Move along, nothing to see here

I’ve been catching bits and pieces of the hullabaloo about AIG paying bonuses and Washington knowing about it, supposedly before they gave AIG the bailout money. This does seem a bit outrageous: why are you giving bonuses to people who totally f@#%ed up in the first place, and why are you using tax-payer money to do it? However, the scale of the problem is being blown way out of proportion (as usual) by the media because they can’t find anything else to talk about.

I mean, $165 million in bonuses is a LOT of money, probably more than 99% of American citizens will ever see in their lifetime. But if you compare that $165 million to the $170 billion that was given to AIG in the first place, it isn’t even a drop in the bucket .. it is a mere 0.097% of the total bailout. To put that in perspective, imagine you give someone $1,000 to fix their car and they spend 99 cents on a cheeseburger while they are waiting .. are you going to rail on them for wasting the money? More than that will be spent on the paperwork to keep track of the money in the first place.

You also have to worry abut the backlash of not paying the bonuses. If a bonus is promised to someone via contract, you know damn well they are going to sue if they don’t get it. The cost of litigation could very well be higher than the bonuses. Even if the government steps in and somehow blocks lawsuits, you are going to piss off a lot of people. Not *everyone* in AIG management is at fault for the huge mess that the company got into, and making a blanket judgment that no one should receive a bonus just because it came from the bailout is downright wrong. Many people depend on these bonuses to keep their family housed, clothed, and fed .. not everyone at AIG is a millionaire. Even if you stop some of the “bad guys” from getting their bonus, you will most likely tick off the “good guys” and force them to leave, making the situation even worse.

Personally I think the bailout was a dumb idea and just more of the same that caused the initial economic problem. Pretending you have a free market economy then turning around and meddling whenever things don’t go your way is a recipe for disaster. However, what’s done is done. They can’t take the money back now, and regardless of how the money is spent, it really doesn’t fix the real problem. Stop feeding the media sharks so they’ll move onto something else, and spend your energy fixing your own little piece of the economic pie.

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