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Read other letters about this article
you will not be able to make an argument in the same way you deal with your subjects of torture or national security - You have to forget every bit of bias and every bit of ideology and even THEN you might not reach a conclusion
How is that? To what bias and ideology are you referring?
I do suggest you forget everything the German bankers are saying and look very carefully at the difference in seeing this crisis from Germany and seeing it from the United States, as a taxpayer.
Do you remember Masayoshi Ohira and exactly how he died? Because I remember it very clearly on the radio that night. They forced him into a vote of no confidence because they wanted to superheat the Japanese economy and play loose with debt. They knew, he knew, the whole country knew he had a health problem, and if he campaigned it would kill him. That was considered collateral damage to opening up the Japanese economy to superheated growth to make a few men very rich. Ohira tried to stop them, and he died doing it. Do you know how the Japanese financial downturn happened? Do you remember which country was playing the role, advice wise, of the German bankers then? I do. It was so much easier to be the U.S. then, giving the sage advice on cleaning up the bad debt. It isn't so easy now.
As a taxpayer, I have every right to evaluate a proposal, by the government, to spend a very large sum of money. I have every right to have them spell it out in front of me for my evaluation and my judgment, in detail. If I don't understand it, I'll say so. So far, I have understood what people have told me, I'm not that worried. Except for one thing: I don't understand at all when someone wants to spend my money, and believes they don't have to tell me what it will be spent on, why, to what effect, and what the alternatives would be.
In case you didn't notice, none of those things were coherently explained to anyone.
Every solution to the crisis, every single one, has a short term and a long term consequence. To evaluate which one is best, both must be put on the table and evaluated. Before you just take a poll of famous economists to decide what is right, what is the long term consequence of the bailout? One of them mentioned 1.5 years recession tops. Oh good. The same people who for the last year or so have been calling the end to the housing downturn every single quarter have predicted that with $700 Billion dollars there will be a recession for 1.5 years tops. Why do you believe them? What is the model? What if I don't buy that it's too complicated for me to understand? What then? Do they explain it to me, or just threaten me?
Put their plan, worked out to the end, against null, worked out to the end, against any other plan, worked out to the end. That still hasn't happened and we, collectively, are $840 Billion dollars poorer. That isn't ideology. I have nothing to put aside, I'm ready to hear the whole strategy, in specifics, the way they would ask me for it if I was asking them for cash for a venture, and they were deciding whether or not to give it to me. That isn't ideology, either. It's demanding they play fair. When Sarah Palin treats me like an idiot, that's politics, and bullshit. When Henry Paulson grabs hold of a trillion first, and then treats me like an idiot, that's criminal.
