This is a thing I know a little bit about, being the father of a twelve year old girl. So the government has gotten it's arm all the way to the shoulder up the ass of the banking system, and all of a sudden Wall Street is revived.
Folks, these things have costs, and no act of government is ever going to pay. What I see here is not a rescue but a recipe for hyperinflation. There seems to be a delusion that just because America has done the sorts of stupid things that make basket cases out of economies like Argentina and Russia, that we are somehow immune from looking like a bunch of prize boobies.
Maybe all this stuff will work, but I'm highly skeptical.
And I can think of some things the government could have done that would stand as good a chance of working, but they didn't go that way because it would mean less power for politicians. For instance, they could have simply declared an income tax holiday: none of your 2008 income taxes, personal, corporate or otherwise, are owed. You'll get a full refund of whatever has been withheld.
Of course liberals like Barrack Obama would hate this idea because they believe keeping tax rates the same is a huge tax break for the rich. But I'm telling you, this would pump roughly the same amount of liquidity into the economy, and it would do so without rescuing the architects of the disaster.
It would be a great idea, in fact, to make this tax holiday permanent. Incomes are good things, and you should only tax bad things like assholes who run pseudo-private corporations into the ground and then run off with a Powerball jackpot. Actually, those sorts of assholes are so bad taxes aren't enough. Dragged behind a truck is more like it for the likes of Franklin Raines.
When I really think about Raines and his ilk, I want to go ahead and burn the whole economy down. Yeah, we'll all get hurt, but then his $90 million is worthless. Let him go fend for himself in an all-barter economy. Then maybe he'd get a more appropriate severance, such as starving to death or dying of exposure on on a sidewalk this winter. Ripped apart by a mob would do in a pinch.
The 40% decline we had last week in the stock market was bullshit, but so was the almost 1000 point gain we had today. I've seen three foreclosures on houses on my street in the past two years. Two of them were the same house. I know another neighbor who did a refi last year that I literally couldn't believe was possible.
I'm skating on thin ice myself, but I know people who seem to be skating on the water itself, just waiting for gravity to finish pulling them in.
And just as Congress can't pass legislation that alters the law of gravity, this debt won't disappear just because Jeanie waves her ponytail at it.
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