How to Spend the Bailout Money

The government keeps on giving billions of taxpayer dollars away to large companies, and there is absolutely nothing to show for it. The economy is still declining, and we're still hemmorraging jobs at massive rates. So what went wrong? Greed, of course! Instead of using the money to fix anything, these companies used it to help themselves.

Where should the money have gone to help fix the economy? To YOU, of course. But first let's look at how they got themselves into this mess. Lenders got themselves into the habit of selling and trading your debt (whether it be store cards, credit cards, student loans, mortgages, or whatever) for profit, and exploiting variable interest agreements you signed off on to raise the interest on what you pay in order to gain a return in their profits. Plus many added all sorts of fees to further pad their profits. I still remember how angry I was when Best Buy sold my account for my store card to HSBC, who in turn nearly doubled my monthly minimums. Companies used to sell delinquent accounts of customers threy sought to write off, but now they sell any account where someone else can ofer a profit for. Plus for mortgages, variable interest rates were raised to many many homeowners suddenly too poor to own homes.

So what does that have to do with the bailout? It's simple. Fix what got us in this mess. Use the taxpayer bailout money to pay down the fees and foreclosures of customers victimized by the relentless uncontrolled greed of the financial institutions. Use the bailout money to undo what has been done in order to make the public solvent again, because as it now stands, all we're doing is throwing billions at companies who aren't using it to help anyone but themselves while YOU get stuck with the trashed credit and the debt. No matter how many billions the lenders take from the government, they still have it on their books that you owe them, even though it was their fault the markets melted down.

But I know the excuse: "the customers are to blame. The customers over-extended themselves and lived off of over-extended credit for years." Maybe and maybe not. The financial institutions have a policy that is a rare case where something that makes complete sense in a business context completely defies real-world logic, and that policy has to do with what they charge you. If your credit score dips or you're starting to have a problem being late, or in this case they sold your debt to someone who just wants the profit, they raise the payments in an effort to recover as much as they can. But that creates a self-fulfilling prohpecy that you WILL go into default. What they consider a rational move is in fact an irrational mistake. Making it harder for you to pay only increases the chance that you will go into default, and THAT is where the economy went wrong. Making it harder to pay is how millions lost their homes and saw their good credit destroyed. Making it harder to pay increases the likelihood that you will default, especially when multiple financial institutions are doing it to you all at once. The more you squeeze a customer, the more you increase the chances that the customer will fail and go into default. It's simple common sense that is in contrast to what businesses consider rational.

That is why the government needs to use the money to pay down the customer debts, so customers can start having an easier time becoming solvent and recovering from the economy. After all, it's YOUR money. The national debt the money is borrowed against is borrowed against YOU as a taxpayer, so the government needs to use it to help you and not these corporations who seem hell-bent on living like Gods in the middle of this terrible recession.