The latest round of Senate talks on the “bailout” package still hasn’t addressed directly helping the people who are being asked to foot the bill.

Reminds me of Wimpy- who wants a hamburger today, but will gladly pay you Tuesday – without saying what Tuesday in what year, with what money.

The bone that’s being thrown is raising the FDIC insurance level to $250K. You think anyone facing spiraling credit card rates and fees, predatory loans or foreclosure has over $100K in the bank? Didn’t think so.

To right the economy and get the public spending, banks lending, and some sort of semblance of sanity to emotion driven markets- we need systemic change, not window dressing- or the proverbial lipstick on a pig.

There have been a bunch of e-mails going around suggesting we just split up the $700 Billion and send it out to every individual in the country to let them pay off their debt and get on with it (I call this the payout bailout). Of course, this is a nice feel good Republican solution- we’ve tried to send people money before to “stimulate the economy” and it did- short term. This won’t do anything to stop the Wall Street Casino from continuing to play Russian Roulette with gigantic sums of money that’s been entrusted to them for “safe-keeping” in the form of pension funds and retirement accounts.

However, at this point- maybe we just let Wall Street suffer- foreclose on a few of the biggies, and do go with the payout bailout solution. Even if we capped the payoff to taxpayers at incomes under $250K and threw in some tax breaks- at least we would be able to put tangible assets in the hands of the taxpayers- something the current bailout fails to do.

Without systemic changes- no plan insures us from any future implosions. If there wasn’t an election right around the corner, none of this would have any chance at all of passing. After the election, unless we voted every incumbent out and immediately cut all ties to lobbyists and special interest groups, we couldn’t expect better legislation- because we don’t elect the best minds in the country to begin with.

Supposedly, the best minds in the country were working on Wall Street-at least, that’s what their pay suggested- and that’s how we got into this mess, wasn’t it?