The house is on fire

I’ve become convinced that the bail-out is necessary, although as you may have heard, according to Congress, it is no longer a Wall Street bail-out; it is now a “middle class tax cut, Main Street economic stabilization plan,” or some such nonsense. If these guys were as creative at problem-solving as they are at Orwellian language distortion we’d be in good shape.

The simplest and best analogy I’ve heard was Obama’s, who said if you lived next door to an odious person who smoked in bed and left candles burning all night long, and his house caught on fire, you wouldn’t stand around saying, “serves him right.” You’d call the fire department and grab a garden hose, because no matter how big a jerk he was, and no matter how badly he deserved it, it would be in your best interest to act. First of all, the fire could spread to your house, and even if it didn’t, a burned-out hulk sitting next door would depress values for everyone on the block.

I had time to read the papers cover-to-cover this morning, and there were at least a dozen examples, at every level of the economic ladder, where the credit crisis is starting to hurt everyone – not to mention the trillion-dollar meltdown in the Dow this week. It seems clear that action in necessary. Unfortunately, the power to act is in the hands of the Detroit City Council – er, I mean Congress. God knows what sort of monstrosity they will ultimately inflict on us.

Charlie Rose is interviewing Warren Buffett live at 9:00 pm EST tonight on PBS. Maybe he can make some sense out of all this.