All right. Just a bit of a rant here. No time to add links, if anyone actually reads this I'll probably be asleep already and won't even look at comments till morning, but -- I've had it. I've spent the last few days following this bailout story pretty obsessively and, while I don't think I have any more than a very primitive understanding of the economics involved, and a moderate understanding of the politics involved, I've reached the point where I no longer support this bailout -- at all -- and am hoping that I wake up tomorrow and learn that the Democratic leadership has told the president and the rest of the numbnuts criminals that constitute what's left of the Republican Party to shove it up their asses. Seriously.
On the economics: I don't believe this bailout is going to work. The international banking system doesn't need cash. The international banking system needs a real floor on real estate prices and a sustainable value of the U.S. dollar. We have neither today. Handing $700 billion to Wall Street will produce neither. Quite the opposite -- it will keep the corpse walking a little while longer. Or, to steal some other online commentator's metaphor, this bailout is like finding a junkie going through detox and giving him a hit of heroin. He'll feel better. Briefly. Then he'll feel much worse -- if he's still alive.
Real estate prices (including my own wildly overpriced California home) need to fall another 30%. The dollar needs to fall some proportionate amount. Everything needs to get more expensive. We all need to be broke for a couple years. Our savings rates need to go up. The government needs to borrow money from the future but spend it on infrastructure projects that keep our economy afloat and prepare us for the next decade's boom. When we reach a point where most people can afford the houses they own and prices are cheap enough for new buyers to buy, and prices are stable enough that bankers feel like they can trust other financial entities' balance sheets enough to lend them money, the economy will start growing again, honestly and sustainably.
Until then, we'll suffer a severe, multi-year recession. But when it's over, our economy will once again be on sound footing. I know this incredibly primitive economic thinking, but I just do not believe anything else anymore other than this simple, commonsense explanation: we've been living way beyond our means, a deregulated banking system let these assholes run up a multi-trillion dollar tab, we have to let it all wash out of the system and start over. The bailout plan, even with all the highly rational addenda that Obama, Dodd, Frank et al have successfully added, doesn't really address this problem at all, so far as I can tell. It is just inconceivable to me that our party is lining up with George W. Bush to give a trillion bucks to a bunch of Wall Street pricks instead of using it for, oh, I don't know, a few million infrastructure jobs, national health care, you know, whatever, stuff that will actually build the new America and employ millions of Americans.
On to the politics. That's really simple: FUCK MCCAIN. FUCK ALL OF THEM. After what the Republicans pulled today, if they come back tomorrow with the same attitude, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should hold a news conference and say "Hello, America. We worked hard to try and get an acceptable bailout bill passed this week, but the Republican Party isn't interested. We have nobody to negotiate it with and frankly, we think this party has gone so far off the deep end that we wouldn't feel right giving them half a trillion of your dollars to spend anyway. So we're just going to wait and ask you to vote for Barack Obama so we can get some fucking grownups in charge of our country before it goes off the rails forever. Hopefully they world won't come to an end before January. Thank you, and god bless America."
And you know what? I don't think it will. Let the goddamed banks fail. Lance the wound. Get it the hell over with. I'm not being casual about people's suffering. I expect to lose half the value of my own damn house while retaining a big-ass mortgage. If the economy gets bad enough, who knows about my job? I simply don't think there's any way around this anymore, and I cannot spend another day watching decent public servants like Dodd and Frank and Obama get jerked around by scumbags like McCain and Boehner who couldn't give a flying fuck about anything but accruing power and looting as much as they can before flying off to their secret compounds in Latin American countries with no U.S. extradition treaty. This cycle has to end, and it has to end now. The American people need to decide whether to return their government to the grownups. We're either going to go through a painful period and recover -- in which case I'd like to hold onto the trillion bucks until we're ready to spend it on a high-speed rail system, thanks -- or we're going to continue blundering down the same path, in which case -- well, I just deleted the sentences I wrote to cover that scenario. I believe we're going to win this election. I'm highly confident of that, in fact. I've just reached the point where I really don't want to spend a trillion dollars until we do, which means I think our party is on the wrong side of this issue and the mad dog House wingnuts are in the right.
If any relevant D.C. Democrats are reading this: hello? Am I right?