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Paulson should give taxpayers a bailout
Published November 7, 2008
Dear Secretary Henry Paulson,
First, my deepest sympathies. Your personal fortune, due to the current financial debacle, has shrunk from $700 million to $450 million. I feel your pain, not to mention your uneasiness over demands for more transparency on Wall Street. You, as CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to amass a fortune under rather loose regulations.
Now, as Secretary of the Treasury, you have been told to solve this money problem. Your first recommendation to Congress was to ask for $700 billion with this stipulation: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and might not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” You also brought in a team from Goldman Sachs to handle disbursing the funds in what I call “Operation Henhouse.”
It’s not your fault. Alan Greenspan, the self-acknowledged leader of the unregulated financial market, didn‘t apologize, but expressed his “shocked disbelief” that self-regulation didn’t work. That’s close enough for government work.
And now it’s bailout time. It does seem ironic all those Wall Street types who kept harping about “get the government off our backs,” and “unleash the free market,” now want the feds to ride to their rescue. As for all the conservative Republican Congress members who swore to guard my taxes, can they spell “hypocrisy?”
The banks want money, too. U.S. banks were given federal funds to make loans, but instead are using the money to buy up other banks. “This is a misuse of my money!” I told the CEO of ChaseJPMorganCitiFargo. It is said that AIG is “too big to fail.” Am I too small to succeed? States and cities are asking federal funds because those governments can’t pay their bills. Thus far 27 states have lined up for $26 billion. Texas is not one of them.
The automobile industry wants a bailout. It is in financial straits because the automakers make autos people don’t want. You, Mister Secretary, are a strong proponent of the Trickle Down Theory. For me it’s been mostly a Trickle On Theory. So here’s my plan: You give me a bailout.
For years, I have dutifully paid for flood insurance because where I live it might flood. By purchasing flood insurance, if my house floods then I get some of my money. During Katrina and Ike, people’s houses flooded. They didn’t have flood insurance, so they got some of my money. Americans who are buying homes they can’t afford are getting some of my money so they can afford those homes which I can’t afford.
Nonpartisan experts estimate these bailouts plus the $168 billion for those stimulus checks we got, come to $2.6 trillion. That is, of course, money we don’t have. In closing, I think of your increasingly expensive bailout spiral as a gigantic corkscrew going round and round and up and up. Then I think of myself as the cork.
Lynn Ashby is a Houston-based columnist. Contact him at ashby2(at)comcast.net.
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