I'm still reeling from the fact that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had the gall to put on paper a proposal that would give him absolutely unchecked authority to dole out 700 billion dollars from the U.S. taxpayers pockets. The infamous Section 8 of the Paulson Plan provided that Paulson's decisions about what to do with his jingling money "may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency," much less subjected to any scrutiny before the deal is done. It got me to thinking about what I would do with unlimited authority over $700B, without the worry of ever answering to a court. I'm a basically honest, law-abiding person, but they say every person has his or her price, and I can't think of anyone — myself included — that I would trust blindly with that kind of money.
Well, for starters, I would probably take up to $200 billion and use it to buy troubled assets from banks and other financial institutions facing liquidity crises, making sure to hold big photo-op press conferences to show the people that I'm out there working on the problem. I would probably even take the advice of a serious panel of experts from a variety of political and economic viewpoints, to be sure that I was spending that portion of the money wisely. Of course, the real reason would be to prepare my getaway, researching which countries (preferably tropical island countries) have the weakest extradition treaties with the United States, just in case some future DoJ lawyer figures out a way to chip away at that "may not be reviewed" business. For that matter, I'd research the possibility of just outright buying a tropical island so I could declare myself emperor. Maybe I'd even build a hurricane-proof plexiglass dome that could be erected when "climate change" threatens my habitat. After all, a half a trillion dollars will buy a lot of boondoggles.
Naturally, I'd set aside a few billion dollars just for my house. I want an actual creek running through the house, with working waterfalls and real trees. I'd have a private movie theatre with an IMAX®-sized screen and every cable/satellite channel on earth, even if it means launching my own satellite. I'd bribe the Hollywood studios to give me copies of all the big blockbuster movies 3 days before their "world premieres." I'd put in a swimming pool and a giant hot tub, with a deck covered in some kind of precision UV-filtering material so I could get a tan without slathering myself with sunscreen. I'd have a separate supercomputer just to play games on, because it's so much more fun playing Sim City® at 20 teraflops. I'd bring back the flying toasters screensaver, only with real flying toasters in the computer room. I would have a backyard garden about the size of a small suburb. I would have every cool technotoy and computerized gizmo I could think of. Definitely some robots. Lots of robots.
And then I'd paint a giant Stars and Stripes on the side of my house, with the caption, "Thank you, U.S. taxpayers!"
Seriously, I can't think of anyone, not even my own mother, whom I would trust with a 12-figure budget based on nothing more than "Trust me!" I think that the mere fact he proposed such a thing, destroys whatever credibility Hank Paulson had. It was such a brazen act of naked hubris, it beggars belief.