Bailout Wizard.

• Author: Hightower, Jim Allen
• Position: The Lowdown - Essay

There was a little news item recently about a man in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who was sentenced to six years in prison for robbing $20 from a child's piggy bank.

Think how much better things would have gone for him if only his name had been Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, or any of the other flamboyant figures of high finance on Wall Street. They are the ones that rigged the regulatory system so they could rob the piggy banks of millions of American homeowners.

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And when they got caught in the crash of their own house of cards, here came Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (himself a former wizard of Wall Street), sprinting toward them fast as he could--not to arrest the scofflaws, but to reward them with a twelve-figure taxpayer bailout.

You might recall that Paulson is the fellow who spent the last several months pooh-poohing the notion that anything was fundamentally wrong with the Street's house of cards. Yes, he kept telling us, there are some difficulties with those tacky subprime mortgages, but the problem is "contained," and the market will magically correct itself--even as more and more families were losing their homes, housing values were plummeting, the home construction industry was rolling into the ditch, and mortgage lenders were seeking the shelter of bankruptcy. Only when Wall Street itself began taking on a deathly pallor did Paulson suddenly bolt upright and shriek: "The sky is falling!"

So Paulson-the-capitalist now gives us an unlimited plan of unvarnished socialism to rescue the failed greedheads who did this to America (and to countries beyond). He got $700 billion from you and me ($2,000 per every man, woman, and child in America) so the government can buy up the bad bets that these speculators made. Trust me on this, he said.

Trust Paulson?

I'd sooner trust a coyote with my last lamb chop.

Here are a few reasons not to trust him:

One, so far, he's been consistently wrong in his judgments and actions.

Two, the $700...