First President Bush, then President Obama, have pursued a policy of “too big to fail.” The first TARP, or Troubled Asset Relief Program set aside $700 Billion of your tax dollars to bail out AIG and others who had lost money investing on poor mortgages. They were simply “too big to fail.” Since then, the government has bailed out wall street investment firms, banks, and car manufacturers. After bailing out General Motors, the government gave away ownership shares to union workers. If GM had gone through normal bankruptcy first, those union contracts and debt would have been washed away the stockholders, such as your retirement fund, would still own the company. But we spent $50 billion to bail them out, give the company to the union, then still had to have the go through bankruptcy. All of the executives at these “too big to fail” organizations made more in bonuses than most of us will make in our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, most of us footing the bill for those “too big to fail” are small enough that our failure means nothing. Most Americans who have pensions or investment funds have lost 40% or so of their net worth. Last year 1.6 million bankruptcies were filed. 100,000 were businesses that were small enough to fail. 1.5 million were people small enough to fail. Last year, 250,000 people lost their homes to foreclosure. Did the banks lose money on those foreclosed homes? Well, ninety percent was covered by mortgage insurance – which taxpayers bailed out the insurers because they were too big to fail. The other ten percent would have hurt the banks – but you guessed it – they were too big to fail.
Meanwhile, the federal government annual debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year. The government needs more money and more taxes for even more programs. Why? Because the federal government is too important and too big to fail. Over 36% of federal workers now make over $100,000 per year while the average salary is over $76,000. The average for taxpayers who pay for them is just over $40,000. We selfish people who are small enough to fail need to pay for them so they can run our lives better than we would left to our own devices. Those who have worked so hard to have nice things need to get rid of them and live on a smaller budget so that those like banks, investment houses and the federal government can spend all they desire. Unfortunately, I am on the list of small enough to fail and I believe those who read this blog site are all with me in that same boat.
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 
Some of your points I don’t disagree with. However, the one I think I do disagree with the most is about the auto manufacturers. While I think bailing out the financial sector was a necessary evil (I don’t want to even think about what would have happened to the dollar’s value if we hadn’t), I think the auto industry was more about jobs and the people. Sure, letting GM and Chrysler fail and crumble into dust might not have destroyed the U.S. economy, but it sure would have made things much worse and for much longer. That’s not to mention the thousands of people who work for those companies. (Sorry, I’m a bit of an auto industry legacy, my grandfather retired from Ford and worked for GM MANY years ago.)
With that aside, I do have an issue with the average pay of government workers, especially knowing how little the largest group of gov employees (the military) makes. It’s kind of a running joke in the military, particularly for supply people, to get out and go to work for the GSA or other gov group to earn a TREMENDOUS amount of money comparatively.
However, I also like to keep in mind that, right now, one of the largest chunks of our national debt is the result of two wars that were never accounted for in our national budgets. I’m not going to get into the politics of the wars themselves, or how horribly they were handled. I’m speaking just about the fact that we threw vast, vast, VAST amounts of money to those conflicts without every accounting for it or sacrificing anything for it. Sure, we sacrificed our people, which in of itself is huge. But what sacrifices did we make as a people to make sure they were funded? We did it in WWII…
I’m not sick of government spending, because I know it’s necessary. I’m sick of waste, no transparency and rampant corporate cronyism.
LikeLike
I would not have let the auto makers go out of business, I would have had them go through bankruptcy like the rest of us, renegotiate their contracts, lower their debt, and move on. I also may have bought up some bad debt, but every executive at those firms would be gone first and certainly wouldn’t have been given bonuses. I don’t think we are too far off in the end.
LikeLike