No, that's just a down payment

The Federal under-estimators are at it again:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's rescue package for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would probably cost taxpayers $25 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said.

"There is a significant chance -- probably better than 50 percent -- that the proposed new Treasury authority would not be used before it expired at the end of December 2009,'' the nonpartisan agency, which provides economic and budget analysis for lawmakers, said in a report today...

The Bush administration is depending on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help pull the U.S. out of the worst housing slump since the Great Depression. The companies, which buy mortgages from banks, face mounting credit losses stemming from the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market.

Why should it stop at $25 billion, given the known mess in the financial sector? (Hey, the Iraq War was only supposed to cost $50 billion, remember? We've been here before. The cost of the Savings and Loan bailout should have seared the lesson into the public mind: no taxpayer should ever be forced to make good on bad or shady business practices. Instead, encouraged by the salvation of their S&L buddies, the entire financial industry went on a sub-prime lending and derivative binge, reaching for ever-more-questionable securities in an attempt to squeeze a few more pennies of profit.

And they now want us, the average American, to cover their bad roll of the dice yet again? To heck with all of them. This socialistic rescue of people who don't understand the efficient ruthlessness of capital correction has to stop now. We've already put off the day of reckoning far too long, for fear of paying the piper. But his eventual fee keeps growing the longer we withhold it.