The headline speaks of "economic analysts" but the only people quoted are law professors. What am I not understanding?

Analysts cannot predict the obvious.Their biases cloud the truth. More Republicans no doubt.
Watch reality unfold before your eyes.

Bro Peterson seems to have some insight. It will not work (bailout)Simple

So impatient! Only one day after the signing of the financial plan and everyone including investors in stocks are dissapointed that it has not worked yet. Instant Coffee!

I blast selfish, greedy, short sighted people. Instant gratificationites. So There!

Only 4:28 AM and already doing the Republican blame game.

Let's see, Community Reinvestment Act - Carter and Clinton Administrations.

Changing regulatory environment on banks "encouraging" them to make risky, subprime loans - Clinton Administration.

Defeated efforts to reel in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1999 and 2005 - Democrats Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.

$700 billion bailout designed, championed and pushed in less than one week - Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Yeah, sounds like a Republican problem to me.

Admitted, George Bush supported the Democrats bailout. And some Republicans have helped carry water for the Dems like Bob Bennett did in 1999. As a whole though you see Republicans very much opposed to both the Community Reinvestment Acts of 1977 and 1995, as well as this bailout.

What you are saying sounds goodm, though truth to the wind.

And bailout won't work. Just as 'We the People' took our stimulous checks and paid off debt, banks are going to take the $700 billion and not begin lending, but trying to balance their bottom lines/stop the bleeding.

This is Keynesian economics at it's worst. A shell game designed to fake economic prosperity.

Paying the piper now.

It is very interesting listening to all these economists that have studied the economy all their lives. They can't agree on the laws of economics. What does this tell us?

There is a book that gives very plain language to the laws of economics that govern this land. It is very plain to see those laws played out in exactness now. One of the biggest reasons America has enjoyed the best economy in the history of the world is because it was blessed by God, and another is that by and large the most of the participants have been honarable and honest in their dealings.

We seem to not have as many honarable and honest men in this country and therefore God is not blessing us in the same way.

I'm a Californian. Schwartzenager wants a bailout at my expense. He keeps hiring more people and giving more benefits. I will be bankrupt if this continues.

Taxpayer

Where were the "economic analysts"? I read the article because I was interested in what ECONOMISTS had to say about this, not a bunch of lawyers. Lawyers are not "economic analysts". What a joke! The headline could not have been more misleading.

To 7:22, you have obviously never studied economics. Your comments reveal your ignorance of the subject.

To JMT:
You missed the memo that the bailout plan was the fruit of the Bush Administration. The Republicans controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress in 2005 and yet you blame Democrats for that year's inaction.

Making home financing available to less well off Americans isn't a flawed idea. Making too much financing available and talking them into loans that have wildly escalating payments is an entirely different matter. Creating opportunity is good business. Greedily setting people up to fail is bad business.

Both parties share the blame, but don't try to ignore the unmitigated Republican disaster called the Bush Administration and the first 6 years that the "R's" controlled Congress.

As to the bailout, that solution is akin to taking an antibiotic to treat a virus. It won't help, wastes money, and might actually cause more troubles. Both parties jumped into that tar pit hand in hand.

To Matthew:

Relax with the republican controlled congress stuff. Everybody knows that the minority controls the senate and the majority controls the house. Unless its a huge majority, as long as the parties bicker with each other nothing gets done. I do agree with you that both parties are to blame for this problem. But what have the democrats done since they took over? Mostly they've just held hearings to try to blame republicans for the countries problems.

Bush is likely the unluckiest president ever. Not all this is his fault. He hasn't been great but he hasn't been the worst. (Why was Jimmy Carter any better, we had the same problems with him in there minus 9/11)

I agree with you that the blame game being played is silly. Its the bickering congress thats the problem.

This article or the introspection it is trying to show is, well a week late.

Folks,

Please don't be fooled, millions of Americans will never forgive the bush administration for allowing lehman to fail, simply because if they had done anything, the media would have written the news about how bush saved his cousin George Walker's company from failing, as a result and due to other reasons, lehman was left to dry, and because Goldman had $20 billion worth of positions with AIG and failure would have meant a lot of the administrations top notch folks going out of money including hank paulson, AIG was saved. Americans please wake up against the conflict of Justice. Support republicans blindly because they know which of your buttons to push (abortion, gay issues, etc, )when pure virtues are thrown by the road side for greed, dishonesty, selfishness, disrespect for law and constitution, etc. oh men!! when shall we wake up. And then John McCain opens his mouth waawaa!!.

"If you're in a hole, the way that you get out of the hole is to stop digging," he said. "We just keep borrowing more and more money in different sectors of our economy, but it's time for us to start focusing on thrift and to impose comprehensive regulation of the consumer finance industry."

Geeezzz people are dumb. Obviously we have to focus on thrift NOW but BEFORE we can do that had to FIRST put the FIRE OUT that was burning and we did that with a $700 billion fire extinguisher. Once the fire is out we can then CHANGE the way we do things going forward. I am so SICK of all this second guessing from these so called economists - let's forget the past and fix the future!!!

people would be crying alligator tears if the bail out would have failed to pass congress. All this back and forth conjecturing debating the value of the bailout is like debating the value of a emergency heart by-pass surgery. Don't do the surgery and the patient dies .. and then where are ya??? After the surgery you can change the patient's eating and exercise habits along with a host of other changes but a dead patient offers nothing!!!

All sarcasm aside, I am one Republican who happens to be HAPPY that Obama is leading in the polls and most certainly win the presidency. Not only that but congress will also be a democratic majority. The last time this country was actually in "good shape" economically was during the Clinton presidency. The 1990's - what a great decade for American. We actually had a SURPLUS instead of a deficit. Clinton was an immoral, shady bugger but the man did get us out of debt and he actually inherited a HUGE debt form George Bush the first. Obama has shady friends and is as liberal as the day is long BUT getting away from the Bush/Cheney circus as well as the GOP fiasco in congress is the best move this country could possibly make going forward.

To Reality:
Iraq is very real. That falls 100% on the head of George W. Bush and it wasn't bad luck. It was and is stupidity. Jimmy Carter was unlucky and ineffectual (in some areas). He may have done better and redeemed his presidency if the American people had given him a second term. The world will never know. George Bush has been actively bad. That is reality. Books have already been written about how bad and there are hundreds more yet to be written. George Bush and his administration have set a new low.

Even so, George Bush isn't responsible for the current economic mess we are in. That took a whole bunch of people a long time to accomplish. But his administration has severly hampered our country's abilities and options for dealing with it.

What if the $700 Billion wasn't a fire extinguisher but gasoline? Fixing a problem by borrowing money because too many people borrowed too much money sounds laughable. Obviously it is much more complicated than that, but it comes close to capturing the essense of the problem many have with the bailout.

2:17 Sorry to burst your bubble, but Bill Clinton had nothing to do with the high tech boom of the late 1990s and therefore did not have anything to do with the budget surpluses that were generated from the resulting increases in tax revenue. Economic illiteracy is an enormous problem in this country! The bottom line is that association is not necessarily causation. It wasn't in this case.

To Obama will save us: Do you have any idea what you mean when you say Clinton got us out of debt? That's totally false. You have no clue of what the deficit is. The deficit is the INTEREST on our debt. So Clinton paid the interest on our debt, whoopteedoodaa. Give me a break!

The decision to take economics out of high school curriculuums was a mistake. The general public would at least understand some basic principles. We are in deep doo doo.