This question was recently posed by the Realtor.com Blogging Team:

Critics continued to raise serious questions about why taxpayers should help pay the price for Wall Street’s excesses. Do you agree the nation should assume the risk and burden of the failing mortgage companies?

Small business are going out of business every day due to the “big box stores” coming in to town and nobody is bailing them out.

The general public is watching gas prices go up, their mortgages go up, food prices go up, construction costs go up, while they go from owning the local hardware store, to working at Home Depot for $7/hour - and nobody is bailing them out.

You bought a house that was within your means, pay your mortgage on time, have equity in your home because you realize that it’s better to put money down and have a slightly smaller home than it is to stretch your budget to the absolute max and need 125% financing in order to get the house you can’t afford.  You’re watching the market eat away your actual CASH SAVINGS and equity, rather than just watching the banks paper lose value while your neighbor who got a 110% negative amortization loan is crying foul because they can no longer squeeze any money out of their home and they want someone else to now foot the bill for their mistake -and nobody is bailing you out.

These companies are crying for YOUR money to come into their coffers because they’re unable to sustain themselves, and yet their ceo’s are getting salary increases and taking home millions of dollars in bonuses.  If they are unable to stay solvent it is due to their poor lending practices.  Was it wonderful back in 2004 and 2005 when it seemed everybody could get financing for the home of their dreams?  Absolutely!  Was it reality?  Absolutely NOT.  Not everybody can afford the home of their dreams.  Start small.  Realize that you have a budget and you need to stick to it - because if you don’t, you go out of business.  Just like the company that lends money to people they KNOW can’t afford to pay.

If you run a company with sound judgement and make common sense decisions and don’t get GREEDY, you will have a business that thrives…but when you get greedy, you start to cut corners, do things you might not have done otherwise, you take risks.

You take risks.

When you take risks, there’s a chance that those risks won’t pay off…if they do, the payout is great!  But if they don’t…the consequences can be pretty bad…

These companies took risks - they knew the potential cost the risks could impose, but they took them anyway in the hopes of making HUGE returns.

Why in the world should my tax dollars get siphoned into their bank accounts to make up for their poor decisions?  This isn’t one person who ”made made a mistake”…this was multiple boards of directors agreeing on a course of action…this was many people in a company being told from the top down to “take as much as you can, we’re going for it!”

There are repercussions for bad decisions, just as there are rewards for good decisions.

Ya know what?  Bail ME out.  Someone help me - my tax dollars are going into some CEO’s multi-million dollar bank account instead of into my childrens school.  They’re going into some executives vacation fund instead of towards programs to help keep the park down the street from becoming a hangout for hoodlums.  They’re going into buying bad debt from companies who were irresponsible enough to create the bad debt in the first place instead of towards helping to feed the people at the homeless shelter in town.

What do you think?  Take a second, vote, and voice your thoughts below.