You cannot turn on the TV or open a newspaper or even walk down the street without being hit with some new fearmongering about the economy. And I'm so tired of it. It's awful. Particuarly, I'm done with the whole bailout debate. This is not a good plan.  

Don't me wrong - I do know a little something about the necessity of wise budgeting and careful spending considering the possibility of fickle investments and the reality of an erratic market. My dad is a senior financial consultant with a major investment firm, and I'm a college student. Both of these inherently include some minor awareness of the current financial situation in this country. (The price tag on my degrees will be, at the end of my formalized education, equivalent to that of a fairly nice starter house, or a downright luxurious condominum or apartment. As a student who makes less than fifteen grand a year, that's a little scary.) However, I don't believe that the way to fix our economy is by putting the government further in debt than it already is.

I do not like the idea of economic bailouts. It's a bad idea for the economy at large to take huge chunks of the governmental budget and award it to struggling corporations. It is not General Motors or its CEO and CFO that need the extra money - it is their workers, the thousands of everyday people that they employ, who are probably living paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time and who have families to provide for, retirement to invest in, that need some security about their situation. They need to know that, bailouts or not, they will have a job to go to tomorrow morning and a paycheck to cash on Friday afternoon.

 What if we award these multiple billions and then the corporations who take the money end up bankrupt anyway? What have we accomplished, besides providing false hopes to their workers and increasing the federal deficit? I believe there are better ways to help the economy - one of which is the idea of "microcredit loans", currently utilized by the World Bank/IMF/etc, mostly in third-world countries. If we put even a small percentage of the bailout money into microcredit loans for the employees of these corporations, the money would be going directly to the people who need it, and they would be able to get started on something, some other investment or earnings/savings plan, some other means to secure their future even if their company of employment goes belly-up. We would be, in essence, bypassing the middle man and providing some real security to the people who are being put at risk by the bankruptcy/bailout threat.