"You Can't Solve a Problem By Throwing Money At It"

How many times have you heard that from a conservative when you suggested health care for children or a boost in the minimum wage or a bigger education budget? Just about every time, I bet. It's one of their favorite aphorisms.

Apparently that's all out the window when it comes to the bankers who own the GOP. They get money thrown at them every day to "solve" a problem they created through their very own bottomless greed. The latest recipient of your money is an insurance company called AIG. It got itself into a ton of trouble betting on scam mortgages and the Fed just bailed it out with $85 Billion. At first the excuse was the same one we've been hearing ever since the mortgage crisis began claiming the Golden Studs who started it.

The Federal Reserve said in a statement it determined that a disorderly failure of AIG could hurt the already delicate financial markets and the economy.

Or, in the words of the much more passionate (about money) NYT:

Fearing a financial crisis worldwide, the Federal Reserve reversed course on Tuesday and agreed to an $85 billion bailout that would give the government control of the troubled insurance giant American International Group.

(emphasis added)

Oooooh. Can't you just feel the chills running through the room? A WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL CRISIS!! Gee, nobody saw that coming.

But then somebody, probably in the Rove/Bartlett White House PR shop, decided that what with already having thrown some $300Bil at the problem and saying the same thing every time only to come back a few weeks later when another greedy corpo was getting ready to tank to say it yet again, they figured they better add something new and, you know, personal. They didn't do it to save their friends' asses, no no no. They did it for us.

It also could "lead to substantially higher borrowing costs, reduced household wealth and materially weaker economic performance," the Fed said.

Uh-huh. Translation? A crash by AIG would hurt a lot of very rich and influential people. They didn't have to think about it, they didn't have to get Congress to write and pass a bill or any of that namby-pamby BS. They just gave them the $85Bil. Mind you, this was after the "free market" had a chance to operate and all the players turned it down as it was too risky.

The crash came anyway. Of course.

The Dow Jones industrial average, which only two days earlier had suffered its steepest drop since the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, lost another 450 points. About $700 billion in investments vanished.

Oops.

Here's the oddity: if you throw money at a hospital, more people get healthier. If you throw money at a stupid banker, he just keeps stupidly throwing it away. What the hell, it isn't his money. So the Republicans don't want us throwing money at education or healthcare where it woulod actually, you know DO SOME GOOD, but they've got no problem rewarding the people who got us into this mess and will even violate their own (supposed) economic rules to do it.

Isn't that odd?

Comments

[eRobin]

Brilliantly said, as usual.