700 Billion Reasons to stop being complacent

Congress is going to pass a $700,000,000,000.00 bailout of the banking industry. That's a lot of zeros, I know. And we taxpayers are going to have to pay for it. It is going to suck, but it will suck less than if we do nothing and allow our banking industry to collapse.

We are going to pay and it is going to hurt and that is just. This is our fault. We took out loans we could not afford. We did not force our elected officials to do something about predatory lending before it was a problem. This is not the fault of Wall Street. The bank presidents did not lose their own money. They lost our money. We gave them money and we are responsible for that. We bought stock in them, rewarding them for taking on more and more unsafe debt.

Pain is an effective teacher. Hopefully this will teach us something because this is going to hurt bad. We need to be responsible for our personal finances. We can no longer keep spending more than we can afford to pay back. We should not invest more than we can afford to lose. We need to hold our elected officials responsible for doing nothing. Our current presidential administration and any member of congress whose party held a majority in the last six years needs to be held responsible for this miss.