I’m not the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Speaker of the House, or the secretary of speaker of anything. So I don’t have the expertise or access to know whether our government buying all the toxic mortgage debt in the country is going to help anything. I’ve heard a logical case for it doing so, but am I getting the full picture? 

So as long as we’re spending a lot of each other’s money on debt without really knowing what’s going on, allow me to scare you into paying off my student loans. 

Because of my monthly multi-hundred dollar payments, my savings are suffering. I am unable to adequately invest in my future and that of my community. Ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession.

You have now way of knowing this, but we’re just going to have to trust each other.

The situation with the mortgage backed securities and to a lesser extent, my bills, is of course, remarkably like the prelude to our invasion of Iraq, where we were presidentially scared and nationalistically rallied. I was then thoroughly opposed to the invasion, because I don’t like shooting people, throwing bombs at them, or blowing them up. Did I know that Iraq was not stockpiling weapons of mass destruction or cooperating with al Qaeda? Of course not. All I had was my skepticism and gut reaction that invading Iraq was both a strategically and morally awful thing to do, a judgment that has become increasingly defensible.

I think the House members who rejected the bailout bill acted in a similar spirit as those who voted against authorization for the war. It violated their principles and it didn’t smell right.

Now, I’m not a fan of gut reactions in policy making, so with regard to the financial bailout, that’s the last thing I want our elected officials to do. But I have no reason to trust the Bush Administration when they try scaring the country into taking some dramatic action just as I have no reason to believe the Democrats in Congress are acting in the genuine best interest of the country instead of buying into the administration’s threats or into supposed political expediency.

So is a bailout the right thing to do? Well, whether it’s out of modesty or intellectual cowardice, I’m going to say I don’t know enough to know. And it’s a frustrating position to be in, one that would surely be less frustrating if I trusted our elected representatives, those with access to all the information they need, to make the right decision here.