Bailout Of The Rich

It's a continuing theme in the Bush administration: if the rich are hurting, have the Government help them out.

If you're poor, too bad--the "free market" will have to take care of itself.

When Bush took office, the wealthy class, flush with capital gains and other perks of the longest economic expansion in U.S. history (under Bill Clinton) whined and complained about their taxes. So Bush and his GOP congressional allies wiped out the government surplus in one fell swoop, handing it all back to those rich backers.

Now, with the economy in turmoil, people losing houses and jobs, what do we have? Lost your job--forget it, Congress is not willing to extend unemployment benefits (the GOP filibustered that one to death).

Lost your home, or about to--too bad. Maybe you can get some mortgage counselling. But hey, the free market is tough.

But if you lost some income on your investments in mortgage-backed securities, or your investment in a company that profited from such securities for a number of years, well, Bush and Paulson and the Republicans--they feel your pain!! (Unless you worked at Lehman Bros.--competitors to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's old firm, Goldman Sachs.)

So now the government, which has piled up a couple trillion dollars in debt under Mr. Bush, is going to borrow another trillion--god forbid they would tax the people who caused this mess in the first place--to bail out all those poor investors.

Meanwhile, all the Democrats can think of is to suggest putting some kind of limits on executive pay. This is a silly band-aid. Granted, there are excesses in executive pay, the only think we can think of that would be worse would be having the federal government regulate it!

The time for CHANGE is now!!