Average voters should educate themselves on the crisis

If you’ve ever stood outside the Treasury Building in Washington, you’ve likely felt as any Middle-Age peasant must have standing outside his city’s cathedral.

Unfortunately, most of us are just about as confounded by the inner workings of the Treasury and the modern-age religion of money as that flea-ridden peasant must have been when he tried to make sense out of a Latin mass.

Consequently, today’s majority can still be found prostrated before the high alter of the financial clergy, waiting for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to come off the mount and reveal the secret word of the divine to us, the long-awaited message that will cure all our financial troubles.

And because Mr. Paulson’s recommendations require a level of competency far above the average American’s understanding of the economy, we’re all a little apprehensive of the drastic measures he has recommended. Why should we allow this man to spend $700 billion to subsidize the Wall Street wealthy while allowing the victims of their subprime scam to lose their homes?

The fact that the new strategy comes from the same morally compromised neo-conservatives who have a history of misrepresenting the costs and benefits of their plans does little to comfort the concerned.

Remember, we were promised we’d have a lightening war, neutralize an evil dictator’s capacity to destroy the world with his weapons of mass destruction all while establishing an oasis of democracy in the Middle East.

If you love revenge and execution, perhaps you thought Saddam’s hanging was sufficient payoff. In my estimation, though, President Bush came up short of these lofty ideals when he produced a wasteland of instability and an intensified hatred for the United States in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Moral of the story: We should be doing the cost-benefit analysis for ourselves this time. We need to figure out whether the risk of a larger banking meltdown is worth the $700 billion we’re about to spend to stop it.

Henry Paulson will tell you it is. He says you should be willing to pay higher taxes to make sure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not collapse. If they do, he says, middle-class families might continue losing their savings and homes.

We’ve heard that rhetoric before. Clearly we should be skeptical, but we should also be more educated. If we knew more about the economy, we’d be able to know whether Paulson is selling us economic salvation or just a modern-day indulgence.