If hating the bank bail-outs feels so good how can it be wrong?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I was very much in the pro-TARP group and consider the no-votes on the first bail-out package to be a stain on a politician's career along the lines of voting for the Iraq War Resolution.

For all the low hanging fruit of outrage (bonuses, full-repayment of bad bets, cronyism, etc.) the panic-phase of the financial bail-out process is looking pretty good. Net cost to government is going to be relatively low. Effects fairly dramatic in reversing specific inter-bank liquidity issues.

But it feels so right to hate the bail-outs. Even I hate them!

Why?

Because they are relative. Financial institutions are booking profits and the stock market is stronger than it has any sensible right to be and those are good things... important things. But it was assumed, even by cynics like me, that some kind of comparable exigency would be felt in addressing the public demand-side of the acute crisis. It is not that what was done for the banks was unreasonable or even all that expensive in the long run. The problem is that problems other than bank liquidity and stabilizing the stock market were not met with the same frantic alarm and 'damn the cost' approach.

I had, and have, no objection to shoveling money too some undeserving fat-cats as the price of accomplishing something. But money should have been shoveled to alley-cats with the same abandon. But there "is no public money" for unemployment. The stimulus bill "had to be" well under a trillion dollars. It feels like flinty yankee penuriousness reigns in every instance where the beneficiary isn't a financial institution.

So that's why I support the bail-outs (in broad terms, not to the level of approving every single nuance) while simultaneously hating them as a standing "fuck you" to everybody else.