Citigroup, one the world’s largest banks, was bailed out with about $45 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds, and we taxpayers — you and I — still own a little more than one-quarter of the company. Do you recall making this investment? I don’t.
Nevertheless, in testimony before a panel appointed by Congress to oversee management of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program fund that financed the Citigroup bailout, the bank’s chief executive officer, Vikram Pandit, thanked all of us.
“I want to thank our government for providing Citi with TARP funds. … Citi owes a large debt of gratitude to American taxpayers.”
The rest of Pandit’s testimony amounted to genuflecting before his government welfare officers and endorsing sweeping new government regulation of the financial services industry that Democrats in the House and Senate are championing.
“I strongly believe that consumer protection can and should be strengthened at the federal regulatory level,” Pandit testified.
The $700 billion TARP funds used to bail out Citigroup, along with others, was a check written on American taxpayers that Congress gave then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to spend however he wanted.
At the center of the financial collapse that brought down these banks was the illusion of infinitely rising housing prices fueled by trillions of dollars of free-flowing credit, artificially cheap because it was backed by us taxpayers through the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In other words, the heart of our crisis can be explained by Margaret Thatcher’s famous summary of the problem with socialism: Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
Of course we need protection. But American consumers are also American taxpayers, and it’s American citizens and taxpayers who need to be protected from their government.
The tea party grass-roots revolt that has sprouted across our country is a basic expression of recognition that we have lost control of our own government and that if we are going to be a free and prosperous people, this can’t go on.
This year about 45 percent of our gross domestic product, the economic production of the American people, will be taken by local, state and federal government.
Since 1970, federal government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased by 221 percent compared with a 32 percent increase in median household income.
No, we don’t need a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. We need restoration of the rule of law, basic protections for private property essential for any free society, and recognition of the limited role of the federal government, as enumerated in our Constitution.
We can’t continue living in the lawless society we’ve become where politicians and corporate welfare queens can conspire in Washington to do whatever they want with our resources.
It is illegal for businesses to collude to set prices. But somehow it was not illegal for the nation’s pharmaceutical firms to do essentially this in helping to midwife the multitrillion-dollar health care bill that still might be forced on us.
Pharmaceutical industry support for socializing one-sixth of the American economy was critical for moving the health care bill forward. And the industry got on board by getting agreement on how government would be involved in pharmaceutical pricing.
The Department of Education has announced that Washington is among the finalists to receive federal money as part of the $4 billion Race to the Top program. Washington already spends $28,000 per student in one of the worst school systems in the country.
The current Obama administration budget projects a doubling of our national debt to $18.5 trillion by 2020, or about 100 percent of our GDP. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates interest alone will cost $800 billion a year.
It’s time to stop lying to ourselves. We’re losing our freedom and our nation. We need to slam on the brakes before it’s too late.
Examiner Columnist Star Parker is an author, and president of CURE, the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education ( www.urbancure.org). She is syndicated nationally by Scripps Howard News Service.
