Now that I am sober I have given some thought to my idea for fixing the bailout issue that our country is currently facing.
In perhaps overly-simplistic terms, people are afraid that if our financial institutions do not get access to liquid capital they will fold, which could take a large chunk of the economy down with it, triggering a new Great Depression.
But if our government hands over a big wad of cash to these troubled institutions, then we are in essence condoning the shortsighted greed of the men who created the problems in the first place. Hell we’d be rewarding it. At the cost of massive tax increases and/or a huge spike in the deficit. And spending money that wasn’t there is how we got into this mess in the first place.
And so I have come up with what I will now call “The Skippy Plan”.
Step One: Identify every financial institution that took part in the shady real-estate loan business that got us into this mess.
Step Two: Commandeer a skyscraper. One that is basically all window across every exterior surface. Remove all non-load bearing walls from the interior of the skyscraper. This essentially makes it a big tall building that you can see through.
Step Three: Stock the building with every piece of kitchen equipment you can think of, but nothing edible.
Step Four: Arrest every board member and corporate officer from Step One. Arrest every board member and corporate officer that served during the real estate bubble. Arrest all lobbyists that worked for these companies during that time period as well.
Step Five: Dress them as clowns. Because if you are foolish enough to play thermonuclear hot potato with the US economy, you are going to look the part dammit.
Use the different types of make-up, costumes and accessories to mark which bank the clown belongs too. For instance bankers associated with Fannie May could look like sad hobo clowns, while those with Freddy Mac could be dressed in motley.
Step Six: Lock all of them inside the the newly remolded “Economic Summit Gulag”. Nobody leaves until we have a workable solution to bail out the economy. No matter how long it takes. And they can’t use public money to do it. But they are more than welcome to dip into their own savings if the are overcome with community spirit.
To encourage them to really set aside their differences, and apply themselves as never before, every 12 hours that passes without a solution will result in a culling.
During the culls American citizens who are willing to do their part to help fix the economy will set up in buildings adjacent to the Gulag and open fire on the investment geniuses inside.
After a few days of dodging sniper fire and having nothing to eat but investment banker tartar I’m sure that the finest minds in finance will be suitably inspired to find a solution to the mess they made.
And just to make sure that we have all of our bases covered, we can turn this into a money-making venture at the same time. I mean, it’s entirely possible that they broke things too much to fix on their own. In that case we might need a way to raise $700 billion fast.
The membership in the incentive squads could be made dependent upon a modest tax-deductible donation to the economic recovery fund. We could let citizens at home call a 900 number to vote on which set of clowns will be considered valid targets. We could set up cameras inside and sell the feed as pay-per-view. I’m sure that the production companies behind the current glut of reality TV could come up with a way to turn this into a gold mine. We could even get some corporate sponsorship involved here: “This culling of Bear Stearns executives is brought to you by ‘Build-a-Bear’.”
And no matter how it turns out we should mount the remains of the partially devoured clowns onto pikes, and place them on the campuses of prominent MBA programs with a placard that reads “Behold the terrible price of fiduciary misconduct!”
We just might end up with a few less clowns recking our economy.
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