When is it going to end?

We’ve bailed out Fannie and Freddie.  AIG now belongs to the U.S. Government.  Now we’re bailing out half of the investment banking sector.  Big Auto now wants a bailout as well.

How much of our money is our federal government going to spend bailing out companies who have made poor decisions?

Fannie and Freddie were both created under a federal charter, and were directed by law to provide “affordable housing”.  And whenever you hear “affordable housing”, that means making sure people get mortgages who can never afford them in the first place.   This problem can be blamed on members of both parties in the Congress and the Bush Administration.  Both Democrats and Republicans (fiscal Republicans are the minority) love to tax and spend money that isn’t theirs.  They love to look like they are doing things “for the people”.  What ends up happening is that organizations like Fannie and Freddie are forced to make bad loans, and then when they come due and the people who took them out can’t pay them anymore, the rest of us are left footing the bill.

Democrats though were out there saying Bush hadn’t provided “enough oversight”.  Enough oversight?  These were two organizations who were heavily supervised by a federal agency known as the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.  Sounds Orwellian, but two government-started institutions, overseen by a government-run institution, are now themselves government-run institutions.  Yeah, that’s a solution.  When are people going to realize that the problem started when the government became involved in the mortgage industry.  And the solution is the government running the entire industry(or at least a large majority of it)?

Now it’s all cascaded through the markets.  I’m not a rocket scientist when it comes to all things Wall Street, but I know bad financial planning when I see it.  I would not be able to survive if I tried to “balance” my checkbook like the federal government does.  I think I’m gonna go down to the credit union, and pull all my money out, go and spend it, then ask the government if they will bail me out.

Not likely to happen.

I think the Founding Fathers are turning in their graves.  Anyone with a cursory knowledge of American history (I know, it’s not really taught anymore in public schools, and when it is, it is usually negative) would know that the Founders wanted a “weak” federal government.  However, the federal government continues to grow and grow, and no one in either party is willing to stand up and say “enough”.