Bail Out Main Street, Not Wall Street

Congressman George Miller:
Based on your recent approval of the Wall Street Bailout Plan, it appears that you and the Democratic leadership have now completely abandoned your Democratic roots and values and gone over to the ideology of the Republicans, embracing their discredited trickle-down economic theories. The housing bubble and this credit crisis that we are now in proves that trickle-down ideology doesn’t work—it only benefits the financiers and wealthy investors and speculators. But now when that crowd and their “experts” hold a gun to your head and tell you to jump and bail them out, you jump – even though there is no reason to expect the banks will eagerly start loaning to other banks and businesses as soon as you spend $700 billion of our money to let them unload their bad debts on the government.

The only thing this plan does is trickle down their toxic mortgage securities to us, while ballooning our national debt which we and our grandchildren will have to pay back to those same banks plus interest! It will plunge America into a “disaster capitalism” scenario in which there is no money left over, after payments on our enormous national debt, to pay for infrastructure and basic government services and social safety nets. And what will it do to the value of the dollar and higher prices? This is a financial coup d’etat. Don’t do it!

Please do not vote for another Wall Street bailout plan. We are not fooled by the sugar coating of tax breaks (much of it pork), toothless oversight, and other tweaks. Not one cent of our taxpayer money should be spent assisting Wall Street. Vote only for a Main Street bailout plan. Use our tax money to directly assist homeowners and the real economy on Main Street.

Your constituents are watching. Don’t fail us again.
Sincerely,
Norma Fox, Benicia, CA

Note: If you want specific suggestions from independent economists on what an appropriate bailout plan should look like, please hold some public hearings and invite a few of the 200 economists who wrote to Congress on Sept. 24 regarding dangers in the Treasury Plan.

And for some very practical specific suggestions for a bailout that would protect and stimulate Main Street, that would mostly employ mechanisms that are already in place, and would not require taxpayers to borrow hundreds of billions, see the WashingtonPost.com op-ed by James K. Galbraith, Sept. 25, “A Bailout We Don’t Need”

Also see the key principles laid out by the Institute for Policy Studies in their Plan to Pay for the Recovery