I'm so sick and tired of this...

Really, I swear I am going to scream and begin to pull out my ha…. well, I don’t have much hair, but if I did I’d pull it out I swear! Ok, Ok, so what am I losing it about? This whole debate we just had over the $700 billion “bailout” or “rescue” or “economic life raft” that just passed. It’s not the fact that they debated it that’s bugged me, it’s HOW they debated it!

When I hear a politician interviewed from one side or the other, I don’t hear about the pro’s or con’s of the package; the merits versus the liabilities. What I kept hearing was this partisan crap about how “This was the result of poor regulation by the Republican administration”, or “In January 2005 the Republicans and John McCain warned about the need for more oversight and regulation of Fannie and Freddie and the Democrats killed it. It’s their fault.” I’m tired of it! What do I think caused this problem? To a great degree I agree that inaction and wrong decisions on both side of the isle allowed us to get to the point we are, but I don’t believe it caused it. That, I believe, came primarily from greed and complacency. And now we have a $700 billion, pork laden mess to reckon with and for our kids to pay off. Thanks guys... but is it all their fault?

We live in a society that for the large part espouses more and more, faster and faster and looks poorly on you if you can’t keep up. It’s true whether we like it or not. It’s no different from the root of many of the problems that face us today, I don’t think. Basically, greed and desire got the better of us as a nation. I mean who can blame us, we’re bombarded at nearly every corner by something that we need to have, and if we do manage to resist, our kids come home with all the stuff they need to have to "complete them". (At least in their eyes and the eyes of their peers.) So of course when companies start offering loans with all kinds of “perks” like no money down, no need for verifiable income, interest only ARM’s etc. a lot of us that are not economists and tend to trust the establishment at large are going to take advantage of it. Or better yet we can take the “equity” that we have in our now artificially inflated home prices and use that to get the new toy du jour that we need to have. Now we can have our cake, eat it, and pay for it over the next thirty (and sometimes even 50!) years with simple small installments. Oh yeah, but wait, wasn’t that kind of what happened just before the Great Depression? Paper money income, that is not to say actual FIAT currency but rather “investment” income from the stock market was so high that wall street and even the public at large felt it had reached a permanent plateau. Banks even began lending money to people to buy stocks at a rate of nearly two thirds the price of the stock. It was considered a totally safe practice. Sound familiar? So here we are, facing an economy that has basically forced the government to come to us with hat in hand, strike that…BAT in hand to scare us into approving this massive bail out that will possibly fix the problem in the very short term but opens a can of worms that could cause much more serious ones in the future.

So back to the crux of this problem. Who caused it? Who’ll save us from it? Well, I think that's going to rest pretty squarely on the shoulders of the same people that I just blamed for a majority cause in the problem... we the people. Oh sure, I totally agree that some serious regulatory oversight needs to be put in place, but I also think that we need to rethink a few of the things that have been driving us for the last 20 or so years. For many of us, a good majority of our adult lives. On the up-side, I think we're starting to get there. I hear more and more about people choosing to "live more simply", or making choices about what they consume, rather than just running on autopilot. It's a good thing. The more dialogue we can get started about this stuff, the more acceptable it will become and the more people will start paying attention.

As for the politics of the issue, well I'm sorry to say I've become a pretty big pessimist in the last couple of years. As of right now, I'm not voting for either of the candidates. I've seen no specific economic plans, short of more hand outs, from either of them, no energy plan other that to say they'll drill more and expand alternatives (A nice soundbite, but HOW? That's what I want to know.). Basically it just seems that both the candidates are leaving me with the old lesser of two evils choice, and I'm so sick and tired of that too! I am, my family is, my readers are, our nation is more important that the lesser of two evils.

Just my opinion...Care to share yours?
P~