Progressive Conditions for a Bailout

Here are some good ideas from Dean Baker over at TPM Cafe'.

Progressive Conditions for a Bailout

If we are going to bail out Wall Street, and I think we have to, we need to make sure the people who got us into trouble in the first place don't profit. We also need to make sure we put conditions on the money that makes sure that we have some control over the companies we are bailing out so we can at some point put some of this money back into the treasury; or at least pay back China for buying the T-bills or bonds or whatever they will be buying to give us the money for the bailout. Finally, the bailout must include legislation to put back the regulations like the Glass Steagall Act that were created as a result of the crash that caused the Great Depression. Personally I think that most of the problems this country has can be traced back to allowing mega-corporations to be created starting back in the '80s when the Reagan Administration stopped enforcing the anti - trust laws for the most part.

What Digby Said...

Ok, I'm stealing a tag line from Atrios over at Eschaton, but this post from Hullabaloo:

It's one thing to tell 23 years-olds that they get to have fun with their social security taxes. They are young and dumb and don't have clue about saving. But once people get into their 30s and have kids and old parents they start to think about the future.

is pretty much said what I thought when the shit started hitting the fan in Wall Street and Mr. McPrivatization started talking about our economy be fundamentally strong. Well, the first thing was, "See...see you dumb asses! THAT'S why we shouldn't invest our Social Security in the stock market."

The thing that really kills is one of my friends looked at me when I said this and replied, "Yeah but I still think we need to invest the SS money in something like mutual funds." This friend is really a fairly normal, intelligent guy but somehow he had some kind of disconnect in his brain that mutual funds were actually a collection of various investments including stocks and that they would almost assuredly would get hit by the same economic problems that would crash the stock market.

Arrgh.