An AP poll conducted last night shows that Americans oppose the Bush administration’s plan to bailout the financial sector by a margin of 45% to 30%, with the remaining 25% not yet taking a side.
According to the survey, 40% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats oppose the $700 billion bailout. A paltry 23% of respondents say that they approve of how President Bush is handling the crisis.
Those numbers are in line with my own informal polling of friends and family. Therefore, it seems amazing that nearly everyone in Washington, D.C., is falling for Mr. Bush’s bailout scheme. You would think that the Democrats especially would want to let the guy twist slowly, slowly in the wind, but oh no. They can’t bail him out fast enough. The same is true of the Republican leadership in the Senate, but that is more understandable. Mr. Bush used to be their guy.
The only group saying “Hey, wait a minute!” are the House Republicans. Their free-market ideology makes the very idea of a bailout galling to them. I don’t agree with House Republicans on many things, and I may not end up agreeing with them on this issue, either, but right now I say, hang in there.
You don’t hand over $700 billion on spec. Let’s wait and see.
If the market drops, OK. It will rise again. That’s what markets do.
If the predicted credit crunch comes to pass, and tight money causes unemployment to rise, OK. We can deal with that situation when and if it happens. We will have $700 billion to work with. It will come in handy to have a reserve.
Which is what we won’t have if we fork over all the money to Wall Street and doing so fails to solve the underlying problems.
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