If the goal of the bail-out is to keep the lending system going so that businesses outside the financial sector can maintain their basic operations, then fine, let’s do it. I’m surprised to learn just how much modern small and medium sized businesses depend on short-term loans for basic daily operations, but apparently they do. I’m surprised to learn how quickly the crumbling of a few wall-street financial companies has affected loan availability for regional businesses from regional banks, but apparently it has. And if so I suppose if those loans dry up it’s gonna hurt us all.

If that’s the goal of the bail-out, or at least once outcome of it, fine.

And if another outcome is giving mortgage owners a chance to renegotiate their debt rather than it all going to default on them, then fine, let’s have a bail out. If.

But as I fuzzily understand, the machinations of the bail out plan involve all kinds of reverse-auctioning of debt packages and other obscure financial transactions which are presumably going to take days and weeks and months to fall into place. So it’s not going to solve problems on the scale of this week.

So why the heck are we rushing into this thing like it’s a burning house and Obama and McCain and Paulson and Pelosi and Bush and the rest of them are the ones with buckets of water? It’s hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, and presumably a decadal-scale restructuring of the finance system, and it’s not going to make anything different in the instant term. So why can’t we take until, say, next Tuesday to talk the damn thing through? Surely to God no one has even had time to read the whole thing through.

Sure we need to restore confidence in the system by proving that the government is going to step up to the plate and take big action. But that’s obviously going to happen now, anyone who needed reassurance of that before they could engage confidently in their business can just go ahead and do so. Really, I said it was okay.

Of course, if the bail-out is to save specific financial-sector specific businesses which needed immediate interventions…

But we wouldn’t spend money to save those house-wreckers now would we? Would we?