loans or credit cards and the economy would stop…Hmmm.  I wonder.  I’ve been thinking of other ways to use $700 billion.

1. What if we reward regional and community banks and credit unions who didn’t play in the high risk mortgage market with a large pool of low rate money they could loan to credit worthy businesses and customers?  And what if we published the list of those banks and credit unions so we would all know where to get the capital we need to make our economy grow and our lives work?  Maybe we really don’t need the big banks that seem to psychologically headquartered in Las Vegas.
2. What if instead of expanding unemployment benefits we spend a few $100 billion on rebuilding our public infrastructure like repair bridges, roads, and water and sewage systems and put all those people who recently lost construction jobs back to work building our future?
3. We must let the real estate market find its true floor.  Its values were outrageously inflated.  If we don’t allow for a true price correction in real estate values will remain flat for 10 years or more.  So what if we start a national Real Estate Trust that buys foreclosed homes at their real value instead of some pre-negotiated-good o’ boy-bail-out value allowing the banks that made the inflated loans to eat their losses or fail.  Then suppose we put the homes in a huge rent-to-own pool where people who can pay a market rent for 2 years or more earn the right to buy the home they’re renting.  The supply of homes for sale would reduce and prices would stabilize.  The trust would make money, Americans could live in the homes we built and people would take pride in the homes they are earning the right to buy.

The point is if we’re really interested in building our future based on principles that reward good judgment and maintain the honest value of free enterprise there are a lot of things we can do besides bail out the hand-wringing corrupt financiers of our Congress and administration.

New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson said taxpayers deserve better than what we are getting.  They need to earn back some trust and provide us with information about the financial bailout.

Gretchen Morgenson talks about the financial bailout stating, “Such is our lot today: They break it. We own it.Taxpayers deserve better than this, of course. But we have no lobbyists, so we get skinned. If federal regulators and political leaders want to earn back some trust, they could do two things. First, they could provide us with some transparency about whom precisely we are backing in the recent bailouts.”

With financial markets in flux and a massive government rescue package in the works, financial reporter and New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson looks into what’s involved in the nearly $700 billion deal. In an interview, she calls the financial bailout a conflict of interest.

What’s the best thing we can do?  Email your Congressmen and Senator today (Write Your Representative, Congress.org, or Contact Your Senator), forward this email if you want to. Tell your friends to as well.  Make some noise, America.  We went to war because we were lied to about the immediate danger of WMD’s.  Doesn’t it seem like we’re being whipped into the same kind of frenzy?  Let’s not fall for it!

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