Economic Crisis and the Wall Street Bailout

by Gordon Cooper

From Broader View Weekly, October 10, 2008

Words do have meaning. The current use – and overuse – of the word “bailout” to describe what we the taxpayers have just done for the failed financial giants of Wall Street is significant. Let us imagine a metaphorical analogy in which that same word is used.

Say, for example, there is a loving, faithful wife who has entrusted her security and financial support in a man who has, time and again, betrayed that trust. She calmly acquiesces to his demands and tacitly accepts his garnished truth when he comes home late, broke and drunk. Then comes the dreaded night when she is called at 3am and she hears a slurred, intoxicated voice tell her that there is a terrible crisis. He has been arrested for drunken driving and he needs her to come down to the jail and bail him out. The bail amount will most certainly take every penny of their savings account and put them deep into debt for years to come. She has two choices, neither of which are very attractive. To leave him there would certainly cause him to lose his job, thereby disabling him from ever paying their bills, causing her further and deeper loss. To bail him out would only open the door for further abuse of her mercy in the future; in fact, it could be seen as enabling him to avoid the very consequence he needs to teach him an extremely valuable lesson.

Well, friends and neighbors, if we were that loving, faithful wife who has been used and abused by the most abusive and thoughtless of spouses, we each could have pondered those choices and made decisions based upon our own preferences and convictions. But sadly, we aren’t. In fact, we are, more accurately, in this case, the powerless children who scream and cry silently in our bedrooms as the adults play fast and loose with our futures, caring little about what it costs us.

Last week’s BVW carried an excellent article by Martha Goodsell in her The Hubbard Town Patriot column. She laid out the case for keeping the government out of the market and letting the drunken hubby sit it out in a stinky jail cell. I agree with Ms. Goodsell. The application of good, old fashioned “tough love” tends to discourage a repeat of bad behavior.

The strange feeling of déjà vu some of you may be experiencing when you hear the news reports and dire forecasts of all those so-called experts is not surprising. I feel it too. I remember hearing these experts telling us that the Savings and Loan bailout was a necessary move and I also recall the experts claiming that the government (read U.S. taxpayers) should step in and assist Chrysler Corporation when poor decisions and foreign competition threatened that company’s survival. The same forecasts of lost jobs and long-range effects upon the economy spurred the response then, as it does now.

While I could follow the money trail backward and tell you my theory of how we arrived at this point, I am afraid that would not be fruitful. I could also give you some possible alternatives to this policy of enabling the drunken addicts, but I am sad to say the ink is dried on the legislation and any alternative choice would fall on deaf ears. The jail doors are opened and the drunk has the car keys once again with no consequence for his actions.

Instead, I think it is good to take a little time and remind us all of how BIG this bill really is. For example, if you were to spend one dollar a second, every minute of every hour, every hour of every day, every day of every year, it would take you 31 years and 6 months to spend the FIRST billion of this bill. Now you need to repeat that for the next 22,190 years to spend the other $699,000,000,000.00! Friends, this is no small bailout!

Count this column as one time when I agree with my brother (except for a few mistakes in his analysis) in that we need to step out of the bedroom and scream at the adults. We cannot just allow them to come back home to us with empty promises about how they are working for us.

The Senate version of this bill does more than just bail out the drunk, it also contributes to the drinking habits of other drunks. Here are some of the pork barrel spending (classified as emergency tax breaks) attached to this bill to entice legislators to sign on:

1. Wooden arrows designed for use by children – put in by Oregon Senators, Smith and Weyden for an arrow manufacturer ($200,000)
2. Motorsports racing track facilities (i.e. NASCAR)
3. Rum producers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
4. Book donations to public schools

Again, I am limited by space and time here to go into greater detail about all the wasteful spending that was attached in the interim between the failed House version of less than 100 pages and the Senate version of over 450 pages.

In summation, let me say that we are still the people and we do have the privilege of voting in this nation. Please, please exercise your right and let your representative know that they are OUR REPRESENTATIVES only as long as they REPRESENT OUR views. Speak out loudly.