Wall Street fat cats and big-wigs spent years irresponsibly handling their duties and responsibilities to their companies and to the economy by making questionable decisions and even more questionable loans. America has been led into a "culture of debt". Once upon a time, it was considered almost shameful to have a mortgage, and buying a car on credit was considered irresponsible. Now, with corporate financial advertising shoving the ideas of "why wait?", "have it now" and  "reward yourself" down our throats, creating an artificial need for instant gratification, every day Americans are as committed to living beyond their means as our government seems to be. At no point during this greed frenzy to put every single American in debt did it occur to anyone what might happen when everyone was as in debt as they could afford to be, and then suddenly couldn't afford to pay it, due primarily to an over-inflated housing market making owning a home virtually impossible in some areas for average working-class Americans, pushed to the tipping point by escalating fuel prices.

I'm not a financial expert, and I'm not going to try and give a history lesson on what has happened to our economy. I will just summarize it as we, the people, have been led to believe:

Greedy wall street types abused their companies' assets and practices for personal profit, while ignoring the potential impact of their actions on the economy as a whole. Is that about right?

They did this for a long time, encouraged by a trend towards increased de-regulation, and wouldn't you know it, they crashed the economy. As a result, the government is "forced" to bail out the financial sector to prevent the utter collapse of the economy. As I said, I'm no expert, so I will buy, for the sake of argument, the necessity of the bail out.

Now, the bail out comes, essentially, as a massive, 850 Billion Dollar (including the soon to be 150 billion given to AIG) hand out to the very executives that are at the root of the problem. Am I the only one that sees a problem here? Are these companies required to fire the executives that ran them into the ground? No. Are they required to restructure their businesses to be more cost effective? As far as I know, No. Ok, Are they even required to have any kind of accountability whatsoever for how they use the money they are being given? Astoundingly, No.

So, the exchange could be over simplified as something like this:

Government: "Greedy financial company executives, you have run your businesses so irresponsibly that you have put the entire economy at risk of collapse."

Executives: "Oh, crap. Sorry. Can you give us a minute before you arrest us, so we can collect our multi-million dollar golden parachutes that we get from our companies despite the fact that we did a crappy job?"

Government: "We're not going to arrest you".

Executives: "You aren't?"

Government: "No. Instead, we're going to give you hundreds of billions of dollars."

Executives: "Seriously?"

Government: "Yes."

Executives: "What's the catch?"

Government: "You have to clean up your mess, and promise not to do it again."

Executives: "Oh. Ok. I guess you'll be over-seeing how we use this money to make sure that we are using it responsibly?"

Government: "No. For some reason, we're going to trust you to look at more than just your own best interests, this time."

Executives: "So, I keep my job, don't get arrested, and still get my massive severance package when I do decide to retire, or wind up getting fired, and I still get my massive bonus that is obviously not performance related?"

Government: "Let's just keep that to ourselves, shall we?"

How do you suppose these executives are rewarding the inexplicable trust our government has shown in them in how they use their free money? Well, instead of using the money to start the flow of credit our economy is dependent on once again, they've instead used it to buy up lesser, more struggling institutions, and to pad their bottom lines. And, just to show how little they feared any sort of accountability for their use (or misuse) of taxpayer money, AIG officials sent their executives on a $400,000 retreat to an exclusive resort. I can only assume it was to thank them for screwing up the economy so badly that it earned them $65 billion (soon to be $150 billion) in free government hand-outs. Goldman & Sachs handed out enough cash in executive bonuses to more than double the average yearly income of all employees of Burger King, a company they own. But why raise your employees from WAY below poverty level to merely poverty level when you can keep it all for yourself? At one point, planned bonus pay-outs for Morgan-Stanley ($10.7 billion) was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. If I'm reading correctly, Citigroup increased it's total payroll in 2008 by 25.9 billion, which is, astoundingly, almost exactly what they first got in the bailout (25 billion), which means we all just paid for them to get raises. Lehman brothers had set aside 6.12 billion for bonuses, which is roughly 100 times their net revenue for the year, prior to their bankruptcy. Huh? At one point it was estimated that an equivalent of 10% of the government bail-out package would wind up in the pockets of the very executives who were responsible for creating the mess, as a "reward".

I maintain my stance that it would be better for every day Americans, AND for the economy, if the $800 billion was instead given over to the populace, with the stipulation that it be used on outstanding debts, mortgages and loans. That would be roughly $4000 per person to apply to their individual debts. As a result, the money STILL winds up in the financial sector, much of the "bad debt" that is dragging down the economy would be eliminated or eased, and for those of us for whom $4000 would be enough to eliminate all our debt, it would also act as an economic stimulus, because we'd now have back the several hundred dollars per month we currently spend on paying down debts to use on other things. I mean, the government is for the people, not for the banks, right?