For people trying to hang onto their homes or jobs, all this bailout talk for millionaires has to be more than discomforting. Back in the early ’80s, when Reagan started his deregulation crap by overturning the very policies that rescued us from the Great Depression, CEO salaries were about 20 times that of the average worker. As we sit here helpless in the middle of this current financial disaster, the equivalent CEO salaries with bonuses are now 500 times greater. And if that’s not enough to get your sphincter muscle twitching, many of these companies are losing billions to boot.
People are losing their jobs not because of any wrong doing on their part, but because of greed and poor decisions by upper management. Instead of being innovative to reverse the process and increase business, they have been taking the easy way out by cutting jobs to reduce costs. This is just stupidity squared because job losses are reaching critical mass and unemployed people are not exactly known for buying cars, investing in stocks or buying homes. Quite understandably they will spend the minimum just to survive, so as job losses and unemployment expand, our consumer based economy is sinking into a depression.
Unlike the federal government, consumers can’t print more money, sell bonds or borrow from foreign governments like China. We instead have to rely on credit cards or house equity to secure bank loans. Well, credit cards eventually get maxed out and home equity is something most can only dream of given the current circumstances. In fact, many new home owners hold mortgages of greater value than their house. Without a light at the end of the tunnel, it only makes sense to leave the keys in the door and walk away.
You can only feel sorry for the millions of normal folks who are getting crushed financially, and anger towards the bastards who abetted this disaster, but the thing that irks me the most is that the $700. billion bailout to the financial industry, the very culprits who started this mess, are using these funds not to help you, me, GM, Ford or Chrysler, but to buy up the weaker banks who couldn’t survive this crisis.
Think about that for a second. The biggest banks got seven hundred billion in bailout money with little oversight other than the expressed purpose of easing the credit crunch, but won’t loan a dime of it to the big three auto makers, which means the car guys have to come cup in hand to the government, that’s us folks, for additional bailout money. The so-called big three are definitely guilty of poor decisions and being on the wrong side of the trend to smaller and more efficient vehicles, but when GM, once the largest corporation in the world is denied a loan from the banks, banks fresh with this infusion of our commitment to higher taxes to pay this off some day, you really have to wonder
And just to put it in perspective, with all these numbers involving billions, know this: to count to a billion, you know…1,2,3, 4, without a break would take 31 years.
Smoke that taxpayers.