BOHICA - or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Embrace the $7 Trillion Government Bailout

"We destroyed the village in order to save it."
-Anonymous U.S. Colonel in Vietnam

Bend over, America; here it comes again. The nearly $1 trillion dollars lavished by the government on banks and insurers has apparently proved insufficient to stabilize the economy, and now the automakers has demanded a $25 billion bailout for themselves. Detroit's "Big Three" even took out an ad in newspapers across the nation to assert that millions of people would lose their jobs if Uncle Sam failed to pony up. A technical term exists to characterize this sort of behavior: extortion. Of course, Ford and GM haven't threatened to deliberately cause mass unemployment; they have merely suggested that it will naturally result from the status quo. But I feel so frustrated that the subtlety of this distinction fails to impress me much right now.

When I was growing up, both my dad and my stepdad owned small businesses. During the 1980s, they each had to declare bankruptcy after incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt. So imagine my surprise when, at the end of that decade, Donald Trump avoided personal bankruptcy when banks positively fell over each other to renegotiate the hundreds of millions dollars of debt he had incurred while building the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. From that event I learned a profound financial lesson: the next best thing to having no debt is having so much debt that your insolvency would imperil either the rich and powerful or a sufficient number of innocents for the rich and powerful to take notice. Trump met this criterion; my family, alas, did not.

Since I began writing this, the government has decided not to bail out the "Big Three" - at least not yet. But enough livelihoods hang in the balance of the future of the American auto industry that it will likely receive its lucre sooner or later. In the meantime, the government will be bailing out other companies whose precarious financial positions pose even more imminent threats to the citizens whose future earnings the government is looting in order to bail them out.

Just today, Citigroup received a $20 billion direct investment and another $306 billion of backing for its loans and securities. According to one source, the government has now pledged $7.4 trillion of aid to faltering companies. The Republicans, who traditionally disdain welfare payments to individuals, have apparently cultivated quite a taste for corporate welfare. And the Democrats, who have traditionally disdained corporate welfare, now want even more of it than the Republicans do. Meanwhile, average Americans can only console themselves with the knowledge that, however impotent they feel in the face of forces they did not unleash and cannot control, they would find themselves in even direr straits without this intervention - at least in the short term.

As a taxpaying citizen likely to live long enough to see the bill for all this largesse come due, I demand that it come with certain stipulations. I don't mean increased oversight and accountability. Rather, I hereby call upon the government to create a new national symbol more befitting of prevailing economic attitudes. I want the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States replaced by an emaciated sow besieged by frenzied piglets furiously competing to suckle its last teat. Such iconography would more accurately reflect the actual state of the union. And if I end up having to sacrifice my retirement in order to shovel more swill into the troughs of greedy and incompetent pigs, at least I won't be laboring for a lie.