Money down a rat hole? Wait a minute, not so fast.!

As usual, these things are always buried back in the Business Section of the newspaper.  However, this one should have been Page One.

An article by Allan Sloan, Senior Editor Fortune Magazine, and known by many for his "Sloan Reports" on NPR's Morning Edition, claims in the latest edition of Fortune that... The Bailout is Working! 

"Not only did it forestall a worldwide financial meltdown, but a Fortune analysis shows that U.S. taxpayers are coming out ahead on it -- by at least $40 billion, and possibly by as much as $100 billion eventually."

"A key reason for the rescue's profitability is that the Federal Reserve System has already turned over more than $100 billion of bailout-related income to the Treasury, and is on track to turn over $85 billion more this year and next."

Ever since the Great Recession began, I have argued with my knee-jerk regressive family and friends that if one thing was learned from the Great Depression, it was that government should have jumped in much bigger and faster than it did.  This is not my idea.  It was the leading economic theory spearheaded by John Kenneth Galbraith.  Unfortunately, the rise of the Neo-cons in the 70's and their adoption of the "Trickle Down" theory espoused by economists like that darling of the far-right, Milton Friedman, set us on a course that ultimately proved to be disastrous, at least for the working class.

Thank goodness Bernanke and others were Galbraith economists or who knows where we would be.  Anyone who thinks that government does not have a major role to play in the economy is a fool.  The only questions are, what role and who's side are they on?


Here's the whole article:  The Bailout Is Working