Tuesday, December 23, 2008

How ironic would it be if the bailout went unaccounted for

I was at the gym yesterday and I was watching CNBC or something like that and they were talking about how they contacted all the banks that got more than $2m from the bailout money and asked where it went. The guy at the bank basically said, they lent some, they kept some and that no one had told them to keep track of it. I find it highly entertaining and even more highly disturbing that with all the talk about how de-regulation was the cause of all these problems in the first place, it seems to me that the first thing that should have happened when we started handing out some of our hard earned tax dollars was that we actually learned from our mistakes and asked where it was going... doesn't look like that happened.

This is why making a hasty decision like the bailout wasn't and isn't right. If those banks were so far in the hole that they were going to go out of business in less than a month then they deserved to go out of business and we would be better off without them. But, I am guessing that most of them could have figured out a few ways to un-burden themselves long enough to give the Congress, House of Reps and even our President a month to figure out a constructive way to help them out, that might not have cost the tax payers as much, only to have no account as to where things are...

I struggle with my need as an American to get everything the minute that I need it. That's why so many people have made so much money on fad diet pills and, pyramid schemes in this country, because even though history tells us different, we want to believe that it's just that easy.

And if there's one thing that I've learned unless you are a billion dollar bank who begs the government for money and cries wolf the minute the interest rates drop, it's not that easy...

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