Congratulations to the august members of the House of Representatives. You just saved America $148.5M. Of course, after countless hours of wrangling with the Senate, that will surely be reduced by half. And then, there will be the lawsuits challenging the ex post facto tax targeting a particularly company--a really, really, really bad company which deserves to be disemboweled and which we would definitely do if that pesky economic depression weren't in the way. But as I was saying, after the lawsuits and the bureaucratic overhead costs for collecting the cash, the DBO (Dagblog Budget Office) estimates the net savings for the American taxpayers to be somewhere between 0 and -$148.5M. But that doesn't matter because the point is JUSTICE! We demand that all the rich assholes deserve to pay the ultimate penalty for their greedy, greedy awfulness: TAXES! That will show the bastards.
Now I know that the American taxpayers elected George W. Bush, twice (ok, once), the same guy who lowered the taxes on the rich in the first place. And I know that we the people used to believe that the free market knows best and that the government should stay out of our wallets, purses, piggy-banks, and overvalued investments. I also admit that a few of us may have chuckled happily as our 401K's bustled and our houses boomed and Japanese HDTV's flowered like digital dandelions in our living rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, anywhere else we could fit them, which is a lot of places because they're so incredibly thin. And maybe back then we weren't so down on greed, and so we nodded complacently while AIG and the other bad boys bought up all the mortgages that inflated our real estate and when they awarded those absurdly generous contracts with mandatory bonuses to the evil greedy bankers.
But that was before they sucked all the froth out of our 401K's and fired our neighbors and foreclosed our houses and forced us to sell 12 of our 15 televisions on craigslist so that now we only have one in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the den which doubles as a computer monitor so it doesn't really count. In short, that was before we were MAD!
And when the American people get MAD!, we don't want to sit around and wait for our plodding leaders to come up with plans and ideas and ways to make sure that this whole mess doesn't happen again after we're not MAD! anymore. We want JUSTICE! NOW! We want to see our our leaders stick it to some token bankers where the sun don't shine: their wallets! Let's see how many HDTV's they can buy now!
I had thought that our craven representatives would just hem and haw and talk about how mad they were but how the past was the past and how it was too late to stop the bonuses and how we have to think about the future. But I underestimated the willingness of our elected leaders to do the right thing, which is to say whatever they think will get them re-elected next time round. So thank you House of Representatives for standing up to the evil bankers and bowing, nay groveling, before the unrivaled wisdom of the American voter.
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Cross posted at dagblog.com. You can subscribe to all my posts via RSS feed or email. For those who missed my video before and for those who missed the point of my video before: The House That George Built...