The Bailout Dilemma

I am against the bailout.

I’m not against giving money to high profile businesses, nor am I against having ideas like this on the congress floor, nor am I against keeping our economy booming.

I am against giving money away that we don’t have to begin with; I’m against the debt. If we had this amount cash sitting in our treasury, I would be all for this bill. I like the bill itself, if we could afford it.  

 

Once this bill passes (and it will eventually) we will have a short future of economic growth. The stock market may be dramatic for a while, but over a few years, it will slowly creep up. Business will go on as usual and some profits will be made. People will start spending money; life will move along steadily.

 

And then a black day will come. The day when China (or whichever nation is lending to us at the time) wants their money back from us, at a high interest rate and we will not be able to give it to them. And if we aren't borrowing the money but just take $700 billion from our own dollar, than our nation's inflation will be outrageous. The great depression seemed dramatic? Try the great reversal. We will be the developing nation. It will happen overnight with high profile people and then slowly trickle down to everyone else.

 

So, what do we do with the bill? There will be some major economic consequences if this bill does not pass. Major. I am not arguing that. But this is part of a free market. Regardless of the causes that got us into the situation that we are in today, we’re here. We (us who caused it and us who did not) need to pay the consequences of where we are at.

We need banks and loans. I do get this. We have to have the option of borrowing for economic growth; without a bank, a country will not prosper. TIME did a recent article on why India has seen some economic success, compared with African nations and why they have not seen success. The answer in the article was simple- India set up a banking system and Africa has depended on Foreign Aid. (Which BEGS the question of how much good foreign aid actually does.) Banks are what we must have and I do believe this bill will help the banks, but there has to come a point in time where we stop depreciating the value of the dollar with enormous debt and start being real with money again and start to ask what can we really afford?