There has been a lot of nonsense in the air over the past few days about bailing out the financial system. And there have been plenty of things talked about that I don't understand and may never understand.

I don't know, for instance, exactly what form a bailout should take, or what all those esoteric securities are worth, but there is one bit of nonsense that I understand and am qualified to talk about – not because I'm a financial expert, but because I'm a California homeowner.

That bit of nonsense is the oft- expressed belief that it's unfair for ordinary taxpayers – that is, taxpayers like you – to be stuck with the bill for the current implosion. The nonsensical corollary is that only greedy Wall Street execs and real estate speculators should be stuck with the bill.

To see why this is nonsense, consider my tale of two refinancings.

Back in the late 1980s, my wife and I refinanced the home we then owned in Lexington, Ky. As part of the routine, an appraiser hired by the mortgage company appeared at our door one day and set to work.

He measured the house. He asked detailed questions. He inspected the new roof and gutters and the remodeled kitchen. He pored over records and receipts from the improvements we had made. He left without saying much. After a few weeks, the mortgage company notified us that we had been approved for a new, larger mortgage.

Two decades later, after we had lived in Sacramento for three years, we refinanced another house. That experience was somewhat different.

The man who showed up at our door seemed uninterested in the new roof or the remodeled kitchen or the new patio in the backyard. He asked if we had the 3-year-old appraisal, took it and left.

A couple of weeks later the mortgage company informed us that our new mortgage had been approved, with a lower payment. The house appraised at considerably more than we had paid for it, and the mortgage company offered to loan us more money. We settled for the lower payment and were happy with the deal.

Variations on this experience were common in the past few years, particularly in California. And in all instances, homeowners benefited, at least initially. Some people took out bigger mortgages and used the extra money to expand their homes. Others took cash out to buy new cars or a vacation home.

Everybody who did any of this – including me and perhaps you – had two things in common. We came out ahead. And none of us told the guy from the mortgage company, "No! This house can't possibly be worth that much. Keep your money! I don't want to be part of undermining the global financial system."

That's why the notion that ordinary taxpayers shouldn't now share the pain strikes me as nonsense. Lots of the people who shared the benefits of cheap credit and loose documentation requirements were perfectly ordinary taxpayers – not just homeowners, but carpenters, and roofers, and people who sell carpet and appliances and cars and everything else homeowners bought with their inflated mortgage gains.

Some people are more to blame than you and I, of course: Mortgage fraudsters and Wall Street con men aren't just figments of the popular imagination.

And some people didn't benefit at all, I suppose – unemployed renters, for example. But I don't know how to separate these folks from the multitudes who did benefit. And that being the case, I'm afraid they, too, will get stuck with some of the bill.

Like it or not, huge numbers of ordinary people gained something in the creation of this mess, and huge numbers of ordinary people will be in on the cleanup, no matter how much we'd all like to walk away and stick somebody else with the bill.