Bailouts

No body asked my opinion. That's why I'm writing it in my blog. Just in case someone stumbles across this, they will know it. 

What the heck is happening to this country? We are suffering from too much "everyone owes me" syndrome. I think our generation got that idea from grateful post-war parents anxious to please us after so much of their own sacrifice before and during the WWII. They didn't want us to ever go through that so they heaped every spare cent on us, making us learn to expect having things given to us. We then transfered this habit to our kids.  

So, these same people now seem to feel that since they have had it so good in the past, they should continue to have it good, even when they haven't earned it. If they make bad decisions when trusted with the public good, they think "someone" should help them fix it. The idea that we should reward or "bail-out" people for making bad decisions isn't a good idea. We've made some really stupid mistakes in high places in this country in the last few years that should prove that.

 First it was the dot.com disaster. Did mature, intelligent people really think that you could "wish" upon a company a value that had no basis in reality and make it so?  How did Yahoo get to have a multi-billion dollar value when they had almost no product? How did so many companies get valued so high without any basis in reality?   Greed. Pure and simple it was greed and the lack of any regulations to watch that the greedy monsters weren't taking over Wall Street.

Then we get this mortgage debacle. Thanks to the idiocy and self-serving nature of our elected officials we had no watch dogs telling people you can't borrow money way below market value and expect the economy to stay healthy.  We had greedy mortgage lenders who preferred to issue a loan to unqualified borrowers that they could resale for a profit even though they knew their clients had no way to pay it back. Now we have $700 billion dollars of non-existent taxpayer money being manufactured to "bail-out" the greedy banks and help the victimized homebuyers either keep their ill-got homes or get other loans.  Thanks to no oversight by duly elected officials. We put our trust in the people that we elected and they let us down big time!

Now we have the auto industry crying again that they will cause the ruin of the nation if the government doesn't manufacture more money and help them out of a totally predictable and inevitable situation.  How many times does this have to happen before we stop doing it?  Back in the mid-seventies, we got a taste of what driving large gas-guzzlers would do in a gas shortage.  GM and others refused to do anything other than a few short term solutions. They eventually kept on building automobiles that averaged 14 miles to the gallon while the Japanese, the Koreans, the English and even the Germans made cars that got from 30 to 50 mpg.  They had been told by countless politicians, environmentalists and anyone that had a head on his or her shoulders that the United States couldn't survive much longer with such inefficient cars.  Now after the other Greedy segment of our society (the oil barons) have wrung out every extra dollar we had in the bank, no one wants a car with 14 mpg.  and few can afford a new car due to our economy being so bad.   So.. why shouldn't they go under and every person or company that helped them do so suffer the same fate?  Maybe out of the ashes will grow a better transportation industry with much greater fuel efficient vehicles, alternative fuels and a greener footprint for the environment.

This country has made numerous mistakes because the voters and thus the politicians have refused to look to the future more than 2 to 4 years. We didn't elect the only person that wanted to do this in ages (Al Gore) and instead they elected a totally incompetent person to lead the country for 8 years.  He has proven his worth through his accomplishments (or lack thereof).  I suspect that all the voters that elected him have suffered by losing large amounts of investment money and I hope they have learned their lesson.  The lesson? We need to take our duty of voting much more seriously. We need to elect officials that have qualifications to do their jobs, not just vote for friends, actors, or politicians with empty promises to make you richer. We need to stop thinking about how WE personally will make out with this or that politician in office, but how our COUNTRY will make out in the long run. That's true patriotism in my opinion.  Flying the flag won't solve this problem.  Only doing your homework will solve it.  This will probably never happen, but we need to do it to survive the challenges ahead of us.

So.. let's let the auto industry (and their Unions) figure this out on their own. I personally have to figure out how to live on Social Security and any little jobs I can find on my own. It will be a lot harder to buy the essentials when my dollar buys a lot less because the government is adding to the money pool with empty paper promises by printing a Trillion dollars or more of worthless paper to "bail-out" irresponsible and greedy industries. A dollar has to be earned by an equivalent amount of work or else it just devalues it.  Let the auto industry mend their ways, start building fuel-efficient cars, work to build cars with alternative fuels and cars that respect the air we (try to) breathe.

Over the years I've heard a lot of people say that they think the Democrats coddle the poor people too much. They complain about welfare and unemployment insurance and the programs that try to bolster the lower income people in our society.  They've said, why do people think they are "owed" something. They said, "people should have to work for a living".  Well, those same people are the ones who now think we "owe" the bankers, the investment community, the auto industry to save their butts.  Is it OK to coddle the rich and not the poor?   

My blood pressure has probably surpassed it's danger point, so I'm going to stop typing. The world will not stop or change because I stop typing or even because I wrote this blog. It's off my chest now and you can disagree all you want, but it will still be off my chest!

Good luck in the coming disaster.  You'll need it.