Bailouts

I'm not an economist, just a annoyed curmudgeon. My thoughts are therefore not to be taken literally here, but maybe my ramblings have a notion of good sense in them.

Everyone from Jamele Hill on ESPN is saying things like:

Congress is stalling regarding the Big Three automakers, having forgotten it just wrote a blank check to Wall Street without even asking for so much as a Christmas card in return.

I think they're wrong to beg for an auto company bailout and here's why. The Big 3 built cars and a new (overpriced, overweight, overhyped) car (SUV, pickup) is not a necessity. In fact, in these times of trouble, the last thing that any family should do is to buy a new car if the old one has anything left on it.

For me, the difference in the bailouts is that the banks had retirement money, mortgages and such. The house and the retirement are more important to the average American than replacing a 20-month old car with a shiny new 3-month old car.

Companies go under all the time. There have been layoffs and closures that have hit my state hard. It's nature and it's style have changed dramatically over the last few years. That's progress. Move on.

I would let the banks go under, too. Screw the banks and their multi-millionaire owners and CEO -- save the account holders and mortgage holders. If you took the $700Billion dollars and distributed it a little differently, you could pay the mortgages for a year for more than 35 million families. Then sell their mortgages to someone like GMAC (the highest profit arm of GM, don't you know ...) at, say, 97 cents on the dollar and tell the banking industry to go buzz off.

Much more sensible than giving it to a company that's paying it's CEO more than $100 million dollars this year alone.