EDITORIAL: Hard to understand a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street

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Most of us living in Central Nebraska have been struggling to come to grips with the staggering amount of money flippantly being bantered about this week in Washington and on Wall Street. To listen to the talking heads of the assorted news networks and the blathering nonsense of talk radio, the fact that $700 billion is on the verge of being handed to the Treasury Department to prop up renegade Wall Street investment firms is just another bump in the economic road.

$700 billion is ridiculously huge. It will be added to the existing national debt and bring that amount to over $11.3 trillion. Consider that when the Bush administration took possession of the national checkbook in 2001, the national debt was $5.7 trillion. Anyone with a modicum of business sense should feel a burn in the tummy while orchestrating a borrow-and-spend policy with little hope of being able to respond to a national financial emergency such as the one now rotting on the nation's collective doorstep. Yet the administration did little in the way of preventive actions to avoid this meltdown.

Each person in the nation will soon be the owner of a $35,000 piece of the national debt as a result of this week's Wall Street mess. The nation will spend $500 billion this year in interest alone to pay the national debt.

Through no fault of their own, every Nebraskan will suffer at the hands of the Wall Street dandies who sailed past a reduced regulatory mechanism that allowed these companies to make up the rules as they went along. "Trust us," they chortled. "We are too big to fail," they harrumphed.

Perhaps part of the Wall Street executives' fiscal rehabilitation should be a stint in the bowels of a Nebraska auto repair shop or a farm implement dealer. These Gucci- wearing thieves would get a dose of a hard day's work and how to manage a business. The owners would gladly explain some simple business practices like not taking on more debt than you can repay. Or don't give customers credit when it's obvious they can't repay it. Most housewives in Grand Island could explain how the family checkbook needs to balanced every month. It may be a new concept to our Wall Street brothers and sisters, but with some tutoring, even these Ivy League graduates may be able to eventually comprehend it. Maybe. They may be too preoccupied with the dust on their loafers to fully appreciate that their ballooned bonuses need to be earned rather than expected.

The greed of American financial executives in the last decade is nothing short of a national tragedy. And for some reason, the workers of America get to bail them out of their financially toxic hot tub.