This is Floyd Wynne with The View from Here

This is Floyd Wynne with THE VIEW FROM HERE

What are we going to spend 700 billion dollars on?

The President and Secretary of the Treasury Paulson are embarked on a plan to spend up to 700 billion dollars to do what?

Already a number of organizations involved in the stock market panic had been bailed out by a 300 billion earlier bill that not only bailed out two federally established organizations, but led more recently to new capital to keep the insurance agency AIG in business.

Both Presidential candidates have taken skeptical views of the proposal, and in my mind the question is “What are we bailing out?” I say that because it is driving the nation deeper into debt and that debt is the responsibility of all of us Americans.

Under the past several years of housing boom the financing of those gigantic homes, in the million plus category has become a problem. Those homebuyers who rushed into the market to buy such homes signed mortgages, in most cases that proved to be too big for them to handle. Smaller financial groups apparently transferred those mortgages to a bigger financial institution.

Now those bigger financial institutions are unable to make further mortgages, and foreclosure faces a number of those who initiated the huge mortgages. At least that’s the way I understand it, although I’m certainly not a financial wizard.. I still have trouble at times balancing my home checkbooks.

They talk of a meltdown in the stock market unless this 7700 million is made available to stop the stock market bleeding. They compare the possible panic to that of the depression 30s when the lack of money for such things as houses buying and supporting businesses was the situation.

Senator McCain has highly criticized the failure to follow regulations as the main reason for the problem. While not endorsing the bailout, he did call for a bipartisan committee to review and recommend who would receive those monies.

While blaming the Bush Administration for the problem, he has not yet come up with his possible solution to the problem.

Congress is busy earmarking funds for all kinds of things in the President’s plan and its certain that any fast action is out of the question.

We would agree that first of all the reason things went wrong should be investigated. Then we can look at possible solutions. Like so many other government programs just throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve it, but rather makes it worse.

We’ll have to wait and see what eventually happens, but right now few of us really understand what the so called bailout of 700 billion dollars would do.

This is Floyd Wynne and that’s THE VIEW FROM HERE.

Text Box: This is Floyd Wynne with THE VIEW FROM HERE

What are we going to spend 700 billion dollars on?

The President and Secretary of the Treasury Paulson are embarked on a plan to spend up to 700 billion dollars to do what?

Already a number of organizations involved in the stock market panic had been bailed out by a 300 billion earlier bill that not only bailed out two federally established organizations, but led more recently to new capital to keep the insurance agency AIG in business.

Both Presidential candidates have taken skeptical views of the proposal, and in my mind the question is “What are we bailing out?”   I say that because it is driving the nation deeper into debt and that debt is the responsibility of all of us Americans.

Under the past several years of housing boom the financing of those gigantic homes, in the million plus category has become a problem. Those homebuyers who rushed into the market to buy such homes signed mortgages, in most cases that proved to be too big for them to handle. Smaller financial groups apparently transferred those mortgages to a bigger financial institution.

Now those bigger financial institutions are unable to make further mortgages, and foreclosure faces a number of those who initiated the huge mortgages.   At least that’s the way I understand it, although I’m certainly not a financial wizard.. I still have trouble at times balancing my home checkbooks.

They talk of a meltdown in the stock market unless this 7700 million is made available to stop the stock market bleeding. They compare the possible panic to that of the depression 30s when the lack of money for such things as houses buying and supporting businesses was the situation.

Senator McCain has highly criticized the failure to follow regulations as the main reason for the problem. While not endorsing the bailout, he did call for a bipartisan committee to review and recommend who would receive those monies.

While blaming the Bush Administration for the problem, he has not yet come up with his possible solution to the problem.

Congress is busy earmarking funds for all kinds of things in the President’s plan and its certain that any fast action is out of the question.

We would agree that first of all the reason things went wrong should be investigated. Then we can look at possible solutions.   Like so many other government programs just throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve it, but rather makes it worse.

We’ll have to wait and see what eventually happens, but right now few of us really understand what the so called bailout of 700 billion dollars would do.

This is Floyd Wynne and that’s THE VIEW FROM HERE.