“It’s like watching the emergency room doctors save the life of the drunk driver who just plowed into the car in which your family was riding.”
From David Wessel’s “Blasting the Bailout Blues” in the WSJ. Here’s a little more of how Wessel explains why the bailouts were necessary and helped avoid major economic calamity, and yet the little guy is completely disgusted with the bailouts, Washington, and Wall Street:
Look at the world for a moment through the eyes of an American middle-class family somewhere in the Midwest.
They see the stock market zooming back. They see big-money investors who bet on banks, the ones who bought bank bonds that the government stood behind, getting 100 cents on the dollar… They see Goldman Sachs’s trading arm making at least $25 million every single day of the first quarter and $100 million or more on 35 days. They see the return of bonuses on Wall Street that can exceed the lifetime earnings of a middle-of-the-pack U.S. worker. They are lectured that the mounting federal debt means higher taxes and smaller benefits ahead.
At the same time, they see unemployment at nearly 10% and more than five jobless workers for every job opening.
Related:
A Nation of Haters: Why We Hate Bankers, Bonuses, Government Officials, and Government Workers