Deal reached on bailout

Washington Post reported Congressional leaders and the Bush administration this morning said they had struck an accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

This is a big mistake. Instead of $700 Billion they should have appropriated $700 MILLION, half to be spent building new prisons, and half hiring special prosecutors to go after people that committed fraud in either getting mortgages they knew they could not pay for, or lending money to people they knew could not pay it back, and then lying to other financial institutions that then bought those loans, thinking they were good.

By the way, they just made up the $700 Billion numberto frighten everyone into rapid action.

House and Senate negotiators from both parties emerged with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. at 12:30 a.m. from a marathon session in the Capitol to announce that they had reached a tentative agreement on a proposal to give Paulson broad authority to organize one of the biggest government interventions in the private sector since the Great Depression.

This sets a precedent, and anyone that is in trouble will now expect the government to bail them out too.

Full details of the plan were not immediately available. Lawmakers said their staffs would be working through the night to assemble the package and post it on the Internet.