Just so I can say I told you so. Part II

Photo Stolen from the Planet Money Blog.

Well, I said I would get back to this issue to clarify some points and to add all the links I'm so fond of inserting into my blogs (like footnotes on steroids!). Lets begin with the basics. There are two major schools of economic thought. Keynesian and Austrian. The short version is, Keynesian economists believe government spending = good economy, Austrian economists believe a g00d economy = the government staying the hell out of the way. Of course, just like politics, the truth most likely lies somewhere in between.
TARP, or Troubled Asset Relief Program (I prefer "toxic asset relief program") was part of the EESA (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act). The original intent of TARP was to buy the so called Mortgage Backed Securities which led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual. Pretty quickly someone realized, "Holy Shit!! We have no fucking clue what these Mortgage Backed Securities are worth because the housing markets in the shitter! We could be getting totally hosed if we buy these!" So instead of buying what is now very conservatively estimated to be two trillion dollars worth of poop, the government just decided to buy the banks holding all the poop, this lead to things like the nationalization (some would say socaliastion, as in Capital "S" commie stuff) of AIG among others. This has up to now been the model for all the Instituions that have recived bailout money.
All of this was supposed to free up credit markets and get the economy rolling again. Instead, quite the opposite has happened. Unemployment is way up, and Governments are collapsing. In fact things are so damn bad a normal person can almost afford a Super Bowl Ticket (if you still have a job).
All this leads to the point of my original post. I've decided I oppose the bailout. Why you might ask? Simply because I don't trust those assholes. Or these assholes, this asshole (not Adam Davidson), or these assholes, who apparently didn't need the 210million dollars they were asking for bad enough to put the government in charge. So I guess you didn't need the money in the first place, further driving home the point that the whole damn things just turned into another mark for the greedy, sociopath types that deregulated all the related markets and got us into all this trouble to begin with. The governments not any better. In what was supposedly the worst economic crisis of modern time, Congress still had to bribe themselves with an extra 100 billion dollars to pass the first stimulus bill. Democrats, whom I hear are the majority now, continue to demonstrate a complete lack of a spine by capitulating to the handful of Republicans who were not up for reelection this year by inserting tax cuts into the new stimulus plan. Thanks for guaranteeing that my grandchildren, in addition to still paying for the Iraq invasion, (another asshole!) will have either an unbearable tax burden or will be speaking Mandarin.

Surely there must be a better way?