Fixing Wall Street does sound like "going all in" in a high stakes "no limit" poker game. This centralized and socialized economic/political solution is very suspicious the longer you consider the basic idea. It sounds doomed to failure.
The more I listen to individual Republican Congressmen and John McCain respond to the question: if you were the last deciding vote for "The Bailout" would you vote for it? and I hear SILENCE I am certain I am looking at fellow poker players holding their cards close and refusing to let their poker faces get them in trouble along with the overly optimistic Democrats convinced that big government can do anything as long as the Democrats can craft the solution.
Once the Democratic party "goes all in" with this proposal, we will be held responsible for the failure.
Additionally, most likely,"the pot" will be empty when the next administration tries to pick up the pieces from the end of the Bush/Cheney/Paulson Administration.
Did Communism work? Do we admire the socialistic economies of Europe that had to join together to rejuvenate their economies as a larger, grander unit with a single currency, the Euro?
A centralized economy, run from the top down by committee, is the direction The Bush/Cheney/Paulson Bail Out seems to be driving us.
Frustrated by sitting on the sidelines for the first four years of the Bush Administration and having only limited power over the veto of President Bush, the Democrats may be TOO EAGER to jump in and try to FIX WALL STREET.
Barack Obama has been extolling the praise of Abraham Lincoln and his Team of Rivals sitting at his Cabinet Table. Well I think we need some rival economists sitting at our poker table that HATE the bailout proposal and know how to chat up the idea extensively.
We need these rival economists to play "devil's advocate" like there was no tomorrow. Because there may not be one, at least one we recognize. Because we can be easily seduced by The Bailout proposal thrust before us, without a thorough debate on the possible danger of departing from a fully capitalistic market approach to financial disasters where the market determines the winners and losers.
It would be hubris of the Democratic Party to think we can understand the full ramifications of this bailout solution without getting to watch the Director's Cut of the poker game we are now playing.