Post Published on October 28, 2010.
Last Updated on November 29, 2017 by davemackey.
Okay, okay, this isn’t a product or a service – its a person…but I’m going to stretch Dave Enjoys beyond products and services because I do like Fareed Zakaria. Perhaps this will come back to bite me – I’m speaking from fairly limited knowledge – around two years of reading his columns in Newsweek and it seems faintly possible that I saw him once on the Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
In any case, he writes interesting articles. I’m not saying I always agree – just that I usually find them interesting and well thought out. Right now I’m finished up his short editorial from the Sept. 27th 2010 Newsweek (yes, I’m behind…) entitled “A Lonely Success: Don’t forget: the bailouts worked” – and it is an interesting read. I do question whether there is quite the cause and effect relationship between the bailout as Zakaria seems to suggest – it seems to me that the involved factors are too many and too complex to yield to such a straightforward analysis – but still, Fareed highlights how much of the bailout we are likely to get back, how in this case – if it did work – people are still attempting to avoid being associated with it, and highlighting the bipartisan work that made it happen.
There is still one question I have – why did we bail out the banks instead of the people? Before people jump on me for suggesting we should have taken the bailout – please not, I’m not taking a position on that topic – I’m simply asking if we were going to do a bailout (and we did) why did we use the money to bail out the banks? This seems like a trickle down approach in which we have to rely upon the good-will of the banks, etc. to let the bailout trickle down to the average man…whereas if the average man had been bailed out, this would have resulted in a forced trickle up – e.g. if instead of foreclosing on people we utilized the bailout to pay banks for parts of mortgages – the money would have both saved a lot of people from homelessness and financial hardship and still made its way into the banks coffers.
I’m no economist, so perhaps someone with more financial savvy than I can explain…
If the banks went under, the losses would be far more catastrophic than if we had an extra $1,000. Consider all the money people have in banks that would have vanished overnight.
That I understand – but if we had applied the money directly to debts owed by consumers? The banks would have received the income to stay alive and consumers would have been at least slightly relieved of their debt burden. As it is, it seems we maintained the same consumer debt burden while relieving the stress on the banks – who in turn have done little to relieve the consumer debt burden.
Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that..