This is a kido special podcast. I'm Kila Brown. The bailout eking its way through

Congress underscores that the calculus lawmakers use in dealing with big problems

often ends in a decision to deny the problem exists

or when they believe action is inevitable to kick the problem down the road for the next batch

of lawmakers to handle.

Unfortunately, according to John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's

Center for Representative Government, when lawmakers kick the problem down the road,

they often make it much much bigger.

Both parties face a problem.

We're a month from an election and they don't want to go in,

nobody wants to go into the election if there's a financial meltdown, which they are afraid is going to happen.

Or if there's a risk of that. So they have a, well, everybody's got a strong motivation to pass the bailout plan or something that they

think is going to work. But they also have another big problem that's come about this week,

which is it's very apparent that the

voters hate the bailout plan which they associate with a bailout of Wall Street

and people who made big mistakes and should have to pay for those big mistakes.

So the problem that you face is if you're the dominant party or the Democrats, you can

pass this bailout plan, but then when you go into the election the Republican

candidates run against you for having bailed out Wall Street. Right? I mean

Republicans would love to do that because that's what's usually used against them on the one hand.

So the Democrats want the Republicans to vote for it also, but the Republicans of course would

like to have something for the election but they also face a problem

...