timake.com

I believe the average American citizen is not as stupid as you think they are - when they hear about a bill in Congress that will spend $700 billion in taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street, they start calling their Congress-person and let them know that they don't want to pay for someone else's stupid business decisions.

When Congress passed the Community Revinvestment Act (see this Wikipedia article ) back in the Carter Administration, they set in motion a lot of foolish decision making about loaning money to people who probably couldn't pay it back. In common sense terms, that was foolishness. The rest, as we say, is history.

Making the taxpayer pay for someone else's failures is not the American way. People generally understand that, and that's why the average Congress-person's phone calls were 10-1 against this plan.

There are probably lots of free-market solutions to most of this problem. And since Congress got us into this mess, they probably have to do something to get us out of it. I don't have a lot of confidence that they'll do it right - they seem to be completely at a loss at the moment. Perhaps that's a good thing - when they do something, it generally hurts us.