Not I, Said the Duck

It’s in the back of your mind. Something else is still bothering you about these hundreds of billions of dollars going to banks, car companies, or anyone else. It’s not the greed, or the mismanagement, or the smug attitude of the suits coming to pick up bales of bailout money.

It’s not the spa retreats, the ruining of pension plans, or the uncertainty that all this bailout money will achieve its intended purpose. It’s not even the fact that, already, we don’t know where the first couple hundred billion went.

Nope. The thing we don’t talk about is, these companies hire large staffs of tax lawyers and accountants, who spend every waking moment trying to figure out how to pay the fewest possible dollars in taxes.

In the case of the car companies, this money could have gone toward developing a family vehicle that’s more fuel efficient than a Sherman tank.

We all try to limit our tax bill, but most Americans agree, we need to pay our fair share.

But the banks, the mortgage companies, the car companies, want money from a fund they didn’t kick in to.

They violated the Little Red Hen rule. You don’t plant or harvest or grind the wheat, you don’t bake the bread, you don’t even get a crouton.
We’ve gotta somehow pump money back into the system anyway. But I feel a little better figuring out what that other outrage was, scratching in the back of my head.