I'd probably do the bailout thing, only because I don't want to see huge bank like Wells JP Chasemorganstanley bank of America Mutual to buy everything up and be a giant monopoly. So keep in mind that I want to bust up potential monopolies and maintain at least a little competition.
So with the bailout thing, I would have them either:
1) Bail them out and wait for them to get all their stuff together and get back on their feet, or
2) find an investment group (preferably not part of JP Chasemorganstanley bank of America or whatever) that would be able to foot the bill, buy out the loans in question, and take it off of the government's hands.
Iono, other than that, the gov't can't really tell people how to spend their money. If everyone decided to buy into the Nigeria Royal Heir scam and send billions of dollars in Cashiers checks to Nigeria, is it really the government's job to bail them out?
Now where will the government get the funding of 700 billion dollars? I think one option is floating a bond.
Now where would we pay the interest generated from that bond? I'm not sure what bond rates go for nowadays, but assuming its like 4%; 4% of 700 billion is like 28 billion/year.
This interest I think should be paid in a the form of a "foreclosure tax" that will be levied on anyone who walked out on a home and let it go into foreclosure. This tax can be simply taken out of the persons paycheck (withheld, sort of like FICA). The amount will be dependent on the price of the house and will be pro-rated so he pays it off a little at time over the course of the bond (which may be as long as 10 years or whatever). If things are REALLY bad, you can apply for forbearance or deferment of the foreclosure tax, but when things start picking up again, then you'll have to start paying it off.
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The idea of the bond is to have people who have extra money (and who want to invest in something more stable than the stock market) to foot most of the bill, and the idea of the "foreclosure tax" is to put the interest payments on the backs of those who were responsible for the housing crisis.
reducing military spending is one option, but that opens another huge can of worms I really don't want to touch right now.