Bailout: Isn't Doing Nothing, Doing Something?

I’ve been out at sea on a working cruise all week and get limited television in my cabin. Two of my five choices are CNN and Fox News so I get my fill of every news cycle, but never more than during this past week when every other talking head on Fox and every single one on CNN was some important Democrat repeating the Obama line of the week: “We have to do something!” Usually this is followed by one of the following sub-talking points:

1) It’s for the children.

2) Irreversible damage will be done to our economy!

3) The world as we know it will end!

4) It’s all Bush’s fault!

I would like to point out to my progressive friends that we already have done something. On his way out the door, The Greatest Democrat President Ever, threw somewhere between 7 and 8 hundred billion dollars down a huge rat hole known as the banking industry. Remember TARP? We had to get that done quickly too. Remember how the world was going to end and if we didn’t do something before such and such a day the damage would be too great and America would have to sell off Montana to the Chinese? John McCain even stopped his campaign for the presidency, which is like saying Elton John came out of the closet: who noticed? Then, right in the middle of the crisis, Congress took a five day break for a Jewish holiday. With no disrespect to my Jewish friends – but if our way of life was at stake the holiday could have waited.

So here we stand on the edge of the same cliff we were standing on in October, and the lemmings, joined by two RINOs from Maine, are ready to flush another trillion or so down the same rat hole with a few billion for roads and bridges and a couple hundred million for a new lawn somewhere in D.C. I didn’t know we had that many road and bridge builders out of work. Every interstate I drive down is lined with orange barrels, and though I see a lot of guys standing around not many seem to be working. Maybe they’re just standing at the ready waiting for the word the money has come in. Maybe the morons in Congress think that a lot of the Wall Street types who lost their gigs are just dying to go out and buy a pair of Dickies coveralls and get into the road building business. Maybe there are a few billion buried in the new bailout bill to retrain all the Ivy Leaguers in the use of a spade and pickaxe.

On the other hand, Wells Fargo has been taken to the woodshed by the media and by Congress for going ahead with their annual rewards trips for their workers. “Shameful!” scream the news readers and talking heads! Really? What about the folks who make a living planning corporate events? What about the caterers, waiters, cooks, truck drivers, hotels workers, stage hands and entertainers? Maybe they’re supposed to go out and join the Ivy Leaguers in shovel-training class.

The problem with bailouts and heroin is exactly the same; they feel good but once you start it’s hard to stop. If AIG, Bank of America, General Motors and a hundred other companies went belly up I know that would be painful but this is the system we believe in. Dinosaurs die and the little tiny creatures get stronger and take over.

What a shame the folks who are running things now weren’t around to bailout United Buggy Whip and Amalgamated Starched Collars at the beginning of the last century.