What Would You Do With $5,000?

I have to question this whole stimulus and bailout deal.  People are losing their homes left and right and the government hands the banks cash.  Our national deficit is more than $34,000 per person.  Jody Swaney (check out his video blog if you haven't already) recently pointed out in his blog that the bailout cost $5,016.18 per person in the US.  Our national deficit is more than $34,000 per person.  Now they are passing a stimulus bill to give people a whopping $500.

Enough with the numbers, though.  What I don't get is why we are bailing out the banks and car industry at all.  Yes, I do want to improve our economy.  I just don't think this is the way to do it.  How do you look at someone who was just foreclosed on and explain that on top of losing their home, their share of the national debt just increased and at some point our taxes will have to be raised to pay off this debt.  They just got hit twice.

Wouldn't it have made more sense to help from the base of the problem?  If they had given the money to the taxpayers to begin with I'm sure many would have used to it to keep their homes from being foreclosed on, others would have paid off credit card debt, others would have put some in their savings, and others would have spent it on things.  Does this not seem a better way to stimulate the economy?  Instead the banks got the foreclosed homes and the cash.  The people got the shaft.

I can tell you that money would have helped me get a decent car, pay some bills, and put some money away.  Doesn't sound like much, but it would have brought business to a struggling car lot, added money back into the bank, gave business to some retailers and I would have less debt to pay off during these economic woes.  Now, not everyone would have done what I did so it would have been spread across industries.

We would still have an unbelievably high national deficit, but we would have stimulated the economy so maybe we could affor less tax cuts to help bring down the national debt.  Instead our politicians, who are bought and paid for by corporate entities, bypassed the citizens and padded the wallets of more corporations.