Crucial

I'm of two minds on the bailout of both the auto industry and Wall Street.

On one hand, capitalism SHOULD mean the survival of only the fittest. Those in charge of making cars decided to continue the deployment of SUV's long after the writing was on the wall about energy. They made poor financial choices. They deserve to go extinct. And the same argument can be made for a lot of the investment banks that are draining the FDIC and prompting bailout proposals.

On the other hand, if we let evolution take its natural course, and let our domestic auto industry and hundreds of banks die, we're all going to suffer. In a great way. A re-investment in GM and Chrysler could get them over the hump, and leading the way into the "green" era of car builds. And if we buy up the bad debt of all these hundreds of banks and give them a fresh start, we just might be able to put all these poor choices on mortgage loans behind us permenently and avoid the shitstorm that, as a country, we honestly deserve from the last two decades of buying houses we couldn't afford.

I guess the thing is we can't say for sure what the consequences will be if we DON'T bailout Detroit or Wall Street. Maybe we'll figure out a way to work through it and we'll not have needed to put ourselves in such debt. Or maybe there IS no way to "work through it"... the hole is too deep this time and we're looking at an unemployment rate of 15 or 20% by this time next year if we don't act now.

It's pretty easy to just throw this on our country's credit card and hope that the next Bill Clinton will get us out of our debt. I think the $700 billion proposed in Congress would really only add about 7 or 8% to the national debt we already have. So what's an extra trillion?

So as I continue to think through this out loud, is John McCain the next Bill Clinton, fiscally speaking? Is Obama? Would Hillary have been, if she had won the nomination? Who can honestly clean up this mess, and get Congress to play ball at the same time?