I almost couldn’t believe it, but upon arriving home from work, I found that the House had rejected the bailout plan. Naturally, the stock market tanked on the news, and there will be much wailing of knashing of teeth in the next few days from financial market CEOs and the talking heads, but the House needs to hold firm on this one. No bailout will be painful in the short term, but it’s a hell of a lot better than rewarding a bunch of very rich people for very stupid decisions with taxpayer money. A lot of the financial analysts have been warning about the systemic risk of allowing some of these banks to fail, but I’m not sure how risk gets more systemic than by enshrining the idea that bad investments will be bought no matter what as a matter of government policy.
The failure of the bailout has also driven home to me once again that most Congressional Democrats are enormous pussies. Seriously, is there any Bush backed policy they won’t acquiesce to? These are supposed to be the people who will fight for the little guy against the entrenched elites, but when it came time to stop the government from funneling nearly a trillion dollars to millionaires, it was mostly Republicans who stood their ground, repeatedly yelling “No!” If the bailout passed, I was set to declare that it was proof that the Republican Party needed to be completely destroyed, but now I’m starting to wonder if the Democrats are good for anything but a rubber stamp on Bush policies.
