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You are an idiot if you want to run a semantic argument with any one of the 75% of Americans oposing this bailout about what you call what normal folks have to do every day. Whatever you accountants want to call it, every responsible household ensures that its income exceeds its out go, biweekly, monthly, quarterly and annual income exceeds expenses, cash on hand is trending up rather than down. Every healthy operating organization does the same. Sure, you can take a time out when you are building a new capability that is not yet operating, but once it is up and operating, the VP incharge gets fired pretty quickly if cash coming in does not start exceeding cash going out (including principal and interest payments pretty quickly).

You see, where you are wrongheaded is that you are just like the political idiots who got us into this mess, and a lot of other overleveraged idiots who collectively got the country into this mess. You are trying to justify borrowing against assets, not for capital investments, but to pay current acounts.

History shows it is a disaster every time. Adam Smith already covered the issue in great detail

Yes, you may be an accounting sophisticate, but you are an economic idiot.

You are an idiot if you want to run a semantic argument with any one of the 75% of Americans oposing this bailout

And you are even more ignorant than I thought if you think that I, or the author of the article, or the FReeper who posted it want to argue with the 75% of Americans opposing this bailout. The point of the article and the point raised by the other poster is that there is a workable plan that was used 30 years ago that was not even considered instead of this bailout plan. I might have been giving you too much credit when I mistook you for Senator Biden.

From the article:

There are lessons in the Brady Plan that can be applied today. One is that, as painful as the bailout is to our sense of free markets, sometimes as Americans we know that pragmatism needs to win out over ideology. Another is that private market solutions to work these problems out can work, but most likely need the ‘imprimatur’ of a government guarantee behind them for markets to give the workout a chance to work (which is why some form of the Republican alternative is worth exploring). It is too bad that Hank Paulson didn’t bother to have read the details of the Brady Plan before he came up with his first proposal. By trying to put together a Bi-partisan political coalition before he had spent a few days researching this relatively recent solution, he put the ‘solution train’ on the wrong track, by allowing the same people who oversaw the disintegration of Fannie and Freddie to be given far more input at the beginning than they warranted.
If the leadership of this country resides in the hands of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama in the future, then we might look back at this time as the period Hank Paulson panicked the country into voting that way.

Now granted, this was at the end of a pretty long article, and there weren't any pictures so you might not have read this far, but it should be pretty clear that the point of the article is that this crisis is NOT as bad as is being hyped by political leaders and the media, and if a government intervention is needed it would be best if it were at least based on a model that has worked before.

“75% of Americans oposing this bailout”

Could you show me where you get that number showing 75% opposing the bailout. I checked a couple recent polls on this, Rasmussen was one that shows support for and against divided straight down the middle, with some undecideds.

I would just like to take a look at that survey please.
Thanks in advance.