Hey, did anyone notice, we are on a bubble binge?

George W. Bush opened wide the government’s coffers to give alms to Big Business, and reaffirmed his populist credentials, by throwing a few hundred-dollars checks at Joe Sixpack.

Now Obama is opening wide the government coffers to give alms, ostensibly to those left underwater when the housing-bubble burst, but ultimately, to bail out investors, who gambled big and lost.

Reaching deep into the bag holding our tax dollars, the Obama Administration moves the portfolio limits on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac up by $50 billion each, and the Treasury doubles its preferred stock purchase agreements with the companies to $200 billion each.

The rule preventing the now government-controlled giants from owning or guaranteeing mortgages exceeding 80% of the property’s value, is going out of the window, for already guaranteed loans. This is to allow people who made bad purchasing decisions, to refinance at lower rates, using the tax dollars of those who didn’t make such bad decisions.

Uncle Sam will also pay banks up to $1,000 and investors $1,500, to modify bad loans, and will even pay $5,000 to each “bad” borrower, if they become good, like the rest of us, and make their payments over 5 years.

All great news, if:

(a) you bought a house that you really couldn’t afford, but don’t want to give it up;
(b) you are an investor, who took high risks chasing high returns, but now hope the taxpayers will offset the losses; or
(c) you packaged “innovative” investment vehicles, which were both “safe” and offered high returns, and made out like a bandit, but now hope the liabilities will end up with Uncle Sam.

For the rest of us, it just sucks.

But back to bubbles: If we all agree, that we had a housing bubble, doesn’t it seem obvious, that housing prices might be too high? And they will have to come down, to a level at which we, the “market,” feel that prices are “fair?”

Doesn’t anyone notice, that this package is the equivalent of blowing air into a broken bubble? Except that the air is very expensive, and it’s our tax dollars.

Charles Robert Darwin
12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882

Charles Robert Darwin, the man who invented the modern office chair and who proposed the theory of natural selection, would be 200 years and 5 days today.

Had he gone on the starvation diet, and extended his lifespan by about 127 years, he may have lived to laugh (or cry) at the born-again, yet non-evolved, ex-President George W. Bush.

Since Charles didn’t know about the starvation diet, he died in 1882. But not before becoming the first person of record, to put wheels on his desk chair, so he can glide around his laboratory and reach his specimens easier.

Amazingly, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the majority of the modern ape-derivatives over-populating our planet, still believe that a large hairy guy with booming voice “made heaven and earth,” and then fashioned another little hairy guy, out of dust, or a blood clot, take your pick. It was, for a while, truly a “man’s world.”

And it all happened less than 10,000 years ago, depending on who’s God-inspired math you rely upon. So believe most poor, uneducated souls in the Third World, as well as a surprisingly large portion of the generally over-fed and under-educated North American public (yeah, this includes the Canadians, too.)

Such stupidity would be funny, if it didn’t impact the rest of us in so many ways. Most importantly, by filling Sunday morning TV with psychotic-looking characters with bad hair-dos, waiving their arms and asking the denser among us to send-in their salaries/pensions/welfare checks to them.

So, say I, let there be light! Or, at least, let there be better Sunday morning programming.

The World of Reason is upon us.