Do you think the $700 Billion Dollar Bail Out Is A Good Idea?

The bail out is not what bothers me so much, it is Secretary Paulson's actual plan and the fact that again there will be no over site or authority to regulate how this bailout happens (if this is the plan that passes). Paulson's plan says: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." This says to me that they want to fix it, and they want the American tax payer money to pay for it, but they don't want us to know how they are going to fix it and certainly not who is getting paid off at the top. This quote is a provision to stop us from knowing what they are really doing with the money. I support Dodd's bail out bill before Paulson's and people should do their research to know what they are in for.

I don't believe that we should "bail out" anyone. If in fact they need additonal money because of their poor management, then MAYBE we should buy stock in these companies at a discount. That gives them an infusion of cash and at the same time, we the tax payer gets something out of it. I don't think we should just GIVE our money away.

I'm convinced it is a necessary evil at this point. I think we were a lot closer to a great depression last week than they let us know. To sit back and let these institutions fail would be unconscionable. It would be similar to the Hoover approach in 1929. I'm a Democrat with a growing respect for Henry Paulson. It cannot have been easy convincing a free enterprise president to accept this bailout and it cannot be pleasant selling this thing on capitol hill in an election year. Paulson strikes me as being a competent guy who gets the job done no matter what. I hope I'm right about him because he's all we've got. If it works and is handld right, the government could even turn a profit. They did when they bailed out Chrysler and when they bought out Conrail. Warren Buffet, at least, seems to think that could be the scenario here and he is usually right.

Nope. Not a good idea. The only possibly good thing it'd do, is delay the crisis a little -- but you'd be buying time with boosting the length of the crisis once you got it, unless somehow, miraculously you figured out a way to fix everything with those few extra days or weeks..or whatever it'd add up to..that you managed to get. Because facts are: It's rewarding bad behavior. It'd FOR SURE give us a decade long Depression with our children's grandchildren paying off the debt. AND it'd destroy the dollar...our money...which would most likely equal total system collapse for the United States. (Because they'd be printing alot of that money, which equals inflation..and since we've already got a very high inflation, this would in fact destroy the dollar. The dollar loses value as inflation rises.) It's BAD, bad news. I mean yes, there's a potential for depression already...because we're in a recession in all but the name right now...but it'd likely more just to be a deeper recession, even if we did nothing and let this problem run its course (which while I don't like either, I'll take short term pain over long term collapse).

I personally think that they should just let them fail, but the impact on our economy would be devastating.