Imagine is you borrowed $250,000 to buy a house. And somewhere in the loan you found a way to eek out a little extra cash to maybe take your family out to dinner and a movie. Let's pretend you were able to find, say, $45.53. Would you give it back to the mortgage company?
What if you financed a car for $30,000 and the dealership found out they made an error and refunded you $5.82. Would you give that money back to the finance company?
What if you went out to dinner and it cost $26.08 and you wanted to tip the waitron 15%. Would you give them $3.91 or would you round it up and give them $3.92?
In all of these instances the percentage is 0.00019412.
When it was first suggested that a government bailout is a bad thing because the government can't run anything, some of the opponents' fears centered around micro-management.
What could be more micromanagement than seizing on 0.019412%.
Assuming the bail-out is $850,000,000,000 (it's way more than that, actually, several news sources are saying well over a trillion…), why is the government and the media going on and on and on and on about these stupid bonuses paid out that amount to so little?
Now let's do some other math:
With our senators and congresspersons making $169,300 a year and 535 of them all yelling about this since at least March 10, the total it's costed the American People so far is $2,481,520.55 ($463.83 per day x 535 people x 10 days).
Add the handful of other staffers and that guy, The President, etc etc, it's easy to see we've already spent over $5,000,000 of tax payer money to play the blame game. It's Obama's fault, it's Bush's fault, it's the Republicans, it's the Democrats, it's the lying bastards at AIG, it's Citibank, it's Wall Street, it's the KKK. whoever.
Now start considering what Bill O'Reily, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, the other guys at NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, ETC, all make, how many untold millions are being spent on this?
Sure the American people are mad. Sure it sucks to be in a recession. Sure it sucks to lose your job or for your company to go out of business right under your feet. But let's quit yelling at stuff from weeks and weeks ago and figure out how to fix the things weeks and months into our future, so we don't have to suffer like this forever.
Find a way to fix it so big companies can't hold the world economy hostage. Find a way to fix it so people can save a little and spend a little. Getting people spending money again is the only thing that's going to make the recession go away.
Find a way to make it work instead of blaming people for why it doesn't. Stop being politics as usual, just like the past 20 years and figure out how to really make a change happen.
One Comment
Not to be overly simplistic, but I think the solution is academic – reinstate the regulation that protected us from the fiasco that became the financial meltdown. It has taken nearly 30 years to pick apart those laws and protections that kept the financial institutions in check.
However, writing the legislation, analyzing the details, etc., all of that is not sexy. Anger and outrage make for good TV ratings. Being angry carries a lot of benefits, including:
- You get all of the press.
- You get to blame others – even when the problem is your fault.
- You get to take credit for any effort to fix it ("See? They are fixing the problem because *I* said so.")
- You get to be angry when the solution isn't to your liking.
- You get to scapegoat other people. This one is particularly evil, because when there is something else to be angry about, you have a ready-made patsy to blame.
- You don't have to burden yourself with accountability.
There's lots of blame to go around: the financial institutions who are "too big to fail," the politicians who allowed it to happen unchecked, the talking heads who keep fanning the flames of outrage, etc. But there is one group inconspicuously left out: us.
We are the ones who elected the ones who took away the protections. We are the ones to put our trust in corporations and then anthropomorphized them into entities that "feel." We plop our butts on the couch to watch the "outrage" on TV.
There are lots of things that need fixing. If we want it to last, we have to take responsibility and fix ourselves, too. (Not to be confused with getting "fixed" of course, although there are plenty of people out there who should never, ever, ever reproduce.)