Can I Get A Receipt For That?

Besides sharing with the world my expertise and wisdom concerning what is wrong with the world, how to fix it, and how it should be run, I also spend some of my valuable time reading the writings of other people who have a grasp on the true state of the world.

In pursuing this pursuit (?) I was over at Deus Ex Malcontent where there was a piece referring to a post on the Huffington Post about the banking failures who floated back to earth on uranium parachutes.

The buzz on the Hill is that those Silly Billys over on Wall Street are going to get an invite to have a sit down with Congress for a little Q&A about what they've been doing with the 700 or so odd billion dollars they said they needed to cover them until payday... . In 2025.

Now taking the subjects of politics, the economy, and personal hygiene very seriously, I felt it incumbent upon me to put forth my own solution to the economic screeching halt that is currently body slamming us into Vegemite.

I new that if I were to have any hope of my solution being considered I would have to put the same careful thought and common sense into it as the recent attempts at a solution had.

And so the post below is the comment I placed in the comments section for the post over at Deus Ex Malcontent. Originally I had intended this as just another incredibly witty comment of the many I leave around this crazy thing we call the World Wide Web. But another visitor responded, (honestly taking mine seriously,) with a well considered and accurate dissection of my mathematical shortcomings.

All kidding. joking, and drug taking aside, Che's response illustrates in a clear, easy to understand serious manner the same lunacy of what is going on in Washington and Wall Street that I tried to portray in my comment. It was this counterpoint that made me feel I should turn it all into a post.

Below is my original comment followed in by Che's response as well as a follow up comment to another commenter in blue.

******************************************************************************

There will never be any consequences for Congress failing to do their job and regulate yet another industry in order to protect the citizenry. Regardless of what the financial entities say or don't say about what they did with the money they were given, there will be no action taken.

Never mind that: The bankers, the Congress, the mortgage lenders, the credit companies, (that the Congress let walk all over them in their hearings years ago,) were all supposed to be the 'Adults in Charge.' They were the ones who said vote for me I know how to handle all this responsibility better than anyone else. Put your money with us and pay us the millions that we're worth because we understand how it works and we are the only ones who can make the right choices for you.

Yet it keeps happening over and over and over again.

Lockheed

The Savings and Loan.

Enron

The airlines

And this time anybody but us who stuck their hand out.

I've lost track at this point. What are we at? 700 billion, 1400 billion.

And 300 billion a year for the war.

Somebody pop a cork in it. Pretty soon we're going to be talking real money here.

Let's do some simple math and just a tad of critical thinking.

Item one. The government has given hundreds of billions of dollars to people who clearly have no idea what the fuck they are doing. And they handed over this money without placing any demands or restrictions on how it was used, where it would be used, or any penalties for failure to account for these actions or failure to pay it back.

Um... A fucking crack dealer would have done a better deal than this.

I'm willing to bet that if the Capitol Police stuck a gun in a few CEO mouths they'd come up with some answers.

Item two. Touching on the minor inconvenience mentioned in item one: People are losing their jobs faster than K-Fed can get a girl pregnant. And a possible solution. (Call me crazy.)

Here's the simple math part.

US. Population. Roughly 300 million.

Money paid for a solution that didn't work. A fuck of a lot.

How about this.

Give every person over the age of 18 that makes $95,000 or less a year 2 million dollars tax free. Just once. 600 million. Not billion. Million.

Which means bills get paid, people still buy things, business don't need to lay people off, people can still engage in buying $8 cups of coffee, silk underwear for their cats and Barackberrys, the economy doesn't constrict and everybody but the people in charge are happy.

Oh, and the need for the services of the Dickweeds who got us into this mess goes down considerably. Wow, hope they don't have to reorganize or restructure or make the really tough decisions or any of the other pathetic tripe we have to listen to come out of the mouths of our employers when they tell us that life as we know it just came crashing down around our Wal Mart wadding pools.

Do you mean to tell me that out of all the uber-brains that have been elected or put in charge by their friends in the financial world that nobody has even thought to themselves: Hey. I've got this crazy idea that might save us enough that we could start having Free Muffin Mondays again. How about instead of giving complete fucking morons a free Ticket to Ride we toss a few bucks to the groveling masses just to watch them jump.

And if they screw it up we drag all 300 million of their sorry asses in front of Congress, threaten to put in jail and fine them and then tell 'em: Ahhh. We're just kidding.

What? Oh you mean this time we really put them in jail? Well okay. Never tried that before, but could be fun.



Sorry to burst your bubble, Brian, but your math is just a little off (like several orders of magnitude). Only 300 lucky people would get the $2M payout to reach your $600M figure. However, that number rises to 300,000 when the payout pool expands to $600B -- which makes the exercise a little more interesting, since we're still talking about numbers that are already in play. Considering that the TARP money ($700B) together with the just-approved stimulus package ($800B) totals roughly $1.5T, we could just as easily have given 750,000 families/households Brian's hypothetical $2M payout. Choosing the recipients would still be problematic, but one has to believe that 750,000 U.S. families would make better decisions and accomplish more with that money than the institutional greedhead entitlement class currently feeding at the trough.




Your (larger fiscal) point is well-taken, Anon, even if your tone is overly dismissive. Brian's plan is already in place on Wall Street: we're burning up the printing presses to haul dumptruck-loads of money to them so they can turn around and pay $18B in bonuses for the glorious year that was 2008! You think there aren't individuals in that group raking in at least $2M for their inglorious effort? How is that different from what Brian pointedly suggested for the proletariat except in scope? Neither approach is tenable, but you are weighing in against only one (so far).

Brian's idea is absurdly unrealistic on its face, but I chose to run with it just to try to put some perspective on this whole bailout rigmarole.