Think of it as collateral damage in reverse

Amen! As well as you comprehend the details, LJ, you’ve got just such an expert eye at discerning the Big picture.

BG gets at the point the Pols try to make: “If there are five houses on my street purchased by deadbeats…” It’s more likely less than 3 of those home-buyers were “deadbeats”. But their mere existence in numbers across the nation give anecdotal evidence to the “individualists” who believe they themselves are more deserving of having the rules of the game – Economics – written by, for and about them and them alone.

Conflict sells. Sales generates wealth. Wealth corrupts. But it’s all on a continuum which can only be managed at subtle points and angles. If this Admin manages to manage the right twists and turns, a whole new source of wealth will grow up; it will be given slightly more logical and effective rules to the whole game.

That is if we want those results to be Win-Win, where everyone has to lose a little in proportion to what they started out with, as opposed to with what they’ve grabbed under the old rules.

{whew!} As is always, we have Got To do what we can and see how it goes, eh.

Well, it won’t. If there are five houses on my street purchased by deadbeats and I’m not a deadbeat — just blaming the deadbeats ain’t gonna cut it! Something needs to be done.

Holly – Whew! Now I don’t have to have my friend Tommy check with your girlfriend to see if you like me. (I like you, too.)

I am eager to see how this all plays out and what happens to folks like myself who did the research and believed what we were told.

I don’t know. I think what the economists are saying is that going deeply into debt like this is bad, but not doing it will be worse. We only have a few choices in this matter, all bad, so we either do nothing, in which case you’d better get that windmill up, or we try for the least bad of all our possible paths of action, and hope that at least when the bill comes due it turns out that the action we took has made it possible for us to pay up.

I’m also feeling FTFO. I want to go totally off the grid, have windmills and sheep and learn to can vegetables. Maybe I’ll join the fundies in their mountain hideout and pretend to pray with them.

I’m not sure, however, about all these bailouts left and right. I would surely rather see individual homeowners bailed out than monstrous industries, but I’m afraid we’re getting into too much spending. There’s a conflict in my own brain these days, because I do believe in funding social programs, but I am, personally, in my own finances, a conservative spender. All this government spending–in such large sums at once, of money we don’t have–seems like it will have a larger price tag later on. And no, I wouldn’t have funded the Iraq War, either. That would be better: We never went to Iraq, and so we could put all that money towards bailouts and the stimulus package.