Is this freedom? Sometimes I wonder…
A few weeks ago, the government chose to pass a bill that bailed out a number of banks on the brink of collapse due to their own bad decisions. The bill (which is an appropriate description) clocked in right around 700 billion dollars. What’s unique about this particular brand of stupidity coming from Washington is that both Republicans and Democrats were in favor of the bill, they just disagreed about some of the terms.
Personally, I think the entire idea of the bill sucked.
The Federal Government just spent 700 billion dollars that taxpayers are going to have to make up for. The annoying thing is that we don’t have any real choice in the matter. So when I stop and think about it in those terms, it begins to feel more like a dictatorship. They are the ones who decided to do this, and they are the ones forcing us to pay for it. I can’t say I won’t do it, because that means not paying my taxes, which in turn leads to jail.
That is not a paltry sum. I get even more annoyed when I look at things that really need money, like education systems or social security. For some reason, there wasn’t enough money lying around to fix those things, but they could scrape together hundreds of billions of dollars to give to Wall Street?
C’mon, us average citizens may be dumb, but we’re not that dumb.
Granted, this isn’t like full blown communism. We can still bitch about the entire thing (like I am doing now), and not get nailed for it. Yet for those who will struggle to make their own ends meet and have to pay to bail out a bunch of financial fat cats; the ability to bitch about it becomes a paltry compensation.
If it had left up to me, I would have looked at those banks CEO’s and said “It’s your mess. You made it, you clean it up”. They made the decisions, and when it came time to recover the losses they should have started looking under the cushions of their own goddamned couches. I can guarantee you the CEO’s and board members of those companies were not hurting in the slightest, and were pulling down massive salaries while working with their brains disengaged.
Now that I think about it, we paid to bail them out for being stupid, which means everything they earned while doing so should now belongs to us. While I wont hold my breath waiting to receive a check anytime soon, it isn’t out of line to say I had better see a damn low interest rate for the next several years, or at the very least a permanent waiver against paying any and all bank fees.
I want my money back, dammit….
Related articles by Zemanta
- Wall Street: Yes, there will be bonuses this year
- Don McNay: $700 Billion In Taxpayer Dollars To Kill Small Banks
- Why Main Street Is Mad: Scenes from a Financial Crisis
**I want my money back, dammit….**
Well said, I couldnt agree more. ;)