Tim McMahon stood beside a big hole in the ground and worked to unknot nearly 100 yards of tangled plastic cable, which seemed as good a symbol as any for what’s happening on Capitol Hill this week.
I stopped to watch, impressed. “We should send you to Washington and see if you can sort out the mortgage crisis,” I said.
McMahon, who was working on a fiber-optics box, shook his head and politely declined. “I’d be there the rest of my life,” he said. “For the rest of my son’s life.”
Like most sentient adults, McMahon has spent the last few news cycles with a growing mix of anger and anxiety. Americans by nature aren’t a despairing people. But ponying up hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the economy because reckless greedheads treated it as their personal Monopoly game? Well, you want to hoist the black flag and start tossing the guilty off the stern.
Now it appears Congress is stalled on an agreement to bail out Wall Street.
Too bad no one has a plan to bail out people like John Griffin.
Griffin, who lives in Denver, lost his job in biomedical sales this week. He is 50 and pays $6,000 in annual HMO costs, none of it tax deductible since he doesn’t own a home and doesn’t meet the itemized-deduction minimum.
Because he is single, the safety net of a second household income doesn’t exist. Unemployment benefits will be about 20 percent of his last paycheck and will last 26 weeks.
The man has a doctorate in microbiology and a master’s degree in business, but there’s one thing he can’t figure out: Why he gets kicked in the teeth while the people who dragged us into this mess are rewarded with whopping salaries and even bigger bonuses.
“I have played by the rules my entire life,” he told me. “Now I’m told that the bailout will cost me $3,000 of my future tax dollars, in addition to the money I am paying for the war, and it’ll be going to the Wall Street bankers that lobbied for and bought the legislation that is killing me.
“For the first time in my life I am afraid for the future, and I think our leaders should be too,” he said. “If they get this wrong, there is no telling what the working people in this country will do.”
Although he finds it galling, Griffin realizes the bailout must occur. But he has definite ideas about how it should work.
“First off, there should be no money to hedge funds under any circumstances,” he said. “These folks were highly speculative, played the tax laws for all they were worth, and are at the root of the problem. They also need to pass credit-card laws that reinstitute reasonable usury limits.
“The ‘I’ve got mine and tough luck for you’ Wall Street attitude has to end now,” he said.
The presidential election is less than six weeks away. New-home sales have fallen to a 17-year low and the jobless rate is rising. And we’re still paying for a costly war.
On Thursday morning I heard someone at a diner crack wise about whether these Wall Street gamblers would start hurling themselves from office windows, like some of their predecessors did in the crash of ’29.
Me, I’m marveling that the citizenry — hardworking folks such as Griffin and McMahon who will be underwriting this bailout — haven’t chucked these dice rollers to the pavement themselves.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
