{"id":4487,"date":"2009-03-30T12:12:15","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T17:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4487"},"modified":"2009-03-30T12:12:15","modified_gmt":"2009-03-30T17:12:15","slug":"so-whos-gonna-pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4487","title":{"rendered":"So Who’s Gonna Pay?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the banks – some of them, anyway, who bet long on toxic assets and lent like 14 year olds with too-big-allowances – are in trouble.\u00a0 The government, rightly or (koff, koff) wrongly, is stepping in and socializing the major bank industry in all but name, and spreading the love downstream with an immense “stimulus” program that promises money to just about everyone.<\/p>\n

The question is, how is this going to be paid for?<\/p>\n

“Borrowing?”\u00a0 Sure – but eventually loans need to be paid back (unless the government has ordered Fannie and Freddie to underwrite the loans, but that doesn’t apply in this situation).\u00a0 And that’ll be “The taxpayer”<\/p>\n

Who is this “taxpayer?”<\/p>\n

Well, let’s find out who it’s not.<\/p>\n

For starters, let’s leave out the 91 million Americans who <\/a>pay no tax at all<\/a>, <\/em>leaving 209 million people to pay taxes.<\/p>\n

Who are the patriarchs who caused the problem?\u00a0 Men<\/em>!\u00a0 That leaves out the 51% of the population that are women, taking us down to 98 million.<\/p>\n

Remove those in State and Federal prison, (3.8 million<\/a>), as well as the 3% of Americans on parole<\/a> (another 9 million), and you’re at just under 86 million people on the hook for these plans.<\/p>\n

Of course, you can’t count the 73.5 million Americans who are below age 18, obviously<\/a>.\u00a0 They’re kids.\u00a0 It’s not their fault.\u00a0 That leaves 12.5 million of\u00a0 us – except we’re going to have to leave out 10 million illegal immigrants, leaving us at 2.5 million), the military (since they’re busy), the employees of federal and state governments (since they’ll be the ones solving the problem and…<\/p>\n

…that leaves two Americans.\u00a0 You, and me.\u00a0 We are the ones who are going to wind up paying for all this.<\/p>\n

(With profound apolgies to PJ O’Rourke, whose original bit this was).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the banks – some of them, anyway, who bet long on toxic assets and lent like 14 year olds with too-big-allowances – are in trouble.\u00a0 The government, rightly or (koff, koff) wrongly, is stepping in and socializing the major bank industry in all but name, and spreading the love downstream with an immense “stimulus” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,68,64,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-capitalism-v-socialism","category-president-obama","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}