Quote Originally Posted by DarkTemplarZero View Post
Ok, investing in a bank != owning it necessarily. If you have some experience working with start-ups, you'll see that the government is like a really slacker angel investor; the government has lots of other things to do, so they'll just throw some money at the banks to keep them going in exchange for hopefully a bigger payout later and not be involved in the day to day matters. Quite frankly, this would be much more capitalist than the bailout; the bailout is just the government giving money to private enterprise with no possible return. It's not even a loan, it's just "hey, here's some cash home slice". However, investing in such a diverse collection of banks would give the government a high probability of a big return. In other words, instead of forcing taxpayers to swallow Wall Street's mistakes, you give Wall Street enough money to get back on its feet, make them pay for the disaster later, and use the return to help education or something nice like that.
See, that's something I could actually support. Considering how slow Congress works, though, it'd take something like five years to get it approved.

Oh, wait. They've known about this situation for about five years. Uh... five extra years?