I was struck this morning, watching the Sunday morning talking heads, how eager the Republicans are to push through the bailout without looking at it too closely. I was proud of the Dems for having the guts to say, wait a minute, let's think this through a bit first.
I get an unsettled feeling as I think about the repeating pattern: Republicans sound an alarm, say we must act now, we'll think more about it later...
And then the Dems get scared and cave.
The very people sounding the alarm bell this time are the same people who thought deregulation was a good idea and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that we had to take out Saddam and that it would be easy and that we would be greeted as liberators and that global warming is phony and that having the richest people get much, much richer is the best way to help poor people...
Now they want us to spend what will likely be one trillion dollars in a "clean" bill to avoid catastrophe. As usual, they want to look at the dirty details later -- then they can go back to their ridiculous conservative principles that got us into this mess in the first place and try to blame the Dems for the ugly solution.
Well wouldn't it be much cleaner if the bill was paid for upfront? Wouldn't it make sense to have the people who caused the mess pay for the mess? Why not raise taxes on the richest Americans to pay for the bailout. They're the ones who made the bad decisions. They're the ones who profited. They're the ones who should pony up to fix the problem.
Force the Republicans to pay for this bailout NOW. That'll make for a squeaky clean bill.