This whole “bailout” of the financial sector bothers me. It bothers me that as a taxpayer, I will be on the hook for a nice chunk of the $500 billion to $1 trillion that this will cost. (And the way things are looking, the cost may be closer to $2 trillion.)<\/p>\n
It bothers me that executives on Wall Street got multi-million dollar bonuses and perks in recent years, but now they don’t have to share in the downside<\/a> of what they’ve done. (What they’ve done is made a ton of bad loans to parties who weren’t credit worthy, and then they engaged in a series of selling those loans by lying to the buyers.)<\/p>\n It bothers me that this bailout is now probably going to include all kinds of consumer debt<\/a> and go far beyond the “mortgage crisis” we are continuously told is the problem.<\/p>\n It bothers me that we are essentially socializing losses in the marketplace<\/a> while keeping profits privatized. (Translation: Those making millions and billions on Wall Street get to keep doing so with no risk, because if they ever get in a big loss position, the little guys like me will pay to bail them out.)<\/p>\n But this little known fact bothers me the most: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is basically getting a blank check from the taxpayers that he can use as he sees fit and no one can ever ever ever question what he has done with the money.<\/p>\n