Quote:
Originally Posted by joshgirls
bottom line, i think all the bailouts & stimulus is the greatest robbery of this nations wealth in american history. reverse peter pan - the poor taxpayer foots the bill to ensure the evil bankers stay rich.
i'll shut up now.
|
At this point we basically had two choices.
Option #1: Just let it all crash and burn. Give money to nobody and let those that will go under burn. The plus of this is that we don't spend any tax dollars. The downside is that when AIG went down it would take most of wall street and a huge number of the banks in this country with it. Without those banks businesses would be going under. Unemployment would skyrocket and what would happen? We could easily be looking at 30%+ unemployment and a full blow depression that could take years and years to crawl out of with millions of Americans loosing everything they have so when/if the economy recovers it would take years more for them to get back what they just lost. Mind you most of the people who would suffer during this had nothing to do with the downfall and are guilty of nothing more than going to work and living a reasonable life.
Option #2: Spend a bunch of money in hopes you can put money into the economy, create jobs and hold things over while the private sector recovers in hopes that in a few years the private sector would be creating more jobs and those working stimulus jobs could transition to the private sector. This wards off a huge crash and eventually helps the economy recover. The downside is that it will be very expensive, could fail and if it works eventually the bills will come due.
Neither option is good. It is choosing between shit and green shit. I'm not saying that the stimulus plan is perfect, I don't think it is and I think it could be much better, but I would rather we try then just let thing collapse and hope for the best.