Moron, moron, on the wall, who’s the dumbest one of all?

I have no more desire to lose my house than the average dad. Yet I strongly dislike the $700 billion economic lifeline being bandied about right now. It looks rather like an anvil to me.

I should love this plan. It’s going to save me from my mortgage. The mortgage isn’t bad — a 30-year fixed at below 5.7 percent, and we put down more than 20 percent when we bought the house. We don’t have a second loan, a home equity line or anything exotic.  But we bought in 2005, near the peak of the market. If housing prices really do drop 45 percent before all is said and done, I’ll be sitting in a home that won’t be worth anywhere near my mortgage, perhaps even by the time the kids are in college. Ick.

So the proposed bail-out might work in my favor, especially if the economy tanks and demand for freelance writers goes poof.

But it seems like if it helps me, it’s gotta hurt my kids, or my (hypothetical) grandkids. At some point, we have to pay back the $6.4 trillion we owe the rest of the world, including the $700 billion we’ll be adding to it after we get through saving the Morons of the Universe from their own debt-fest.

Even after I listened to Alan Blinder, an economist I respect, talk on the BBC the other night about how catastrophic it will be for our economy if a bail-out plan doesn’t happen (though Blinder doesn’t like the Paulson plan at all), I remain puckish. Maybe Wall Street is too big to save.  Maybe the bailout guarantees an L-shaped recovery, a long, slow period of not much going on, as Christopher Wood told Hugo Lindgren of New York magazine (Wood also said, rather brilliantly, “you can’t have socialism for rich people and capitalism for everybody else”). Maybe I’m a moron (with a small ‘m’) who will lose his house sooner rather than later if there is no bailout.  But right now, “L” stands for loser, and that’s what this plan looks like to me.