The Economic Bailout/Stimulus Package(s)

A little over a month ago when this whole thing started, a request was made for an initial amount of $700,000,000,000.00 to prop up the declining financial markets and give financial institutions some liquidity. The first attempt requested unsupervised authority to deal out the money as they saw fit. The initial request was denied by the House (thanks to my Representative Rob Wittman for listening to us and voting against it) and Bailout version 2.0 was underway. This new version was suppose to give the government more oversight. Well a few weeks ago the same Ben Bernanke came out and said the he was wrong and bailout 2.0 didn't work. He also said that he would not disclose where the money had gone, showing us that V 2.o really had no real oversight in it. But that was OK, and he wanted the Congress to trust him and give him more money.

I have to say that I do not favor any bailout. It gives credit to people who have made bad decisions without any recourse. The people who drove these companies into the ground are still there. We are rewarding bad behavior. To make matters worse we have seen the government not only give money to failing company who were "too big to die" but also buy stock in them. Giving them an unfair advantage over any would be competitors. Furthermore, it's only been large companies that have had access to this money. Are there not people who have lost their jobs? Where is their bailout? Where are the voices of reason, saying that we cannot keep this up? We do not have this money. We are either printing it or borrowing it. At some point in time, something is going to give. When it does, the years of high deficits and wasteful spending will come back to bite us. When that happens it's going to get really ugly.