why give money to the people who got us in this mess in the first place

Friend you have taken time to think about the current financial cancer like situation for all the middle class and the poor people not just in America,China,Europe,Asia but throughout the world. some Learned Professional predicts that in the years to come Every Single Thing will CHANGE.
For the people who will Adapt/ Blend with the situation,acquiring necessary Knowledge and Information will FLOURISH and People not nimble enough or not ready/willing to change will certainly go broke causing a great epidemic.
The problem will further deepen when millions of Baby boomers will retire and withdraw their funds from the government controlled MARKETS,STOCKS,BANKS etc giving king size tremors to the world economy.

For the common masses It is the " so far so good " mentality causing more and more mistakes.

No you are not by any means the only person that feels this way. I am made at the way we have been led into this mess: we have been badly let down by the banks and badly let down by the government that seriously dropped the ball.

That said, what do we do now? I think a lot of our leaders have learnt the bitter lessons of the 1930s - banks were allowed to go to the wall, trade tariffs were raised across the world, they slashed spending and increased taxes to balance the budgets and countries instead of working together did their own thing: the result was the worst economic depression in modern times as these policy mistakes aggravated the recession and turned it into a deep depression.

When Lehman was allowed to fail, this caused panic in the stock market. Why? Because of the perception amongst investors that if one bank is allowed to fail, so will others and therefore investors like a herd believe that their money is no longer safe, then you get a run on the banks, then you get a domino effect of multiple banks collapsing, which then impacts on the wider economy with no credit for businesses or loans for homeowners, these go bust, jobs get lost, this depresses economic demand even further, and down the nasty depression cycle we go.

So in view of what has happened in the 1930s and what was in danger of happening after the Lehman failure, our leaders have decided to act. Yes it is bloody expensive though there is chance that taxpayers may be able to recoup most of their money and maybe even make a profit. Of course, this won't I don't think stop a serious slowdown or recession that is now underway, but I do believe that it should avoid a serious depression like that of the 1930s.

For once, it is good to know that our leaders are learning from history in order to avoid past mistakes. If only they had done that over the last few years, we might well have avoided many mistakes which have got us into this mess in the first place. I strongly believe that ALL leaders should have to study history BEFORE they get into office, then they might learn from the mistakes of others and not repeat the same mistakes again and again.

So though you and I don't like this, the issue going forward has to be whether we could be facing something much worse if we did not act.

hear hear i agree with russel crowe give $1000000 to each person that has a home lone it would be cheaper and i gaantee you the econamy would start up verry quickly

I feel bad about to.The tremendous downfall in all countries worldwide is really a burden for honest tax payers.And for a fact,we could not do anything about the government.A single voice could not change anything.I guess what is left for us to do is to take good care of our personal finances and expenses.Times are really tough right now.We should be tougher