Last week, flying in the face of their constituents, the dung sculptors in congress passed a “bailout bill.” Not the original bill that was frightening and socialistic - a revised bill that was frightening, socialistic, and included 100 billion in pork projects including (I’m not making this up) a huge amount of money to NASCAR track owners, funding for a company that manufactures wooden arrows…. the list goes on.

Alec “I want Republicans dead” Baldwin went on Bill “I’ve become a caricature of a liberal nutjob” Maher’s show and pointed out that only a person with the intellect of a toenail clipping would think this bill was a good idea, and that both parties are to blame for the mess in the first place.

When you have hard line communists like Baldwin slamming the Democrats in congress, you know we’ve entered uncharted territory.

The fact is, most of us will be fine. If you still have a lot of years in the workforce ahead of you and you’re not a chucklehead, you’ll probably keep your job and the stock market will work its way back up. It’s the people who were about to retire whose investments have gone down 25% in the last six months that I worry about. That’s the difference between enjoying a retirement filled with fun and vacations and living in a studio apartment and driving a Hyundai.

The government, of course, will bail out old people on the working middle classes’ nickel, so not to worry, old people. You can keep on selling out your kids and grandkids so you can travel to Europe during your retirement.

Greatest generation, my @#$@.

If they pass this revised bailout bill tonight, you’d better hide your wallet and stock up on non-perishables.

This is the most anti-American, anti-capitalistic concept ever cooked up, and it’s been cooked up by a guy who’s supposedly a conservative Republican.

Call your representatives and tell them where they can stick this steaming pile of legislation.

However, in my quest to save $20, I ended up spending $250.

Saturday evening, I was minding my own business, weed whacking my back yard. I had not received the memo that humongous garden spiders now owned my back yard. I quickly ran face-first into a huge web strung between two trees.

Like most people, my first reaction to running into a spider web was to flail wildly in a manner that would make my neighbors call the police. However, my first swipe to remove the web from my face resulted in me getting my left ring finger caught momentarily in the motor of the weedeater.

Naturally, I pulled away quickly, leaving a nice chunk of my finger in the weedeater’s motor. Unlike a lot of cuts that don’t really bleed right away, this one immediately began spurting blood everywhere. I decided I should take a break and find some soap so I could assess the damage.

After running some water over the wound, I could see that I had managed to take a complete chunk out of the finger, all the way down to the soft tissue. There was no skin left remaining, so going to the hospital for stitches would have been futile. It wasn’t a large enough area to get a skin graft, so the best the hospital could have done was clean it out and wrap it… which I was fully capable of doing myself.

I washed it with soap and water, which didn’t feel good, then I dunked it in hydrogen peroxide, which felt like I had dunked it into an open flame. I didn’t learn until the next day that using peroxide on a wound with exposed soft tissue is the biological equivalent to pouring hydrochloric acid on it. Ouch.

I put about half a tube of Neosporin on it and wrapped it up, then went back to cutting my grass. I even played bass at church Sunday morning in spite of the fact that it was swollen, throbbing, and was still bleeding steadily.

In the back of my mind I knew I needed to go get a tetanus booster, since I hadn’t had one in about 12 years, but I told myself I’d cleaned it well enough. My mother talked me into it yesterday, so first thing today, I went and got an Adacel booster.

Now my arm feels like someone punched me with brass knuckles. But that’s good, it distracts me from the pain of my original wound.

For $20, I could have paid the kid next door to cut the grass and saved myself the doctor bill.

So are we on the brink of utter disaster, the likes of which have never been seen before?

Should the taxpayers pay a million gadrillion dollars to bail out shady corporations and help hobos keep their homes they can’t afford?

I read a story of a city bus driver who, all by himself, purchased a $300,000 house 4 years ago. Of course, he bought it on a ridiculous ARM, probably around 1.25%. On a 30 year note, that initial payment works out to $999.76, not including taxes and insurance. His taxes and insurance on a house that size would be at least $200 a month, so we’ll round to $1,200 a month for his initial payment. Let’s assume the bus driver is a union bozo making more than he’s worth, say $20 an hour. For the record, that’s about $40,000 a year, or $3,400 a month, gross. Taxes would take that down to about $2,600 net. If this guy has no other credit cards, car loans, or anything, his debt/income ratio is 44%.

Most reasonable people would agree that your home really should only be about 25-30%. Even the most liberal ‘normal’ banks will not go above 42%. However, a lot of the shady banks would go as high as 50% with no money down.

Let’s now assume this guy has a car payment of $300 a month, and he drives 1200 miles a month, getting about 25 miles to the gallon. I think those are reasonable assumptions. He will spend 168 a month for his gas. Then he also needs insurance, at least another $75 a month. That means he is spending $543 a month on his car. So, his total monthly obligation so far is $1743.

Call me crazy, but he’s also going to have utilities to pay including natural gas, electric, and sewer/trash/water. That’s a minimum (assuming no television service). A home that large would suck at least $300 a month to power it up, so now we’re up to $2,043. Remember, his take home is only $2,600.

Now, does this dude have health insurance? Even for a young, single guy, his insurance is going to cost $100 a month. $2,143.

I’m also assuming he eats sometimes. I know from experience you can eat cheap if you’re a single guy, so we’ll give him $100 a month for that. $2,243.

General wisdom is that home repairs related simply to entropy will be about 1-3% of the home’s value each year. For this home, that would be $3,000 - $9,000 a year. We’ll be gentle and assume the lower number. That’s $250 a month. He now has $7.00 left over each month.

And remember, we’re assuming he has ZERO credit cards.

Now, his home is not longer worth that much because the bubble has burst. He can’t get refinanced, and his ARM is about to reset to, say 6.50%. That’s being gentle. His house payment is now $1,896 (plus the $200 in taxes and insurance) so $2,096. Or in other words, an additional $896 a month.

He has $7.00 extra to put towards it.

So what am I driving at with this super long example? Well, the government wants to buy up all of this bad paper and basically force banks to extend these teaser rates so Mr. Bozo can keep his house. Never mind that he purchased a home at least 2.5 times what he could reasonably afford. The taxpayers are now going to end up footing the bill for his decision.

W says that if we don’t bail out the banks who lent money to hobos, we’re on the verge of a depression the likes of which no one has seen before. I think W is full of crap.

Every time we bail out a big corporation we are increasing the tax burden on the middle class and small businesses. Why should we reward the greed, corruption, and stupidity of corporations at the expense of hard working people and small businesses?

The answer is, we shouldn’t.

But what does that mean to the economy? No, it’s not the end of the world. I believe that if you work hard and you aren’t in a silly industry (making Hummers comes to mind), you’ll be fine. There will be a lot of big banks going under, and there will be a lot of people in financial services losing their phony-baloney jobs. And that’s how it should be. If you were greedy, stupid, and/or corrupt, you deserve to sit in the unemployment line for a while.

It’s called a market adjustment. If we don’t let it adjust now and finally purge out all of the bad mortgage-backed securities, we’re just delaying the inevitable. The longer we put it off, the worse it’s going to be.

Call your senator and tell him we’re ready to face the music of a recession now rather than delaying it until we get a depression instead.