During a conversation Tuesday, I mentioned in passing that I thought Monday’s bailout vote, and resultant 777 point fall in the Dow was purely political theatre. The person I was speaking with asked me what I meant by that.

I explained, “It’s simple.  1) They vote down a horribly crafted bailout plan, 2) the markets stumble, 3) everyone panics, and agrees to support the next bailout (even if it’s obviously worse than the Monday plan).” 

Well, we’ve seen exactly this scenario play out. The senate took the same basic bailout plan, added some perks to make it “more acceptable” to the Republican leadership, and changed it from a $700 Billion plan, to an $800 Billion plan.

Our senators, here in Tennessee both voted for this new package, and this morning, the new package was rolled out in front of House of Representatives once again. The house passed the newer, bigger, bill 263 to 171.  The thing to understand is that both of these bail out bills are several hundred pages long, and that they were brought up for a vote sooner than anyone could have possibly read the entire thing.

Prior to the vote, the Dow had surged upwards around 250 points, and after the vote, most of that gain evaporated.

Now, what does this bailout plan mean to you, as a citizen and taxpayer?  The current US population is slightly over 305 million people, so your personal share of the $800,000,000,000 bailout is $2623, plus accumulating interest.  To put it more clearly, for a family of four, the federal government has just made you liable for $10,500 of the bailout.

That’s on top of the record breaking national debt which recently crossed the $10 trillion dollar mark (that’s 10,000,000,000,000 dollars).

Your share of the national debt is roughly $33,000 (plus accumulating interest).  And once again, for a family of four, your liability runs to $132,000 of the national debt.

There are rumors on the Internet that the bailout is actually required because the Chinese and Saudi investors want to be bought out of the several hundred Billion dollars worth of bad debt that they’ve bought up to try to stabilize our economy.  The rumors state that the hole card, that’s forcing this bailout is the threat of moving the international  float to a different currency, instead of dollars, which would immediately devalue the dollar, worldwide.