AIG and the Interloping Relative

Life in the bailout era is like two forks in the road. One leads to a dung heap and the other to the city dump. It's the lesser of two evils, the old pick your poison syndrome.

And so it is with AIG whose executives behaved like the drunken relative who loses his job again then shows up at your place in search of food and a place to lodge. You can't turn him out because he might end up in a worse predicament, and you once attended Sunday school, so you decide to help out.

Had Congress not bailed out that drunkard of a relative, AIG, then the stock market would have taken an even bigger plunge and pandemonium would have set in, but now that the deed is done and they are in our houses and pocket books, the question is where do we go from here?

The answer is more governmental control and laws that make sense because even a fifth grader would know the answer to the following question: "If a gardener earning twenty-thousand dollars a year has a mortgage of five thousand dollars a month, how long will it be before he winds up in the street?" But no one bothered asking, and here we are now.

Unlike the relative fighting in an expensive war with a beginning, middle and end, this old boy culture has been going on since Dickens' time, if not before, so the only remedy is to hold some kind of government version of rehab with rules and regulations, and that doesn't mean giving any extra spending money to anyone who can't straighten up and fly right.