Open letter to all y'all in charge in Washington

Dear George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, members of the Senate banking committee, and top dawgs at all, uh, banks and stuff:

Please do not be the worst Republican, economist, banking committee members, and greedy bastards (respectively) um, ever.

Your friend,
Katy

In all seriousness, the $700 billion bailout might be the worst financial decision ever to come out of Washington, D.C., Social Security notwithstanding. We are not in a financial crisis now (no matter what every journalist insists on writing...write a new story already for the love) but we will be once this stupid bailout has been approved.

Let's see. The country is in debt (to itself) to the tune of $9.7 trillion. TRILLION. Which looks like this: 97,000,000,000,000. And yes, that would be 12 zeros.

How can you be in debt to yourself? Well, let's assume I am a bank, the Bank of Katy. I have $100,000 in a little suitcase that I carry around with me. I write promissory notes (like checks) to people when I want to buy things or watch television or eat dinner at a restaurant. At the end of the month, those people all send the Bank Me a note saying that the Bank Me should give the business money to cover the things the Real Me bought. And the Bank Me gives them cash out of the suitcase. Except that the suitcase ran out of cash back in, oh, 1998 (tip of the hat to Reaganomics), and instead of paying all those people for the Real Me's expenditures, the Bank Me just writes an IOU to the business and sticks IOUs in the suitcase to pay back later with interest. Even the business, which may say it had a profitable year, is in debt. Because no one freaking paid. They wrote notes. For which the government gives them an out (declaring bankruptcy) if they decide suddenly that they made a stupid decision and can't actually pay what they owe.

So, we live in houses we can't afford, drive cars that depreciate in value (but on which we still owe massive sums of money), and commute to work on roads that were financed with, you guessed it, more debt. Bonds to be exact. Which we voted FOR. God help us. Especially if a Democrat gets elected in November. With this financial bailout, we're basically promising ourselves higher tax rates, increased inflation, fewer jobs, higher interest rates, and limits to what the market can do if the government would just leave it alone. And that's on top of the taxes we're guaranteed to have if a Democrat wins in November.