Government Bailouts.

[Fynn]

A bailout is treating the symptom. Treating the symptom without treating the cause isn't fixing, its stupid. Pain's a good teacher and motivator, and if we treat the pain, we'll no longer feel the need to fix the problem.

I was quite upset about the freeze on short selling since that was a lot of what I was doing. I called the housing bubble, and I believed the markets were overvalued so I kept my money out of them for the most part. For the last few years I've watched the market go onto the brink of readjusting itself only to get another puff of air from the Fed to cause it bubble back up. Its springing so many leaks now that the current compressor can't keep up, so they're going to build a bigger compressor in the form of a 700 billion dollar bailout.

The fundamentals of our economy, contrary to Sen. McCain's so eloquently put statement, are not strong, nor are we the worlds largest exporter. Our economy has been based on finantial gimmickry for so long that Wall Street seems to have forgotten that production drives the economy and Washington has forgotten that its the middle class that drives the consumer market. Forgetting these simple facts can lead to a downward spiral. Companies ship jobs overseas, American workers get laid off, American consumers have less purchassing power, sales go down. Companies seeing their sales numbers going south outsources more jobs to keep their profits up, problem gets worse.

We've become completely and utterly obsessed with the short term. When Merrill Lynch lost their billions and decided it was time to fire Stan O'Neal, they still gave him a huge parting bonus for his great performance between 2003-2006. They just couldn't see as a profitable quarter as anything but good, even when the short sighted quarterly profit strategy is what caused the billions of dollars write offs.

Now, with our government allready up to its eyeballs in debt, they want to spend an estimated 700 billion dollars bailing out our finantial institutions for their short sighted bad judgement. I'm glad Democrats and Republicans united in their opposition to the idea of a blank check with no strings attached to Paulson and Bernake. Something has to be done, but we can't do more shoddy patchwork, we need an overhaul.