My Response to Senator Levin’s Bailout Vote

Earlier today, I posted Senator Carl Levin’s explanation for his bailout bill vote. Well, this is my response, I’d like to make it public and encourage all of you to write similar responses to your own members of Congress who voted in favor of this atrocity.

Senator Levin,

I appreciate your response, yet I still vehemently disagree with your conclusions. Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the absolute wrong thing. If you’re standing on the edge of a cliff, and
the way you got there is now blocked, your options are clear: stay there and think about the situation, or jump off. What you and the rest of Congress did last week is jump.

By jumping on the “blame Bush” bandwagon, you’ve effectively shut down your ability to reason through the situation. We are in this mess because companies and consumers have leveraged themselves way beyond their means. Instead of sticking to sound economic principles, they
were all looking for the quick money, and now you are using our tax dollars to further leverage the government in order to “fix” it.

A market correction is needed, and people need to get back into the habit of making sound financial decisions. Giving them more credit is the worst thing you can do. Now, companies are being rewarded for their mistakes, and an ominous precedent has been set. Why should
other investment firms make good decisions when it’s clear that the Federal government will simply bail them out once they hit a rough patch?

On a personal note, I have had 7 properties foreclosed on this year. I was trying to make some money in real estate by buying and selling rental properties. The problem I faced was that I bought everything at the peak of the real estate bubble, so when I was ready to sell and
move on, all of my properties were grossly over-leveraged. I had a decision to make: either continue throwing money away by maintaining these liabilities, try to sell them, or give the properties back to the bank, since the bank obviously thought they were worth the amount of money they gave me. Selling them for anything close to what I owed proved to be impossible in this market, so I ended up giving them all to the banks.

While this might seem irresponsible, it was actually the best financial decision I’ve ever made. Now, my credit is in terrible shape, but for the first time in 6 years, I actually have money I can save at the end of each month. I essentially started over again with a fairly clean slate, and this time I won’t be using *any* credit to finance my life, at least not until I can be certain that my assets won’t be over-leveraged. The banks are now stuck with my properties, but if they didn’t think they were good investments to begin with at the price they loaned to me, then whose fault is that? Should it be
the taxpayers’ burden? Of course not, it should be each bank’s problem. Just like I had to go through a rough time to handle my own financial missteps, the banks themselves should now be facing the
consequences of their own actions.

What you and the rest of Congress have done is socialize the consequences of bad decisions. You should be ashamed of yourselves, and I hope every single one of you who voted for this package lose
your jobs. If you do, that would be another example of a bad decision leading to consequences. Although at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you all pass a bill which keeps you in office
indefinitely in order to bail yourselves out.