before you slit my purse.
Because no matter what the good candidate, the bad candidate, and the President of the United States say, we little people, well, we don't get it.
I mean, the premise of capitalism is that if you don't fail part of the time you're not trying hard enough (or was that the premise of punk rock, or just the premise of Mudhoney...I digress).
So the logic here is that bad loans have been made. OK, doesn't that meant the people who made the bad loans pay?
No, because they sold them upstream, and now we all have to pay?
That's all simplistic babble, but I do have some real questions below the fold.
And here are my questions, the ones I want answers to before I open my purse for what still looks and feels to be highway robbery:
(1) What if home prices continue to go down. Me, I think they're still overvalued. I could be wrong, but what if I'm right? Then this attempt to support the mortgage-backed securities industry simply tosses money at a problem that is not ready to be solved.
(2) Kos is right. Why is it $700-billion. Why not $675? Or $435?
(3) The bald dude on CNN keeps telling us that we have to do this because the capital markets are locked up and Caterpillar just had to borrow its $1.2-billion at 7%, which is more than it would've been last week. Isn't that called bad market timing, first off, and didn't we have CDs paying above 10% back when I was in college in the early 1980s? It's a cost of doing business, and it's probably inflationary, but it's surely not the end of the world.
(4) What are the political costs to Obama, since he's our candidate, of supporting -- or opposing -- whatever madness comes this way from Washington whenever they're done. Nobody seems to be asking, beyond the blogosphere, whether this is worth doing. Section 8 in the initial proposal seems more and more like a feint, because by forcing us to engage with the most egregious of the three-page draft's clauses they have obliged us to debate the methodology of the bail-out, not its logic.
(5) Did anybody watching actually understand what Bush said? And by that I do not mean anybody reading this, but I do mean anybody watching their tele still trying to figure out who to vote for and what the hell is going on? For that matter, does Bush know what's going on?
(6) How do we fairly and honestly (sorry) value the securities under discussion, and who does it? Under any bill.
(7) What happens if we wait several weeks, and announce that we're going to do so, so as to let the free market correct itself?
(8) Does John McCain still believe the fundamentals of our economy are sound?
I give up. I have more questions, but nobody's listening, right?
It's a done deal, they're just figuring out how.
And maybe they're right. Maybe.