Bailout-friend or foe?
September 26th, 2008 by 
Alica
The Bush adminstration is proposing to bail out the banking system to the tune of $700 billion. That’s a 7 with 11 zeros behind it. If someone had put aside $100,000 every single day since Jesus was born, he’d have roughly 20 percent saved up by now.
The people who proposed the bailout have said that it wasn’t an actual proposed number. They just wanted something that sounded “really big.”
What do you think of this whole bailout idea? If you think it’s a bad idea, what alternatives would you suggest?
A woman I work with suggested that the federal government give each U.S. citizen the cash directly. $2,000 for each man, woman and child in the country equals $700 billion, based on a populaton of 320 million.
Posted in Uncategorized | 
September 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Assuming you are using the US population of estimated 320 million people. Giving each of those $1,000,000 is not $320 million last I checked. That would be if they gave each person $1. If they gave each person $1,000,000 that would be $320,000,000,000,000 or $320 TRILLION dollars!
September 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I forgot, the 20% would also be much closer to 10%, or just under 75 billion dollars.
September 26th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
You are correct. I’m going to correct my original post. My math skills are atrophied since I last had instruction, which was high school freshman algebra in 1972.
September 29th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
RE: the original post…that was my thought, also. It would be similar to what President Bush calls his “economic stimulus”. If people had the money to spend beyond the necesseties, and more than on a “once in a while” basis, it would increase individual spending, thus bringing the economy around. Business 101
October 1st, 2008 at 7:21 am
Not pretending to understand the whole thing but if I do try; credit is going to get tight. What is wrong with that, the banks have been giving money away and creating the massive debt that the country has been talking about for years. Tighten the credit and maybe people will get there lives back together, living within the own means.
We should not be bailing out stupid bankers who have made millions at the expense of the everyday person. the government and everyone need to learn to live within there own limits. If not this country will fail.
NO BAIL OUT!!!!!
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Today, our elected officials decided to financially rape America. How can anyone look to what “wall street” has done with the money the public entrusted them, and then decide to give them more to play with? For a Democracy, driven by free trade to work, companies must be allowed to fail. It is what keeps successful companies in check. The banking industry for too long has been given break after break that allowed them to run up a debt ratio that could not be sustainable in any society other than a socialistic one. If the govt. where to start bailing out companies, we would be on our way to becoming the United Socialist States of America! Many of us were not around to remember this, but take a look at this interesting piece of history:
“Following a pattern it had set in earlier bailouts of smaller banks, the government set up a holding company, which it financed together with the central bank. This company acquired all the corporate shares held in the portfolios of the banks at the higher historical, not current prices. thus, the government not only provided liquidity to the banking system, but it also absorbed part of its losses. It also became the largest shareholder in a number of firms. Many of the industrial firms thus acquired were themselves on the verge of failing and benefited not just from the rescue of their banks but also from the direct infusion of public money|.
The cost of the entire bailout was a staggering 10 percent of GDP. The comparable amount in the United States today would be about $1 trillion.”
- Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists by Raghuram
G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales, p 213.
The bold bailout was by Benito Mussolini.
So basically, George W. Bush and our elected officials started us down the same path that Benito Mussolini took. Will the outcome be different? Nobody can say yet, that is up to us to decide. Will we let the same thing happen?