I like your analogy, so I'll extend and maybe fix it. The economy is like a heavily layered enterprise Java program, where little useful work is performed by l

I like your analogy, so I'll extend and maybe fix it. The economy is like a heavily layered enterprise Java program, where little useful work is performed by lots and lots of expensive layers of abstractions. There are so many abstractions that virtually nobody understands the program or where problems come from. The bailout is not equivalent to throwing out the old codebase and starting anew. Just the opposite, it's the government saying do not abondon the old codebase, here's a $800 billion dollars, hire another 10.000 Java programmers to maintain it. If the government would let you abondon the old codebase, all the programmers who had jobs maintaining it would be unemployed, which is political suicide.