Have AIG Pay the Money Back to the USA? Yeah Right.

So, now that we have all of the indignation over the fact that Congress is a horrible manager, er I mean that AIG paid out bonuses, our great elected officials have come up with lots of solutions. My own Senator Mr. Grassley suggested that they do the Japanese thing and apologize or commit suicide. Of course he had to back track later and say that he really didn't mean for them to kill themselves. Oh really, what does commit suicide mean, Mr. Grassley? You are an embarrassment.

Our tax cheat Treasury Secretary Mr. Geithner has promised us that he will make sure we minimize the loss to tax payers over the AIG bailout. Wait a minute, I thought when we were sold this gagglefest that we (the USofA) were going to make money on our "investment"? Now, we realize that it is flushing money down the toilet? OK, some our leaders realize it is, us common folk realized that several months ago.

One solution several in Congress have advocated is having AIG pay back to the US the amount that they spent in bonuses. So lets see, we gave them $170 billion, they paid out $170 million, and are going to pay the US back $170 million. So where is that money coming from? Oh yeah, the $170 billion that we gave them already (or the next $30 billion when they ask for it).

What I really like is that the Administration is saying they just found out about these bonuses this week (or last week). This tells me one of two things. 1) You're lying, you knew about it before, and realized that legally there was nothing you could do, so you decided to wait and play it for the most political capital you could. 2) You're complete morons and have no oversight into the whole financial mess you are supposedly trying to fix. Either way, you look bad. Real bad.

I have a great idea. When I invest, and the investment turns into a bummer, I cut my losses and sell. I then study what went wrong to learn my lesson for the next time. What we should do is realize that our investment manager (Congress) made a huge mistake (bailing out AIG). Sell (quit all the bailout money and sell whatever stock we own), cut our losses (does anyone actually believe we are going to get anything out of this?). Then we can study the problem (Congress got us into the financial mess in the first place) and learn our lessons (don't trust Congress with anymore money than is necessary, I would put that figure at around $1 trillion, $600 billion of which would be for the Defense Department) and go on with life.