More Bailout Blues

As I was reading the news online this morning, I came across an article about how Congress has included a pay raise for federal judges in their $15 BILLION bailout package for the U.S. Auto Industry.
Article is here: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Pay-raise-for-judges-tucked-apf-13798044.html

So my question is this: If the United States is in financial dire straits (which it is), and we have such a high unemployment rate (533,000 jobs lost in November this year, and the unemployment rate is at 6.7%), why is the government awarding itself pay raises and bailing out every industry that asks? How can we afford a $5000 pay raise for EACH congressman and a 2.8% raise for every federal judge when we can't keep American employment going? Add this to the fact that the entire bailout system is failing - the companies involved have lied and purposely not revealed the extent of their problems to the U.S. people before (see article here ), and we start to see why the Federal government needs to start REALLY LOOKING at the things they're signing. AIG suddenly "finding" an additional $10 Billion in debt is a pretty grim indicator of how little the government's "oversight" seems to work.

Instead of just hemhorraging money at failing industries, the federal government needs to let the free market work itself out. Rather than trying to keep these companies "alive" for a few more months, we need to let CAPITALISM follow it's course. To demonstrate: if I had an "established" printing company that suddenly started to fail, would the government owe me any money? Or would my printing company fall by the wayside as a casualty of the free market system? Our economic system is based on competition and wise business practices; giving any company a leg-up without VERY good reason (or nationalizing the company - but that's a topic for another post) is foolhardy at best, and can become catastrophic at worst.

Rather than undercut the free market, we need to spend the money to revitalize American industry; build American factories and create American jobs that will put currency back into the economic structure. We don't need to just blindly throw money at our problems; we need to look for economically-viable solutions. Increase import tariffs and start producing what we need here at home - it helped bring us out of the Great Depression, so why wouldn't it work now? Creating domestic jobs and goods, while creating an incentive to "buy American" would certainly help our economy. Are we afraid of a little Nationalism?

I've heard it said that the two "engines" of the world economy are American consuming, and Chinese production. I say we re-build the system: Instead of relying on foreign powers for the bulk of our goods, we should create for ourselves and keep all that money here.