The New (and Better) Bail-Out Plan According to a Tax-Payer

Instead of giving billions of dollars to bankers, to Wall Street, to Freddie and Fannie, to auto makers, to investment firms who invested unwisely, to all those big businesses with their hands out and their greed still apparent, and doing it all in the name of "saving the economy" with little or no regard to the millions of Americans who make up that economy - instead of that - why not allocate the same billions to us, the people, the ones who are going to foot the bill in the end regardless of who the direct recepient is, the ones who are out of work, who are drowning under mortgages which are eating 50% of their paychecks each month and let them, let us, pay off our mortgages and our outstanding credit cards and our bank loans and our auto loans?

The money would flow from us right back into the business institutions who are begging for government assistance dollars, thus easing their self-made crunch as well as our own. The dollars would circulate - but widely instead of narrowly - and I sincerely doubt that a nation composed of individuals who are mostly (or totally) out of personal debt would object to eventually paying higher taxes to repay the government bail-out loan which came to THEM instead of bypassing them and going directly to the very people who either acted irrationally and irresponsibly with their money and/or outright misrepresented themselves, lied to their customers and ripped them off in the first place.

I've been listening to CNN all morning and I've yet to see how the common man is going to benefit, other than very very indirectly, and, more likely, not at all, from a plan which will surely, certainly, without a doubt, cost them several billions of additional tax dollars in the end.

If we are going to have to bear the cost of a government bail out (and it becomes more and more apparent that we are) shouldn't we, at the very least, be the ones being bailed?