it's personal (updated once)

Around a year ago, I learned that when investing for a long time horizon (like retirement), someone my age should put everything in mutual funds because the stock market has historically given an average annual rate of return of 10%. I took what retirement savings I had, and invested them in mutual funds. Around that same time, I bought a condo.

Perfect timing, apparently. So through no fault of my own, between the housing market crash and the stock market crashes, the markets have fucked me. Now, complaining about that is not fair. Whenever the economy suffers, people feel real pain on a level that I can only imagine. The 2.2 million people who have lost their jobs this year... every one of those people is someone whose life has been turned upside down. 2.2 million is a big number to wrap your head around. But just think about how much it would suck for you to lose your job, or for your parents to have lost their jobs when you were growing up, and then imagine that happening 2.2 million times.

Now, the point is this. Competition in free markets is the most incredible and efficient mechanism ever devised to improve the quality of lives of people by generating wealth. Before 1800, over 85% of the world lived in what we would consider to be extreme poverty. Now, less than 15% lives in extreme poverty. A combination of technology, and the magic of free markets is to thank for that.

However, markets can fail, markets have failed (see: Great Depression), and because of this people need to be protected from such catastrophic failures. The mechanism to do this is regulation. After the Great Depression, the government insured bank deposits in order to restore the trust necessary to keep the banking system functioning. Since the government was putting its ass on the line by guaranteeing your bank deposits, in return they required that banks submit to a certain level of regulation. After all, it would be dumb for the government to insure banking deposits if there was no way to prevent banks from taking unreasonable risks.

Over the years, all sorts of investment banks and the like have popped up, which do not fall under the scope of existing regulations. Unfortunately, the political party that has been in the White House for the last 8 years and in control of Congress for 6 of the last 8 years has an ideological opposition to even the concept of regulation. Republicans in Congress have been blocking efforts by Democrats to tighten regulations on lenders in the housing market, which led to more predatory lending and loose standards for mortgages. Clearly, this lack of sufficient regulation is part of what led the housing market to collapse.

Republicans have also fought against regulation in just about every other areas, such as extending reasonable regulations to investment banks. Now, you can argue that since the government does not insure investments at an investment bank, why should those banks submit to tighter regulation? They can do what they want with their money. Well, as we have seen recently, these investment banks have gotten so huge that the government cannot let them fail. To do so would be to allow the economy to collapse. That means that the government, meaning taxpayers, meaning you and me, is forced to bail them out when they are about to fail. And what this does is provide such banks with an incentive to act irresponsibly, and you're the one that gets fucked.

You would think, in light of all this, no one would consider voting Republican this year. I'll end with an anecdote. I don't like anecdotes in general, but this one perfectly summarizes what is wrong with the Republican party's cluelessness about the economy. I was listening to a Senate committee hearing on C-SPAN where they were debating whether or not to bail our Bear-Stearns, and some Republican Senator takes the floor. He goes on and on about how bailing out Bear-Stearns is socialism, and how the invisible hand of the market will take care of everything. Well great. I'm glad Mr. Dumbfuck Republican Senator has worked for his entire career to contribute to this crisis by blocking any reasonable regulation, and now when the crisis is upon us, he's so consumed by his free-market ideaology that he can't even bring himself to do what it takes to solve the problem. What a fucking dumbass. Please. Please don't vote Republican this year. For the sake of your job, for the sake of your retirement. For the sake of all the people who are suffering from the loss of a job, all the people suffering from their retirement going up in smoke, for the sake of your future, for the sake of your childrens' future. Just don't be a dumbass.

UPDATE
Well, it looks like the initial proposal is a $700 Billion dollar bailout with taxpayer money. Nearly a trillion dollars. Think about this. The Republican party has allowed an unregulated environment where rich investors have been having a field day for years, earning massive profits on their investments and getting extremely rich(er). When it all spirals out of control, WE have to pony up $700 billion in the hopes that that will be enough to prevent the economy from utterly collapsing. That's approximately $2300 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. And I haven't even said anything about how our long-term security is harmed by going almost a trillion more dollars into debt.