More pay for idiot bankers

President Barack Obama

President Obama,

After listening to your public plea to pressure the congress into passing your stimulus package I wonder if you could tell me why a portion of my fixed income should be used to pay the excessive salaries and benefits of those who created this economic mess. I remember when applying for a home loan I had to have a verified job, 20 percent of the purchase price to put down in cash and the house payment, including taxes and insurance, did not exceed 28 percent of my salary. I am sure that most of the people in the banking and investment community also remember those requirements. I also am sure that they remember why they were requirements. They knew that if those requirements were waived many of those loans would default.

When those in congress decided that these requirements were “discriminating” against the “poor” they insisted that these “requirements” be waived or eliminated. They then created those investment devices that allowed them to pass to others the risk of those loans that history told them were going to default. The irony is that they then bought packages of sub prime collateralized mortgages themselves apparently believing themselves that those with no verified income, no down payments and loans far above any sane percent of their incomes would somehow be good investments.

I am retired from TWA, a company destroyed by the legalized robbery of Carl Ichan, and trying to live on rapidly eroding savings while at the same time being taxed to maintain the inflated and unwarranted salaries, benefits, expense accounts and luxury meetings of those very same “experts”.

If you want me and those of us beyond Washington to support your stimulus package, then, require any entity who receives tax payer money to limit their salary, benefits, expense accounts and trips to luxury spas to the level of that of average taxpayer being asked to support them. What I mean is no salary for anyone in a business receiving government bail out money over your suggested $500,000.00, (I would have that figure a lot less than that because those of us being asked to pay this bill come nowhere near $100,000.00.), no meetings not held at a company headquarters, no bonuses, (I never had a bonus in my life.) and no expense accounts that pay for luxury meals and spa excursions of which the average tax payer never sees. If they think they can do better at some organization that has not taken government money let them go. They have been a disaster at the current crop of financial organizations.

I would like you to tell me why I should be taxed to maintain those life styles when they have been the originators of this terrible financial meltdown?