The primary purpose of the bailout is to shift wealth from future generations to the boomer elites.

There is nothing in current plans that addresses the fundamental issue of lost valuation.

We have politicians and administrative appointees, all of a certain age, strutting about, striking heroic poses, ostentatiously consulting dusty history books as how-to manuals, pulling levers and push buttons, seemingly at random. Their efforts are not just vain, but in vain. Are they clueless, or calculating? Do they want to restore confidence, or are they confidence men (and women)?

Here's a great idea: let's regulate the big banks, now that they're are all gone.

Let's prop up the whole shaky mess by printing even more of our struggling, leveraged dollars. What better way to measure the full faith of the US gummint in the years of "it's our turn now." We may never get health care, but hey, take your pick of complex financial instruments, young America.

Bill Clinton screwed young Americans with foreign objects and foreign trade deals, then pranced around the world pocketing his payoffs. George W screwed young Americans with foreign wars, foreign oil, and foreign-financed massive debt. He won't even have to prance, he pranced in the womb.

Here's the real question the Failed Generation doesn't want us to ask: How much is that ugly, energy-inefficent McMansion, full of Chinese-made consumer items, and with three 5 ton American-made SUV's parked in the garage, just how much is that sucker really worth?

How bout some of that health care instead? A cooler planet anyone? Wanna retire some day?

Got melanime-free milk?

For 16 years we have listened to boomers tell us that human and environmental cost didn't matter, that these values couldn't compare to the payoffs from anti-worker and anti-environmental trade, financial, and energy policies.

Well guess what Aquarians, we know different now. The real value in our economy lays in the quality of our lives.

Don't trust anyone over 50, and vote accordingly.

Conason says "spend spend spend." Isn't this a bit like Bush's advice, after 9/11, telling us to shop, shop, shop? Private consumers and the govt have shopped until we've dropped.

Krugman says we should consider the bailout of boomer elites as "an investment." Yo, Paul, could I borrow your credit cards? I'd like to makes some "investments."

Robert Reich has a plan: let's "all hope that housing regains value." What? Becoming logical symbologists, or whatever the hell the term he used after the trade deals, wasn't that enough? Now we have to become HOPEFUL logical symbologists? Hey, to Bob, 700 Billion is chump change.

Good God. Must every Boomer sound like a self-parody of incompetence, irresponsibility, and selfishness?

The idea that we're in a pre-Depression cycle like the 1930s has a small amount of merit. People are seeking to park value elsewhere than, say, houses. But, unlike the 1930s, they are unsure whether they want to park value in the dollar. Simply easing credit and liquidity is not itself going to restore confidence. I like the role of the modern faith-backed what-the-hell dollar, but it ain't what it used to be in the confidence department. Same even with treasuries and govt instruments.

Other differences: the war came after the 30s, not before, and the stimulus of old-style war was far greater at lower levels of the economy than smart-bomb war.

As many have pointed out, Keynesian deficits were run up during the Great Depression, not really before.

Labor activism helped bring value to low levels in the economy in a nationial 1930s economy, but is impotent in the world economy of today.

Our population, and more accurately, our total consumption of natural resourses, dwarfs the consumption of the 30s.

I could go on.

What the Boomers are really selling is an increased pressure on the environment and a downward pressure on wages as the elites desparately seek to ring out value to cover their greed.

There is another way to increase value in the marketplace, protect the environment, and distribute value at low levels in the economy where it can percolate up. The model we should be looking at now is not the 1930s deficit spending, but the wartime system of equitably distributed point rationing systems and their sophisticated modern offspring: cap and trade.

We need a system of quantified social/environmental wealth that offsets the boomer legacy of dollar denominated illth.

I don't agree with Walter's spelling of Americans, but I agree that the Depression heart people. I would also ask Leonard and other consumers of high-priced boxed cereals purchased by the case to consider what happens to the many, many people now roped in by the neck to the world economy.

Also, it's possible to assume that the devaluation of stocks and homes is "panic." But, that stance assumes that previous values were "rational."

Perhaps we are actually approaching rational valuations now, valuations that are starting to factor in other costs.

Leonard fails to make his case.

it didn't HEART people.

Sometimes my types crack me up. More coffee, please. If I can still afford it.

It's amazing that Obama was able to squeak by with Ferraro withholding her fundraising prowess.