The Bailout Is A Trap

I'm not going to pretend to understand all the economics of the Wall Street collapse. I understand basic supply and demand and how the stock market works, but I couldn't tell you about the intricacies of the credit market. I don't know what the best solution should be to the crisis, only that propping up an industry that's made terrible business decisions for the last decade doesn't sound terribly sensible.

However, as a government major, I can tell you that there are quite a bit of politics behind the proposed bailout. Politically, it's a trap. And the Democrats are going to fall right into it, I'm afraid.

This was not, NOT, drawn up as a quick reaction to an emergency. They've been sitting on this bailout plan for sometime. They had to know that this was going to happen at some point. But the fate of the free world didn't ride on it then, so why are they demanding it be passed right away with no time to truly analyze it now?

Politics, quite simply. The Republicans know that they've got the Democrats backed into a corner over this. They can demand "swift action" in response to this crisis, and if the Democrats don't act immediately, the Republicans can scream "do-nothing!" and "obstructionists!"

But the Republicans aren't going to touch this thing with a ten-foot pole. Why would they? Bush has no coattails anymore, there's no need for them to fall in line with him. They can vote against it, and they will, and then go back to their districts and put all the blame for the fact that we're wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out irresponsible corporations...on the Democratic leadership in Congress!

And it won't matter how much mortgage relief is in there, or how many caps they put on CEO pay (the relevance of which to this problem I'm still not sure). The bottom line will be that the Democrats supported a huge, unpopular giveaway, one that amounted to a small Band-Aid over a gaping wound in the economy.

The political aspects of this bailout plan are obviously not as important as the economical. But either way you look at it, it's a rotten plan. Bush no longer has the power to ram whatever he wants down Congress' throats, so why let him send this final "screw you" to the American people?