Atrios had this deep thought yesterday:
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just divide $3 trillion by 300 million and mail out some checks?
The bailout in those terms is amazing. Thats $10,000 for every American. How many mortgages would have been saved? How many credit card bills paid off? How much more spending would occur around the holiday season? How much money of that money would be deposited in banks or invested on Wall Street?
Inflationary pressures make sending $10,000 to every American a bad idea, but it truly assounding how much money we are throwing down the tiolet right now.
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“Inflationary pressures make sending $10,000 to every American a bad idea…”
It would create no worse inflationary pressure than printing money and sending it into the economy in the form of wealthy or corporate welfare as we are doing. This is one of those pieces of propaganda that says it’s always better to give all the money to the rich. And it is not just dead wrong economically, but morally as well.
Giving the money to individuals doesn’t fix the financial/economic system. Giving everyone a fish is fine, but (re-)teach them to fish too. Our main problem recently has been that Bushies only want to give the Rich a fishing rod and some cash to buy bait.
Fixing the bad mortgages is crucial and keeping the system operating ’til then is important too. There hasn’t been nearly enough effort in fixing the mortgages…though there has been some.
The longer it takes and the more the bankers refuse to lend the more the whole exercise is pointless. I sort of expected this from Bush and his cronies. I just hope there’s a system left when Obama & crew take over.