Nothing personal. I'm sure you are a perfectly decent person, beloved by family and friends, doing your best to get by.
And I don't want you to starve. Or to go homeless in freezing cold weather. Or for your children to suffer privation. Or for you to die due to a perfectly preventable - with subsidized health care - disease.
But I don't want to Bail You Out. Sorry.
Bonddad has a diary up today arguing that we must continue to Bail Out the banks, because if we don't, the pension funds and 401ks and individual investors who put money into their stocks will feel too much pain. Well, that may be the case, but then, that's the price of treating paper assets as the way to prosperity.
More of my unusual unsourced rant under the fold.
I'm an investor too. My investments didn't make me rich in 2008 either. But that's part of the way markets work. I accepted that there would be bad years -- maybe multiples of them -- when I took that risk.
If you bought a house with a subprime loan, maybe you got taken advantage of by a greedy financial company. Well, they ought to be punished, and I think jail time would be particularly instructive to some of those types. Maybe a bankruptcy judge ought to allow you to "cram down" your mortgage. And I don't want you freezing out in the street, but ... It is not my responsibility to prop you up. You were an adult, you took the risk. Renting is not the End of the World. Deal with it and move on.
If you invested in financial stocks, or your 401k plan took a big hit, I'm sorry your retirement isn't coming as quickly as you wanted. But it is not my responsibility to dig into my pockets to make it up to you.
You were happy when you were making money. Heck, you probably checked the real estate pages or the mutual fund charts every week or month to see how well you were doing. You were all for personal responsibility then. Now that you are losing, you are afraid to look -- and you want me to make it up to you. Sorry, not my job.
And I don't mean just "me", personally. The I/me/my here is all of us individual taxpayers. We collectively are the ones who have to come up with the cash later to pay off the public debt -- or push it off on our unlucky children and grandchildren -- or else watch our savings vanish with an inflated, toilet-paper currency.
By all means we need a new social compact, a new New Deal. A program to Relieve suffering, Recovery for the economy, and Reform to ensure the laissez-faire kleptocracy can never return. And we should relieve suffering -- nobody should starve, nobody should be picking through garbage dumps, nobody should be left on the streets, nobody should needlessly die of preventable disease.
But relieving suffering does not mean picking the pockets of your neighbor because your paper assets or your piggy-bank house isn't working out the way you planned.
Sorry.