The “Break it Down” Blog

With the country up in arms over the $700bn bailout vote through the house but now getting ready to be voted on in the Senate, a lot of Americans want their voices heard on the issue… and heard immediately!

Fortunately for us, visiting House.gov and writing to our representative is as easy as clicking the helpful link there at the top of the page… assuming the page doesn’t time out.

Maybe you don’t know who youre representative is, so you decide to use your Zip Code to find your Representative, uh oh… looks like besides your Zip Code you also need the 4-digit Zip Code extension… something about 1.27% of the population actually know.

Maybe you are finally able to figure out who your representative is and want to send them an email with your thoughts? Ohhh, so sorry, better luck next time. It looks like the servers hosting House.gov are under so much straight that they have chosen to shut off email services to lessen the burden. Not upgrade the servers, offload the form processing to another server, launch a “Slashdot” text-only version of their website… nope, can the email.

I really hope you are apprecating the problem-solving abilities of your government here, just to clarify:

They were receiving so much communications from citizens about the $700bn bailout, that the only solution they could find was to shut off the communication in order to keep the website up.

So that’s awesome… that’s like a life guard shooting you with a gun to stop you from drowning or a vet euthinizing your dog to keep it’s hip from bothering it.

What are your thoughts on this bailout (since the government doesn’t want to hear them)? I’ve heard good arguments for both ranging from one extreme:

Fuck those banks and investment companies, you cannot reward bad behavior with bailouts, otherwise it will never stop.

to the other extreme:

Yes, it’s bad behavior but we can’t ignore it. So much of our economy relies on the health of those institutes that it would effect everyone if we didn’t bail them out. Foreclosures everywhere, businesses closing up shop, people out of work and retirement funds along with the market decimated… that would cost us a lot more than $700bn.

I can certainly see both sides of the coin, but is a potential decade-long recession (like Japan saw after it had something similar happen in the 80s) worth potentially fixing our markets and behaviors long-term? My blink-reaction is “Yes”, but then I think about how much traction socially, globally, financially, educationally, etc. can be lost in a decade of a down-trodden country and it might not be worth it.

Thoughts?