Why Obama Should End The Bailouts

Now that he's looked closely at the numbers, Barack Obama wants Washington to show some spending discipline. After his gargantuan stimulus package, that is. "We've got trillion-dollar deficits for years to come," he said recently. "We're going to have to bring significant reform ... to the overall budget process.... We'll have to make tough choices, and we're going to have to break old habits." (Transcript.)

Here's one way he could start breaking old habits: Cancel the second half of the $700 billion bailout package passed last year.

Bailout baron Henry Paulson, President Bush's Treasury Secretary, has drawn intensifying criticism for his handling of the misnamed Trouble Assets Relief Program, which has relieved hardly anybody of their troubled assets. TARP's original mission has morphed into another, and another, with money now going to auto companies, insurance giant AIG, and a handful of banks that haven't even been identified.

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Comments

[oakley9]

Why Obama should end the bailouts? mmmmmm..... because there is no real money left.

[Name Not In Use]

1. End the bailouts.
2. Require repayment of all money that "Cannot be accounted for."
3. Do a computer analysis of all market trading and prosecute all insider trades including short sales.
4. Give Goldman Sachs the kind of audit everyone says Madoff should have received.
5. Dream on. None of this will ever happen.