...on being forced to pay for my unfair advantage

As a nation, we've decided that we no longer trust the free market. We've been burned! The market failed to protect us from our own greed and rank stupidity. So from here on out, we've decided (or at least the politicians who 'represent' us have decided) to put the government in charge of the markets.

WHAT????!!!!!!

What has government ever done--EVER--that would lead us to believe that this is a good idea? Ever? The short answer is NOTHING. But rather than engage in a subjective analysis of history, let me direct the wrath of this rant at what the government is doing with our tax money today.

Today the government has turned its attention to the housing crisis. A brief history: Basically, a whole bunch of greedy, short-sighted financial institutions driven by government legislation, gave out exotic home loans to a whole bunch of unqualified and even more short-sighted people who had absolutely no business buying a house (much less the houses they bought) and couldn't afford to pay the mortgages. This under the negligent eye of the Bush administration and on the wings of legislation championed by Barney Frank to help the "economically disadvantaged" get into a home loan. The result is the present deep and deepening recession. Who would have thunk? Both the financiers and those they over-financed were profoundly unwise and deserve to be dropped on their financial noggins.

But is the government going to let the market run its course and allow stupid financial institutions to fail and stupid house buyers to default? No, it would be too painful and the market cannot be trusted. Barney Frank and his congressional cronies, on the other hand, can. Mysterious.

The plan is to bail-out the people who can't afford to pay their mortgages. And who's going to bail them out? The government? And where does the government get is money? That's right, from people like me. Hard working people who were smart enough not to buy what we couldn't afford with money that wasn't ours. So now we'll be paying our mortgages and the mortgages of a bunch of instant-self-gratification idiots who got in over their heads in homes they couldn't have afforded with a -4% interest rate.

Back when he was pushing his loans-for-everybody legislation through congress, Barney Frank--one of the small, truly disappointing figures in all of congressional history--was concerned with being fair to all the economically disadvantaged out there who couldn't afford a house. Never mind that there were good reasons they couldn't afford a house. The government needed to ensure equality!

And since its plan for equality then has backfired, the government's plan for equality now is to penalize people like me who have unfair advantages. So now, in the name of fairness and equality, I'm being forced to pay for the unfair advantage my HARD WORK and COMMON SENSE have given me.

What an absolute crock! Hey Barney, if I stop paying my mortgage now, can I get some of that government bailout money, you retarded Elmer Fudd Oompa-Loompa?

Seriously, what are we doing here? We're promoting bad behavior by rewarding it! Once upon a time in America, it was embarrassing to take a handout. Now it's a legislated expectation. Oh, I know. I've seen the talking heads on TV explaining how we're all in this together and if the government doesn't take money from people like me to bail out the flunkies then we'll all go down together.

Well, I've thought about that and you know what...let's dance! If it's a choice between getting my teeth kicked in now and being bled dry paying for flunkies over the next 50 years, then I say bring the pain! Let's get this over with! Let's all go down together--flunkies too! It's about time somebody who actually deserves to pay for their mistakes starts paying. And if that means I have to suffer along side the idiots, so be it. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life--nor do I want my children to spend the duration of theirs--paying off immoral imbecile debt. Let's do this now!

But we won't, will we Barney, you beady-eyed lilliputian? No, we'll rob from productive people to underwrite sloth and indigence, and go socialist in the process.

...on being there when my children were sold into slavery

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams


Niro is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Likewise, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew to Rome after pushing-through a partisan spending bill that effectively sells our children and grandchildren into financial slavery. How symbolically ironic that this happened during the tenure and at the behest of our first black president, Barak Obama.

It is perhaps too harsh and unfair to evoke the imagery of slavery here. Indeed, future generations of Americans will not be whipped, shacked, starved or denied their civil and and human rights. They will, however, and in a very real sense, be fiscally indentured to the large and rising creditor nations of the world who are now purchasing our debt.

My children don't know this, of course. They don't realize that they'll grow up in a very different, less friendly world where the Untied States is no longer an economically, politically and socially dominant stabilizing force. They don't understand that they'll toil and be heavily taxed their entire lives in a desperate bid to somehow pay the burgeoning interest on US government debt to China, Russia and other foreign and domestic bond holders. But if they look at today's passage of a near-trillion dollar, pork-filled, politically motivated spending bill with childlike ignorance, they are not alone.

In a nation that increasingly looks to government to solve their problems, and especially during times of crisis, reality is often slow to set in. But I think that a few people get it. Or at least are trying to grasp the magnitude of what's happening. Others--too many--are simply content to shut their eyes, cross their fingers, take the money and run.

Gone are the days of Patrick Henry, who rightly observed, "For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it." On this day, when the worst has come, we the people proved unwilling to understand and know it, and willing to sell our childrens' inheritance for a proverbial mess of pottage.

Yes, we're deep in a recession and there's plenty of blame to go around as to how we got here. There are good arguments to be made (though few arguments thus far have been good) that the government needs to do something. But why a trillion dollars when less than a quarter of it will be distributed within the first year? Would it have been asking too much to approach this crisis in a reasoned, thoughtful, measured way? Would it have killed Pelosi to--as she and the Democrats promised--allow the American people to actually read the bill before agreeing to it? Such was Pelosi's rush that not a single congressman was able to read the final version of the 1,071 page bill that they voted for and passed today. Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver lamented, “We all cast our votes with one hand and crossed our fingers with the other.”

But pass it they did, and not a moment too soon. Nancy Pelosi had just enough time to get in a photo opp and catch her flight to Rome. Whew! And when the gargantuan spending bill finally passed both houses of congress--this urgent bill that had to be passed RIGHT NOW, never mind reading it--President Obama, rather than signing it, took a three day vacation to Chicago. Guess it wasn't that urgent after all. Honestly, you can't even make this stuff up.

Pelosi, Reid, Obama and all those who rammed this colossal spending bill through congress and down our throats at the expense of our children, have killed the proverbial albatross and I intend to be part of the electoral movement that hangs it around their collective neck in 2010.

"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy." - Thomas Jefferson

...on being willing to give my children's money to stupid people

I'll start this rant with a quote from South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford: "[This bailout is] what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power. That is quite different than a market-based economy where some rise and some fall but there’s a consequence to making a stupid decision. A lot of people who’ve made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large."

I'm like millions of other Americans in being absolutely appalled by the events that lead our economy to the present recession. And I'm no less disgusted by the frantic, heavy handed and, as Governor Sanford puts it, "stupid" rush to give trillions of dollars to screw-ups and special interests in the name of bailing out the economy. But am I surprised?

No.

Surprise occurs when something unpredictable and out of the ordinary happens. And that's simply not the case here.

Today the story broke that General Motors will spend $1 billion of its tax payer bailout money on investments in Brazil. This news has, of course, been met with stunned disbelief and outrage by the American public. I say 'of course,' but who can seriously be surprised by this? Is there anything that the GM executive team has done in the recent past that would make this move surprising? No. These are the geniuses who flew their corporate jets to Washington to ask for money. They've made stupid decisions in the past and are merely continuing on course. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE MONEY TO STUPID PEOPLE.

Speaking of corporate jets, until they were shamed and bullied into canceling the order, Citigroup planned on using part of their $45 billion in tax payer bailout money to purchase a new, state-of-the-art corporate jet. People were shocked and appalled. I was appalled too, but I must say that the whole jet thing is very consistent with Citigroup's track record. Oh, and did I mention, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE MONEY TO STUPID PEOPLE.

No sooner did Bank of America get its $24 billion in bailout money then it bought a bank in China for $7 billion. Then followed this up by laying-off 32,000 employees. It's shocking, until you remember that this is the same Bank of America that gives credit cards to people who don't have social security numbers. Then it all makes sense: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE MONEY TO STUPID PEOPLE.

The week after tax payers spent $85 billion bailing out AIG, company executives spent a half million dollars of it on a luxurious corporate retreat. The Huffington Post indignantly proclaimed, "They were getting manicures, facials, pedicures and massages while American people were footing the bill." Indeed, but let me ask you this: Is there anything in AIG's past actions that would cause you to expect a different course of action? Hmmmmm...well then I'm going to have to say, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE MONEY TO STUPID PEOPLE.

John A. Thain, chief executive of Merrill Lynch, leads a pack of flunky Wall Street bosses who have handed out billions in bonuses to their executive teams despite the fact that their institutions have lost billions for investors, are no longer independently viable and have received billions in tax payer bailouts from the government. And yet news outlets nationwide marvel at how these organizations got into the mess in the first place? How could it have happened with such steady hands at the tiller? Are you serious? Thain spent $1.2 million to redecorate his office! HIS OFFICE!!!! And are you seriously taken aback by the billions in bonuses to executives who should have been summarily dismissed for piss poor performance? Come on! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE MONEY TO STUPID PEOPLE!!!

Is there anyone out there who's beginning to see the pattern here? Anybody need a few more examples? Because I've got 'em. How about just one more--the proverbial icing on the stupidity cake.

We just elected a man who vowed to replace the "politics of fear with the politics of hope." Two weeks later he's appointed a tax cheat to run the IRS and goes on TV daily with doomsday forecasts aimed at intimidating Congress and frightening the American public into passing a pork-filled, trillion dollar spending package. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! The bill was drafted behind closed doors by a handful of congressmen from one party lead by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who recently claimed that, "five hundred million Americans lose their job every month"). Now they're pressing hard to pass the bill in the name of expediency and expect us to believe that a) it's a good bill, b) it will fix the problem, and c) it has to be passed right now, as is or we're doomed as a nation.

I have my doubts. And why shouldn't I when it comes to Congress? This is a group who earns their single digit approval rating year in and year out. Gross, bureaucratic incompetence is their hallmark. And these are the very people to whom we pay taxes--who decide where our money goes. And they've decided to use it (plus a bunch more money that they'll have to borrow and a bunch more that they're going to print) to bailout, and thus socialize, the economy. Sorry, but I wouldn't trust Nancy Pelosi to hand out the condoms she claims will stimulate our economy, much less trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. But she's going to. And our children and grandchildren will be saddled with a crippling debt, paving the way for creditor nations like China to takeover the political and economic leadership role in the world.

It sickens me. It really does. I'm angry, disgusted, embarrassed, outraged, saddened, nauseated, fed-up and pissed-off. But I'm not surprised. And I'm not saying don't pay your taxes. All I'm saying is.....THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE MONEY TO STUPID PEOPLE!!!