Wait, Did Paulson win the lottery?
Jumping in where Beezer left off, guess who else wants a bailout? The mayors of three cities; Philadelphia, Phoenix and my illustrious home town of Atlanta. Why the hell should a bailout that was originally intended to shore up the financial markets be used for anything but that?? (You will notice that I as well am opposed to the idea of financially blunting the effects of poor business decisions).
When I heard about this yesterday, and after a brief period of ‘impolite sililoqy’, the first thought that came to my mind is a bunch of redneck relatives coming out of the woodwork to see if they can get a piece of someone’s lottery winnings. It actually made me laugh a little. Why is this even happening? The bailout bill was passed with wording that actually gives Henry Paulson the power to do whatever he wants with the money that he thinks will shore up the American economy. This is political genius in it’s purest form. Now not only is Paulson the only one that can make the decision, he is also the only one who can be blamed for screwing it up!! It was an act of purest optimism to believe that the government would (for once) do something that didn’t have detrimental effects on the taxpayers of the US. Now we have made ‘Uncle Henry’ everyone’s favorite rich uncle. Such disgusting behavior…
I don’t know about the other two cities, but Atlanta could use a serious clean-out of city hall. The city is a bloated, incompetent bureaucracy with dozens and dozens of un-needed (and essentially useless) employees. Decisions are not made on fact, but on how best to keep the SCLC, NAACP and ACLU from protesting. The administrators of many of the various departments are unintelligent, career government employees who couldn’t run a lemonade stand for a profit (or to break even for that matter) because they’ve never had a job that required that they spend their own money. Waste and fraud are chronic and customer service is seen less often than the half-invisible pink, sparkly unicorn that lives in the right hand elevator shaft on the third floor. Sometimes he prances down to the building department, but I think that the mythical “Customer Service” is locked in Shirley Franklin’s desk. She lets it out occasionally when her administration is in the grinder over something, but poor C.S. is largely serving a life sentence in “middle-right drawer solitary confinement.”
This leads me back to the city asking for a bailout. We have been told that it is essentially to help pay for pensions for former city employees. WHAT?! You mean the city didn’t have a privately run independent retirement fund that would continue to pay regardless of tax income?? What a dim decision that was… wait, it’s government. This is why career government (generally union) employees are useless and expendable. The people of Atlanta ought to DEMAND top to bottom reform out of the city government and a total independent audit of every cobweb in the joint. Maybe they could use the bailout money for that instead….