The bailout bill, a $700 billion package to fix the financial crisis, didn’t pass the House today.  $700 billion.  Let’s write that out.  $700,000,000,000.00.  That’s a lot of freaking zeroes.  Democrats are blaming Republicans for putting ideology before the interests of the country and Republicans are blaming Democrats because Nancy Pelosi made a partisan speech before the vote.  It’s awful.  It’s a mess.  Of course, the fact that 40% of Democrats didn’t vote for it might say something was rotten about the deal anyway.

My understanding is this: if we don’t bail out Wall Street then we face a world economic collapse and the money Amanda and I have been putting into IRA accounts and such won’t be worth squat.  If we do the bail out, where do we get $700 billion from?  A lot of Main Street people (there’s been a lot of buzz about Wall Street vs. Main Street) are upset because if we’re going to spontaneously generate $700 billion they think it could go elsewhere, and not help out companies that put us in such a bind.

I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I’m no financial analyst and I have little clue as to the far-reaching ramifications if the House can’t pass something to help out the economy.  I know it would make things really rough, but part of me says that if we bail out these companies, what’s to stop them from being irresponsible again in the future?  And how many generations are going to be paying it off?  And will anything happen to the people who got us into this mess in the first place?

Ugh.

There wasn’t a whole lot that went on today that was personally exciting.  I worked, and I tried to finish up a bunch of things before the end of the month.  Amanda was going to go to lunch with Billy Supplee and Cyra Sherburn, but Cyra decided not to go, so Amanda told me she wouldn’t go to lunch with just Billy if it made me uncomfortable, which it didn’t.  I told her I was fine with it as long as they weren’t sitting there at lunch plotting how to kill me and make it look like an accident.

Reading the news (the stock market had its largest ever crash ever today in terms of points on the news of the bailout not being passed), I was a bit down before Amanda got home.  We slipped into mindless television for a bit, Smallville, Big Band Theory, How I Met Your Mother and Heroes, and I have to admit, we were able to put it behind us a bit.  TV is the new opiate of the masses, afterall.

I keep thinking that, overall, this shouldn’t affect us too terribly.  I mean, Amanda’s company is secure.  I would think it’s so now more than ever.  I mean, people need a place to live, and if they can’t get a loan for a house or they’re defaulting on their mortgages, they’ll go to apartments, right?  Either that or they’ll move in with their parents I guess, but there comes a time when you just can’t do that.  (I think.)

And I’m pretty secure, I think.  We’re not building a lot of brand new websites lately, but we’re keeping busy with updates and the like.  And as a matter of course these days, people need to have websites for their businesses, so I don’t think we’ll see much dropoff in hosting accounts.  So I feel like we’re pretty secure.

Maybe we’ll get some good news before long.

Zach Dotsey