Tuesday, April 28, 2009

NEWS: Bailout v 2.0

*Posted October 2, 2008*

Last night the Senate approved the newly revised bailout package, and tomorrow the House will vote on it. Last week I delved deep into the issue, and since no one who reads this site is interested in the news section anyway, I’ll be brief. The new bill is a lot better than the old one since it now contains Republican ideas like tax breaks and an increase on the FDIC insurance limits for banks. But here are a couple points of interest. A source who works in the treasury department said last week that the $700,000,000,000 that Paulson settled on for the package was not reached through any source of data. Rather, they “just wanted to pick a really large number.” Yet another reason this bill is a bad idea. I haven’t read up on the revised version too much, but the old bill was essentially a blank check to Henry Paulson to spend however he pleased.Most of America was/is against this idea, but the Senators are claiming that while the public’s angry phone calls to representatives did a lot to influence the rejection in a the House(what a novel idea, letting the people decide), after Wall Street dropped 700 points, supposedly the phone calls were changing to “we’ve got to get this done.” I’ll leave you folks with an example. After my second year of college, I received my annual college fund money to spend on tuition, bills, and college stuff. I used some of it to promptly erase the balance on my credit card, kind of like a bailout. Did I learn my lesson? If you’ve seen my balance recently, you’d see that I haven’t. Now I’m erasing the debt using my student loan, which is how the bailout SHOULD go. Rather than the taxpayers (my mom and dad) bailing out the fatcats (me and my credit), this should be handled like a loan to repaid 6 months after graduation. You better believe I learned my lesson this time around, but I doubt Wall Street will.

News of the Weird (from newsoftheweird.com)

Fine Points of the Law

Joey Bergamine, 19, who is preparing for a re-trial in Fayetteville, N.C., on a DUI charge stemming from a July 2007 incident, will argue that he should have been advised of his right to have a lawyer present when his father kicked open his bedroom door hours after the incident to help police officers who had come to question him. Joey's father is the police chief of Fayetteville, and Joey's lawyer said entering a locked room, as well as the subsequent interrogation, constituted "police" action and not "parental" action, and since his dad failed to "Mirandize" him, the charge should be dismissed. [Fayetteville Observer, 8-16-08]

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