A dear friend of mine asked me to post again because he didn’t like the story about breastmilk in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Hehe 

So it looks like they may have passed a bailout bill finally.  They only had to work on it for about 1.5 weeks.  That’s not bad for our Congress, where everything has to be partisan.  After all, who cares what needs to be done, let’s vote along the party lines.  Bah! 

 I’ve been doing a lot of reading about whether we really need this bailout plan.  I’ve also been asking a lot of questions, and reading everything I can find on what’s going on.  My brother and his wife both work for WaMu.  I was worried about them when I heard about the buyout, but I’ve been told that they just have another employer right now.  Which is odd… a dear friend of mine works for Wachovia, which has also been bought out.  But apparently Citibank is getting rid of a lot of the jobs at Wachovia, whereas JP Morgan Chase is keeping a lot of the jobs at WaMu. 

What I’m confused about is how this bailout plan is going to help.  I mean it’s not going to do anything for the rising food and gas prices.  All it’ll do is help the companies that were so involved in this greed scam that they’ve been losing a lot of money with the foreclosures.  It’s not going to help those that were convinced that they needed a bigger loan than they could afford, or those that lost their jobs because of the slow down in house sales.  It seems more like it’s just going to help a few people in concentrated areas… like New York City.  It’s not going to help those who are losing their jobs because their employer was just bought out (like WaMu or Wachovia). 

I see several thoughts on this bailout.  Many people say that the bailout is going to cause the value of the dollar to drop even further.  That our currency is going to be in a free fall against all other currencies, which is going to cause an economic collapse, and that other countries are going to think that if we get too far into debt, we’ll just print money to get out, making the dollar even more worthless.  It’s possible… it even sounds plausible.  If you go to http://naturalnews.com they have a lot of speculation on this possibility.  The authors at Natural News also seem to think that both our government and big pharma are going to become obsolete once everything plays out.  They figure that people aren’t going to have the money to pay for their drugs, which means the pharmaceutical companies aren’t going to have an income.  They’ll be the next to go. 

Many others say that this bailout has to happen.  The world markets are in chaos over what is happening in the US.  (I do have a link, it’s on my other computer, I will try to copy it over tomorrow).  That’s a daunting thought.  We have to put ourselves further into debt because everything is so intertwined.  It’s possible a lot of other countries are going to have problems if we don’t do anything.  There’s no reason that the rest of the world should have to suffer,  just because a few – or a lot – of people in the US became greedy and wanted more than a simple modest return on their investments, or those who treated their houses like ATMs, or those who overspent what they could honestly afford and used the equity in their homes to cover their poor budgeting and credit card debt, or even those who cooked the company books to make it look like the company was earning better than they actually were.

Then there’s the portion that think that no matter what we do, we’re sunk.  We can put $700 billion into keeping these businesses afloat, but if you look at the 777 point drop in the Dow on Monday, that’s $1.1 trillion.  How much of a drop in the bucket is $700 billion?  Not much if you ask me.  Kinda like putting the US further into debt for a “stimulus package” that didn’t jump start the economy like the shrub said it would. 

I’ll admit, I don’t own my own home, my job isn’t affected by this whole situation, and gas prices here in OK are hovering around $3.15 as of yesterday.  The city I live in pretty much has a negative unemployment rate — if you want to work, you can find a job.  I was silly enough to check my 401(k), where I saw that the balance dropped $100 between last Wednesday and yesterday (Tuesday).  Today it was up about $40.  I guss that means I shouldn’t check it so often.  I’ve been tracking it the last few weeks by printing out the statement every Wednesday. 

According to the CEO of the company I work for, we aren’t even going to be affected by the economic “downturn.”  I’m not sure how much I believe him, if it gets too bad, people are going to stop eating out altogether, and more than half our business is to sell to companies like Sonic, or to small cafeterias like one of my brothers runs in Florida.  Basically, what the CEO said is that people are stepping down in the type of place they eat out.  If they used to eat out at upscale restaurants, they’ll step down to family dining types like Applebees, and so on.  He said that so far, it’s only the ones that could only afford to eat out at cheap or fast food type restaurants that have totally cut back on eating out at all.  I disagree, but that’s just from personal experience.  A year ago, we would eat out once a week at places like Applebees, now we don’t eat out at all if I can help it.  It’s just too much money to pay someone else for food that isn’t as good as homemade. 

So, if you go by the trickle down theory, the bailout plan is supposed to help all of us.  I haven’t yet figured out how, but am willing to hear suggestions on this.