David at My Two Dollars has a couple of posts that I was going to do myself but he did a fine job so I’m just going to link to him. I am finding myself more and more angry that we are looking at more than a Trillion dollar bailout for Wall Street. If they enact this, at the minimum I’d like to see:
-Drastically reduced executive compensation packages
Why in the hell would we reward their performance when, we the taxpayers, are bailing them out for their poor business decisions? I’d like to see them in jail. It’s too bad what they did wasn’t illegal. If we are going to reduce the regulations over the last eight years then we shouldn’t come to their aid when they screw up. I don’t see the Bush administration or Congress coming to my door offering to bail me out for stupid decisions. All that being said, I recognize that they want to do this to avoid a massive impact to our economy and citizens. I’m not sure which is worse though. I wonder whether they should just stay the hell out of it and let the chips fall. Either way we are getting screwed. With the bailout, we can ensure our children get screwed too.
-Drastically increase government regulation
If we are going to bail these people out, we damn well better create a full set of regulations that will keep people from going down this path, or anything like it again. This bailout feels an awful lot like a socialized rescue. Where the hell were these rescuers when 42 million people in our country needed help with their health care. Where the hell have these people been when social security and medicare have needed rescuing? Do we have to wait for those to completely fail and the checks stop showing up in retired people’s mailboxes?
Okay. I’ll stop. Whether you agree with me or not, this whole thing is of historic proportions. This is HUGE. It is certainly causing me to bring my spending to a halt. I want to have as much saved as possible when things get a lot worse.