If you have an opinion on the matter you need to contact your state senators and your represenatives. I contacted all of mine in the area I'm from and most of them were voting against the bailout.

US national debt is at 10 trillion dollars.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/national-debt-officially-over-10-trillion/5924
In Bush's 8 years the debt has gone up 75%, and who knows, with all this BS money being printed for all these bailouts it could end up at double.

To those who now want to rescue the credit markets so we can "get back to how things were" are failing to observe that "how things were" was most recently not at all how things used to be.

There's nothing to return to. A nation that doubles its debts every eight years does not really exist. It is an illusion built on borrowing. There's no way to "get back to that" because it was just a crazy party, thrown at great expense, but now the rugs are stained, the lamps broken, and booze is all gone.

Again, this bailout does NOTHING but make it all worse in the non-distant long-run.

remember last time we didn't bail out? the great depression happened.

A lot of people are up in arms about this because all they've seen is the media up-play of the price tag and are under the impression that this money is going to be handed over, perhaps with one of those comically oversized Publisher's Clearinghouse checks, to the CEOs of Wall Street firms, which is incorrect.

However, the bailout in its current form is a horrifically bad idea and the fact that it passed the Senate 74-25 last night is a signal that our representatives in Washington are not representing us and are largely acting in fear, much as they did when they approved things like the Iraq war and the PATRIOT Act.

The US needs a bailout, yes. Something has to be done or we are going to be facing a gradual economic slow- or meltdown that will have a negative effect on almost every citizen (even if you're not affected by the credit crunch, you'll be effected by the drastic upswing in crime over the next three years perpetrated by those who were).

This particular version of the bailout is literally the government throwing our money at the problem, with no idea or plan on how it's going to be spent, laughable "taxpayer protections" that were added as a rough afterthought to make it sound better, and--this is the most important, it's even been said by proponents of the bill--no guarantee this will work. It could be used to buy up toxic assets so banks will feel better about lending to each other and help ease the problem, but it could also be used to simply shore up banksheets so that individual banks can better weather the storm.

To put it in even simpler terms, this money can be used to clean up the fallout but it could also be used to make the banks more resistant to radiation, meaning the little guys like you and me are still boned. We have no say at this point how it will be spent (even though now at least it has a little oversight as opposed to Paulson's original "give me 700 billion and nobody can look at me" plan).

The real problem is that our system itself is broken on a fundamental level. We're operating largely on money and production that does not actually exist. Money exists to serve as a portable representation of production or labor or whatever you want to call it, but when institutions like banks and investment brokers spring up, they're not producing anything--they're running on credit and interest and fees and other imaginary forms of money, which floods our economy with representations of production that do not actually exist. Sure, we'll be rich for awhile, but when it comes time to cash the chips on a macroeconomic level we'll discover that most of this money is worthless. It's phantom money that if you look too hard at it, it will go away, and it's what the nation's largest financial institutions--who in turn finance and thus control actual producers--are built on.

Our economy is a house of cards that's being taken outside into a hurricane.

To be honest, I'd really like to advise whoever reads this to not pay their taxes, because our representatives are not representing us, and what's worse, they're doing it in a way that's less intelligent than the public opinion they're ignoring.

NEVER GIVE UP

our fore fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place, for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate....we can not hallow....this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us....

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion, to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion...

that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain....

that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom....

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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For some reason this seemed fitting to me

Well congress passed it, woooo.

Hope you guys like virtual representation.

http://www.thejimgaudet.com/blog/archives/228