'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.'

I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully nervous about all these bailouts and stimulus plans.

Cary Doctorow at Boing Boing says the Bailout costs more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Vietnam war and NASA's lifetime budget COMBINED.

There seems to be no shame I just wonder how Merrill Lynch paid out $15 billion in bonuses after it took $10 billion from TARP.  John Carney calls it Wall Street's Sick Psychology of Entitlement. 

Even the sharpest critics of the bailout never imagined that it would be used to make wealthy idiots even wealthier.

It seems to have embarrassed Bank of America sufficiently that they have shown the door to former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.
Mr. Thain resigned from Bank of America on Thursday following news that Merrill Lynch had rushed out its year-end bonuses, paying them just before Bank of America completed its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and sought $20 billion in additional government bailout money.

Nick Gillespie says
taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans.

Political interference seen in bank bailout decisions
"It's totally arbitrary," says South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. "If you've got the right lobbyist and the right representative connected to Washington or the right ties to Washington, you get the golden tap on the shoulder," says Gov. Sanford, a Republican.

Instapundit hit a bullseye when he wrote
This is not so much a stimulus, as a massive transfer of wealth from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.

It's a good thing that the majority of boomers plan on working in retirement, because more and more will have no other choice,

I want some TARP, they're giving money away for free

After reading Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 years by the senior economics editor of the Wall St Journal, the book seems prescient.
For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

A few weeks ago I started a post entitled "What are we afraid of".  I didn't publish it because it was all too depressing, so instead I just focused on just how big is a trillion.    But I want to include some quotes by the Anchoress
I wonder if we are finally moving past the adolescent angst, and the numbness, and ... simply waking up to the fact that a bunch of loud, exploitative so-called “friends” crashed the house, called it a party, drank all the liquor, cracked Mom’s prize crystal egg and then decided to have a tug-of-war donnybrook on the front lawn before toilet papering the trees, puking and passing out. The press? Some “friends.” Congress? Some “statesmen.”

Hungover, we’re stumbling around, and realizing that if we do not start demanding adult behavior, adult leadership, less spin and a little honesty, not only from our leadership and our “elites” but from each other, we’re not going to be around to demand much of anything, of anyone.

She in turn quotes Peggy Noonan
In terms of public support, Mr. Obama shouldn't get too abstract. He should be thinking hardhats. People want to make their country stronger—literally, concretely, because the things they fear (terrorism, global collapse) are so huge and amorphous. Lately I think the biggest thing Americans fear, deep down—the thing they'd say if you could put the whole nation on the couch and say, "Just free associate, tell me what you fear?"—is, "I am afraid we will run out of food. And none of us have gardens, and we haven't taught our children how to grow things. Everything is bought in a store. What if the store closes? What if the choke points through which the great trucks travel from farmland to city get cut off? I have two months of canned goods. I'm afraid."

But it was this anecdote that Peggy Noonan told in 2005 that really got me.
Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford's lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It's called "Symptoms of Withdrawal." At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford's mother's apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn't gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. "Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta." Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy "took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

Mr. Lawford continued, "The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of 'maybe we shouldn't go there.' Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on."

Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family--that it might "fall apart." But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . ..

Atlas shrugged.