Congress should tax wealthy to fix Wall Street's mistakes

Editor,

Former Republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee made an interesting analogy about Wall Street: He called it "Las Vegas East" and said the only difference is there's nobody to bail out a Vegas gambler, but the federal government now has to bail out Wall Street gamblers.

Personally, I believe it would be a complete crime against humanity if we middle-class taxpayers had to fully bear the colossal financial burden of bailing out large financial institutions. We've already poured $600 billion of our own tax dollars into Iraq, and now we have to pay an additional $700 billion for this bailout?

According to a recent CNBC TV show called "Untold Wealth," there are 1,000 billionaires living in the U.S. Many of these people made their incredible fortunes from Wall Street investments, and many of them are indeed Wall Street giants. Collectively, they manage an astronomically huge fortune of $27 trillion. According to my calculations, $700 billion is only 2.59 percent of $27 trillion. So if Uncle Sam decided to tax the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans for this bailout plan, they would slightly feel it in their own pocketbooks and portfolios, and it would not hurt them at all.

On the other hand, we middle-class taxpayers would definitely feel the excruciating pain of bailing out Wall Street. If I were in President Bush's shoes right now, I would make a proposal to Congress to tax all of these wealthy folks who made their fortunes off of Wall Street in the first place. What do my fellow UNM people think about my ideas?

Andres Saenz

UNM student