This whole “bailout” of the financial sector bothers me. It bothers me that as a taxpayer, I will be on the hook for a nice chunk of the $500 billion to $1 trillion that this will cost. (And the way things are looking, the cost may be closer to $2 trillion.)
It bothers me that executives on Wall Street got multi-million dollar bonuses and perks in recent years, but now they don’t have to share in the downside of what they’ve done. (What they’ve done is made a ton of bad loans to parties who weren’t credit worthy, and then they engaged in a series of selling those loans by lying to the buyers.)
It bothers me that this bailout is now probably going to include all kinds of consumer debt and go far beyond the “mortgage crisis” we are continuously told is the problem.
It bothers me that we are essentially socializing losses in the marketplace while keeping profits privatized. (Translation: Those making millions and billions on Wall Street get to keep doing so with no risk, because if they ever get in a big loss position, the little guys like me will pay to bail them out.)
But this little known fact bothers me the most: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is basically getting a blank check from the taxpayers that he can use as he sees fit and no one can ever ever ever question what he has done with the money.
The text of the draft proposal for the bailout plan includes this:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
This means no one can ever challenge what Paulson does with the money. Ever. If he mismanages, misuses, or otherwise corruptly dishes out taxpayer money, there is no process to review what happened and there is no recourse.
That’s just stupid. As taxpayers, we would be fools to trust Hank Paulson with our money. And after reading what Michelle Malkin says about his judgment, the idea makes me even sicker. (Check out how many times Paulson claimed we were at the bottom of the mortgage problem and that it will be contained.)
This is even scarier than I thought.
How about this? We bail out the banks but then execute every single executive of the bailed-out banks. We should execute everyone at vice-president level or above, including the boards. If the banks truly are “too big to fail” then those executives’ actions are akin to treason (in that they harm the US for private profit). Bring back the firing squads! This would rescue the financial system while eliminating moral hazard.
It also wouldn’t be any more unconstitutional than the whole “this bailout plan cannot be challenged by congress or the courts” thing.
I get sicker by the day. The real problems aren’t being addressed so throwing money down the drain can’t possibly fix them.
This fake email is making it’s way across the blogosphere. I laughed my ass off when I read it.
http://businessopinions.blogspot.com/2008/09/fake.html
[…] blame for it? Definitely Henry Paulson. Of course, our lawmakers are to blame for giving this clown all this power in the first place. He was basically given a bunch of blank checks to do whatever he saw […]