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We must all now come into terms with one of the biggest inconvenient truth of this decade. The Obama Bailout plans might not work. Though the Obama bailouts do seem like the only sensible move the government at the moment, it may not be so effective. Another most inconvenient truth we have to face right now is this: the last few decades of American wealth was not real.

For those of you who want to understand this situation much more clearly, imagine that debt is a vacuum or a bubble of air in the economic system. This is the perfect metaphor for debt. Debt is actually imaginary income. It is money you spend that is not yet there. Now, imagine that the economy is full of these bubbles. Soon, these bubbles accumulated into one great big bad debt that was near bursting.

Last year, the bubble burst. Suddenly, the market realized that it was supporting all this bad debt out of thin air. It first manifested in real estate where the biggest loan bubbles where being created. Both the banks and the real estate industry colluded to convince people to invest in houses. They kept building houses to sell to these people, convincing them that they could have those houses rented out to pay the mortgage. But then the value of the homes started dropping and that’s when everything started to get messy. The domino effect of these bad debt bubble burst was a recession so bad that no one could have possibly predicted just how bad it would turn out.

The problem is too big now; no amount of money could possibly plug up that big hole that was exposed once the debt crisis blew open. The administration is allotting billions of dollars into the Obama bailout plans, but it is definitely not enough to plug a hole worth trillions of dollars.

Obama bailouts should help to slow down the process. But for how long? Right now, analysts are afraid of another market crash caused by the bubble of accumulated credit card debt that is approaching the trillion dollar mark.

There is however, a ray of sunshine in all these foreboding forecast. Tuesday last week, President Obama accepted the loan payments from banks who were recipients of the Obama bailout plans. All in all, the repayment amount was more than sixty seven billion dollars. This was considered by all as a good omen. If anything, it proves that the banks that were once in danger was able to amass enough profit to pay back that sum.

However the president himself cautions everyone who might think that this is a sign that the economic problem is solved. Although this news is positive, the government further cautions that the market problems are far from over which lead to a dangerous worry free can posture that could exacerbate the problem.

Hopefully, these painful times we are experiencing right now are merely labor pains for the birth of a new, better economic system and spending attitude. The new economy should no longer rely heavily on the illusory wealth created by loans. If these hard times can teach us the great lessons we need to have learned a long time ago, then a great thing would be gained from this big mess.

The entire point of the Obama bailout plan was to revive the US economy from the massive slump it is currently in. This necessarily entailed taking steps to ensure that the greenback stayed well within the country, as opposed to the huge trend that characterized the period just before the recession: huge outsourcing contracts. The huge trend in outsourcing provided American companies with a vast opportunity to contract various services for almost a fraction of the amount they would normally spend if they had the service done locally. The premise of outsourcing also presented a self-contained manpower solution to the companies that largely outsourced their manpower needs to other countries; American companies didn’t have to devote time to seeking and building a workforce, maintaining back operations, and handling other internal necessities of a company. Outsourcing companies largely packaged their business solutions as a complete and full service manpower and staffing business where they would provide the American companies with people who are already trained and ready to work at a moment’s notice, since outsourcing companies also included product training during the orientation of the people they hired. The large outsourcing trend, however, meant even less jobs for more Americans, and this is on top of an already growing unemployment and underemployment problem in the US. The outsourcing trend also meant more US dollars were going out of the country, and in an economy that was less than a hundred percent stable, this is an unwanted thing.

President Barack Obama now seeks to turn this around by taking away all the incentives initially offered to companies that outsourced, and giving the incentives instead to companies that employed people within the US. This is actually part of the major changes the president had explained while delivering his speech on the Obama bailout plan, saying this is a move to start repairing the damage to the US economy. Offering incentives to companies that prefer to hire within the US rather than outside of the country is definitely a deterrent to companies that are looking to heavily conduct their operations offshore, and may very well prompt them to hire from within the US instead, thus opening more work opportunities for undemployed and underemployed Americans everywhere. This may be quite a problematic development for a lot of people that were outsourced for American companies, since this will definitely mean that they will soon be seeking employment elsewhere, and there is also a good chance that this would mean the closing of many outsourced companies on foreign soil, although the entire point may be moot, since the global economic pinch that swept across the greater part of the world pretty much did that already. The recession has claimed the lives of a countless businesses everywhere, with corporations closing their doors and leaving countless millions unemployed. While this may not be the true goal of the Obama bailout, it is a natural consequence of the move.

There are those, however, that believe that an improvement in the US economy is bound to benefit everyone, because the US economy is inextricably tied in the with global economy. Hence, if all American companies subscribe to the incentive of the president to pull their offshore operations and simply continue operations on US soil, the countries where they pulled out their businesses may suffer significantly for a time, but may very well benefit from an improved global economy once more. This, however, is one big “if”. There is absolutely no guarantee that this is indeed the way things go. At best, all everyone can do is cross their fingers and hope for the best and pray that the obama bailout does wonders for the economy, without having to sacrifice significantly.