Meeting the enemy

Here’s a total fantasy that will not emerge from the mouths of congressional Democrats:

How about instead of sucking the $700 billion from the hapless current taxpayer, insisting that Bush and Paulson reverse course on their 2001 giveaway tax break to the rich to pay for their mega-miscalculation? That should put about a trillion new dollars on the table, just enough to bail out the fancy-pants billionaires who have been getting all the gravy for the last two decades.

And here’s the prescient Nouriel Roubini, upon whose words the financiers now hang (after ignoring his warnings for years):

“The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown.”

Philip J. Cunningham at Global Affairs compares the current cliffhanging to the “bureaucratic sclerosis and insider mismanagement that led to the demise of the Soviet Union.”

Indeed, we have become the mirror image of our hate-object. Even Saint Ronald would be taken aback as his disdainful words about the collapse of communism sound suspiciously applicable to ourselves.