I am fairly new here (as an active member, anyway), but any of you who know me, your impression is probably that I'm some infuriating closet conservative, or at least an annoying DLC centrist, since all I've been doing comment-wise is generally arguing in favor of the bailout.
Despite appearances, though, I consider myself a solid progressive on war, energy and socio-economic issues, and my anger at the Bush administration probably equals most of yours' on any given day.
But I am afraid that we have to do this bailout. I wanted to write a diary summarizing my arguments, but when I woke up this morning, behold, Nicolas Kristof, my favorite reporter, had already done most of it for me. On the other side of the jump thingy is a summary and a link.
And yes, I think we have to do this bailout, no matter how much we dislike Bush and Wall Street. Kristof focuses more on Wall Street in his piece, but I know that the distrust of this thing also springs from a very understandable mistrust of the Bush administration. Why give Paulson carte blanche to spend $700bn of our money? Isn't this how they sold the war, by screaming "emergency!" when there was none?
The answer to that last question is "yes," and they have nobody to blame but themselves for our mistrust. But the difficult fact is that this crisis is happening now, and Bush, unfortunately, is still the president. Handling crises is the president's job, and I don't see any way to shift that job to the Congress, as much as we might like to.
That there should be good, strong oversight and strong requirements for preserving taxpayer value in the authorization is also important. As I have written in many comments, I am satisfied that this is the case, although I would be more than willing to discuss specific reasons that you think otherwise.
Anyway, to stop talking and turn this over to someone much more eloquent than I, the link to the Kristof column is here.
All the best,
-David