And You Thought It Was Your Money
by James Glaser
January 26, 2009

I did. I always thought America's tax money was mine and every other citizen's of this country, but I guess I was wrong. It looks like that tax money is owned by whomever is in Washington deciding for us what they are going to spend it on.

You know, I don't even care if they don't think it is my money, but I do care about what they spend it on, and if they spend it, I think they should be able to tell me what they spent it on. Well, we now know they can't. Washington spends or to be more honest, gives away billions of dollars to the bankers and Wall Street types, but they have no idea what those people do with what I thought was our money.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports the Treasury Department has a watchdog for the financial bailout by the name of Neil Barofsky, and he claims that it's practically impossible at the moment to tell where all the money has gone. Barofsky is now preparing to ask every bank and company that's received any of the $700 billion financial rescue to detail how the funds were used.

$700 billion is really 700 thousand piles of a million dollars each. Our Treasury Department gave away that money, and now after the fact, they are asking what the people they gave the money to, did with it.

It would be a lot better if the people in Washington believed like we do that American tax dollars belong to the American people. Then maybe they would ask what people were going to do with the money they give away.... before they give it.

We, you and I don't really know how bad or financial problems in this country are. Washington only tells us what it has to. One of the things we know for sure is that we don't have the money that Barack Obama wants to spend on a stimulus package. Obama, like George Bush believes that we can spend borrowed money and become prosperous again. If it really worked that way, you and I could max out all of our credit cards and become wealthy.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, explains this about Obama borrowing money for his bailout of the financial sector of our country.

Barack Obama has spoken often of sacrifice. And as recently as a week ago, he said that to stave off the deepening recession Americans should be prepared to face "trillion dollar deficits for years to come."

But apart from a stirring call for volunteerism in his inaugural address, the only specific sacrifices the president has outlined thus far include lower taxes, millions of federally funded jobs, expanded corporate bailouts, and direct stimulus checks to consumers. Could this be described as sacrificial?

What he might have said was that the nations funding the majority of America's public debt—most notably the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis—need to be prepared to sacrifice. They have to fund America's annual trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. These creditor nations, who already own trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt, are the only entities capable of underwriting the spending that Mr. Obama envisions and that U.S. citizens demand.

We know we are broke. We know George Bush doubled our National Debt and grew the size of our government more than any president in history. Now Barack Obama is starting out doing the same. Bush started his spending spree with a country that was in good shape financially, but Obama does not have that starting point. George Bush had a surplus to work with when he started, and other countries were more than willing to loan us what ever we needed.

Today Barack Obama is going to borrow from countries who are not in good shape and are only loaning us money because if we collapse, they collapse too. You know, some day those countries are going to ask what we are doing with their money, and I don't think we have that answer.

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