My reaction to the Bear Stearns nonsense:
Why the hell aren't the principals of the company, who have made billions off the company in recent years, not taking responsibility for pulling up their bootstraps and rescuing the company?
Why is responsibility just for poor people?
Ok, it's not Bonddad level analysis, but c'mon! Why are we, the normal taxpayers, taking responsibility for the financial errors of billionaires? Is it too much to ask that the owners and executives of the company put some of their profits back into the business? Is it too much to ask that they take responsibility for their own actions?
One of my Republican friends is constantly harping on one theme: poor people deserve what they get because of bad life choices, and taxpayers shouldn't be asked to subsidize the bad choices of others.
He firmly believes that single parenthood, lack of education, mental illness, illness, and drug and alcohol abuse are life choices that doom citizens to poverty. They had a choice to make better choices, he asserts, so why should taxpayers chip in to help? Why enable the bad choices? If people saw the consequences of bad choices, maybe they or their children would make better choices.
He applies this reasoning to the Katrina response (lazy people haven't moved back and gotten jobs), the health care crisis (insurance is for deadbeats, heath care savings is essential), and practically every other event in recent history.
So, I asked him, why bail out billionaires? Why shouldn't they have to bear the burden of their bad choices? He mumbled something about if Bear Stearns collapses, so goes the whole economic system and everyone suffers.
The collapse of ordinary families affect us all, too. Economists simply choose to ignore those factors.
And when ordinary folks have to pay higher taxes to bail out billionaires, there's something seriously broken.