$700,000,000,000.00

$700,000,000,000.00!

Now, that's an amazing number, representing a huge amount of revenue.

Consider:

The National Football League operates franchises in 31 U. S. cities (New York has two teams).

If you divided the funds being suggested for the latest phase of the financial markets rescue plan, you could send $22.6 billion to each of these cities for use in strengthening local economies, redeveloping aged infrastructure, improving public education, expanding higher education, promoting new employment skills development, restructuring doomed individual home mortgages, developing housing for the poor and homeless, addressing the national health care crisis at the local level, just to mention a few of the obvious needs facing all of our major urban areas. Or, you could divide the funds up based on population. I mean, Dallas likely needs more than Green Bay!

If you include the funding previously committed to the current "bail out" actions by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank, the number climbs to $1 trillion, increasing the available investment capital for our major cities to approximately $32.25 billion each!

The entire operations budget for the City of Dallas is about $2.6 billion or just a little over 1/10 of the smaller amount.

It appears that something must and will be done to stabilize the credit markets.

However, a simple giveaway to the big Wall Street firms and banks without clear and careful attention to the needs of all of our people, especially in the inner cities of America will prove to be a colossal failure that could spell an even worse fate for our national economy. Any plan worth its salt will go beyond simple "oversight" concerns or guarantees of limits to executive pay and severance packages.

Since 1980, our cities have suffered the ill effects of "trickle down" economic theory. You know, what benefits the very top will eventually serve and stimulate the bottom. In my view such theory is upside down. Stimulate that which serves the local, those enterprises, institutions, and corporations working close to the streets, and everyone does better.

Due to a failed system, the credit markets likely should be stabilized or taken over. Along with that, any worthwhile plan must not forget the folks back home who are in danger of losing everything.
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