If you are one of the people who voted for America’s new president, thinking your life will improve, you have my sympathy.
When the money is gone, and the music stops, the party is over. Slinking away in the shadows, amid the exhausted party favors, will be the bailout party recipients. Their pockets are stuffed with your kids’ college fund and your retirement savings.
That big asset bubble you have been living in for the past five, 10 or 15 years has gone pop! The price you paid was bid up into the stratosphere by people who took out loans they had no thought of paying back. And your elected representatives decided that pressuring banks to lend to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t repay was “striking a blow for fairness.” Well, perhaps it was – since so many voters returned the same congressmen and women to office, election after election.
Now when Congress needs another quick trillion dollars to bail out the next crop of bankers who did their dirty work, you’re elected representatives aren’t going to go stop after they’ve visited your neighbor’s house and emptied his piggy bank. They’re coming to see you, too. That’s “fairness,” you see.
But to get a dollar from you, Congress has to take a buck twenty-five out of your piggy bank. Like everyone else, government isn’t immune from overhead and interest costs. So that’s a buck twenty-five you won’t be spending at the grocery store, down at the smoke shop, or at the gas station. Through the magic of payroll taxes, that buck twenty-five will be gone before you ever see it. And as your employer sends in his half of those payroll taxes, he may just decide you’re not worth the overhead, either.
Rest assured, though; your congressman will pass your piggy bank on to a very deserving executive, who will in turn break it open and share the proceeds with his newfound friends in Congress. That, at the very least, you can bank on.
The bailout party, however long it lasts, insures only one thing: That the same evil, greedy and stupid people who caused the problem will still be in charge next time. The problem of evil, greed and stupidity is a problem of the human heart and mind. No amount of money can fix it, because it’s not an economic problem.
People giving loans to illegal immigrants, who have now fled across the border; people falsifying their income to qualify for loans to “flip” another house; people who looked the other way while all this entered the retirement investment stream – these are common-sense issues that happened because there was no common sense.
Evil, greed and stupidity is a human-nature problem, one that God identified shortly after we turned on Him. Without the informal social controls that religion exerted on all of us, society – that would be you and me – is in for a rough ride to a very unpopular destination. Too bad so many have worked for so long to eliminate those constraints. Now we all get to live with the results.
So don’t be surprised when that lucky partygoer who bursts the treasury’s piñata, with the hope of ushering in the new socialist paradise, floods the ballroom with IOUs, rather than freshly minted greenbacks. Do pay particular attention, however, to the names that are read from the bandstand as the mess is cleaned up. One of those freshly minted IOUs belongs to you.
