Framing is everything.
Suppose your teenager cracks up their bike. It might be their fault, it might not. Your angry, but you don’t have enough information to act on that.
But they need a new bike and you have to pay for it. So you give them a credit card and send them off to do what they need to.
They might do a good or a bad job, but you sucked it up on this one because they are probably better at this than you are. It saves you the effort too – and even better it saves you the guilt if you took on the job and did it badly.
They come home with a story about spending and bikes, but there is no new bike in the garage. The story seems plausible, but fishy. But again, when you gave them the credit card, you gave up some of the moral high ground to criticize them.
Then you find out that they definitely charged a candy bar on your credit card. And you lose your mind.
Well, no, of course you don’t. That would be emotionally abusive, not to mention contrary to the character of most adults.
If you’ve gotten this far, you probably see that the teenager is AIG, the parent is the federal government, the credit card is the bailout, and the candy bar is the executive bonuses.
But, you may not have noticed that I have the scale correct as well. The AIG bonuses are less than 1/10 of 1% of the total handed over to AIG in their bailout. That’s about the same proportion as a candy bar to a bike.
It’s one thing for individuals and groups out in the public to be angry about the bailouts.
It’s quite another for the people we pay to make policy decisions to spend any time on this at all.
The fact that they did is offensive. Moreover, you should be offended no matter what they choose to do about it.
