Talking points on financial crisis

• Is it just me or does this $700 billion bailout plan sound a little too much like a bribe? It seems as if Washington is saying to this elusive mass of nameless, faceless investors, "Hey, we'll make you a deal: We'll put up the money, and you won't sell your stocks, okay?" Case in point: The Dow rebounded more than 900 points today, the greatest single-day gain in the history of the stock market. And the only reason given was the promise that all of wonderfully generous taxpayer money would be heading their way soon.

• According to research I've been doing online, only about 48 percent of the U.S. population owns stock, and that includes those with only marginal investments such as 401Ks and mutual funds. Additionally, only about 35 percent of the population has more than $5,000 invested, and a mere 20 percent of investors own 90 percent of stock. Just like wealth, that's a lot of economic power concentrated in the hands of relatively few investors, thus negating the perceived "freedom" of the market. Example: Twenty percent of the population just influenced the United States Congress to launch an unprecedented rescue mission with speed that the residents of New Orleans were told in 2005 was impossible. Something tells me that if residents of New Orleans owned 90 percent of the stock on Wall Street, Congress, FEMA, and President Bush himself would have swum the Gulf of Mexico to stop Katrina in its path.

• Most investors would probably say to me and the millions of other Americans who are skeptical and scornful of this bailout that we're not savvy enough in the ways of the market to appreciate how perilously close we came to economic disaster. I say to them, we live in a culture that criticizes women for being emotional, unstable, fickle, and volatile, yet we place our faith and financial security in an establishment that fluctuates regularly and wildly based on rumor, conjecture, prediction, and speculation. PMS is a walk in a park compared to the tension and anxiety on Wall Street every time a quarterly report or investor analysis is released. And now that a government bailout precedent has been set, what incentive do investors have to act wisely in the future? If anything, I think we can expect the behavior of the market to be even more erratic.

• For years, welfare has been criticized as the cause of everything from laziness to teen pregnancy. A program that accounts for less than 2 percent of the national budget comes under constant fire for being too generous and fostering feelings of entitlement and sloth. Yet in one fell swoop, we're handing over TWICE the welfare budget to people and companies whose net worth used to exceed some countries' GDP, and are hardly being given the time or opportunity to think or respond. It's the height of hypocrisy. People who can't afford their own home, health care, childcare, education, or even food and gas are made to feel almost inhuman for their reliance on the government for basic sustenance. Yet, Wall Street execs are not only accepting this federal money, they're telling the rest of us it's for our own good.

• Furthermore, AIG had the gall to continue with a $440,000 executive retreat after accepting an $85 million government loan to stay afloat. More than $23,000 was spent on spa treatments alone. I haven't heard of any heads rolling for that. Yet a bank will charge me a $36 NSF fee if I splurge on dinner at The Outback after depositing my paycheck because they decided to hold said check until the next business day.
  

The state of Denmark doesn't have anything on all that's rotten in the United States.