Calvin Rees’ DemoOkie

It must be tough being a secertary in one of the low profile posts in the W administration. You see all the God-like power the VP, and Homeland Security, and Attorney General heads have managed to acquire, and wonder how you can get yourself some of that.

So when the financial crisis happened, where most of us saw disaster, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson saw opportunity. His first gambit was to ask Congress for an unlimited tap on the treasury with no oversight whatsoever. That was a non-starter. So rather than unlimited, he asked for a meer $700 billion with no oversight. That’s a bit less than three quarters of a trillion of our dollars.

Now the Democratic-controlled congress may be slow, but they’re no ‘W’. They balk at this too. “OK”, he thinks, “The direct approach did not work. I guess I’ll have to be a bit more subtle”.

So next he takes one small part of the crisis, the bad loans that big banks made on housing derivatives, a promotes it. These bad loans will kill the banks, and the banks are “too big to fail”. A depression looms unless this is taken care of immediately. The treasury department must have nearly a trillion dollars to buy out these bad debts, and they need it yesterday. Otherwise, economic armageddon. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Anyone complaining is being like the guy with the scruffy beard here.

So a scared congress gets together and votes Paulson $700 billion of our money to buy out these bad loans.

Fast-forward to last week, and what does Paulson do? Why he declares that he isn’t going to use that money for buying those loans after all. Stupid idea really. Who thought of it anyway? He’s going to save it for much more productive uses.

Congress has called him back for hearings on this, but their only recourse at this point is to take the money back from him, which would be admitting they were wrong. That ain’t gonna happen.

So now Treasury Secretary Paulson has his own personal $700 billion slush fund, just like he asked for in the first place.

Filed under: MuleSkinner