When do I get to be too big to fail?

About 6.1% of working Americans are out of work and tens of thousands more don’t show up in that statistic because they’ve just given up on finding a job. Hundreds of thousands more are “underemployed”. You know about these people: Ph.D.s driving taxis, people with master’s degrees clerking at convenience stores. There wasn’t any golden parachute of $14 million for them like there was for the CEOs that drove the biggest mortgage companies in history into the ground. In fact, there wasn’t a $1,400 severence package. They just were out on the street. Even if they were doing a good job like the 150 journalists at the LA Times that got fired because the print news industry can’t figure out a way to be profitable enough for the billionaires that own the presses.

If that sounds like a lot of people that weren’t too big to fail, have I got some news for you. This week, we learned that new housing starts and building permits went through the floor, which is entirely predictable when no one can get a mortgage. That means that thousands of carpenters, electricians, plumbers and associated tradesmen are headed into unemployment. They were too small to care about, not too big to fail.

Somehow the working mom who is going into foreclosure and bankruptcy is also too small. We have record foreclosures and bankruptcies nowadays. We’re at levels we haven’t seen in 17 years — since this president’s father was in the White House, just to give a little history lesson in Republican economics. The last time things were almost as bad economically, the nation turned away from the GOP and elected a little-known Democrat who campaigned on bringing Hope to the nation and darned if we didn’t have a boom and turned deficit spending into a surplus.

Nevermind. Democrats are tax and spend liberals who kill babies. Can’t have that.

What we need is hard nosed Republicans who understand the economy. Guys like Phil Gramm who understand that people in foreclosure are just whiners. Phil, who engineered the deregulation that got us to this point, is the guy who has John McCain’s ear on the economy and now we know that the economy is fundamentally sound, even if the Dow is down 4000 points in the past couple years and fell through the floor this week.

Except, of course, for Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae and AIG, which are all too big to fail.

Seems like the Republicans who are all for rugged individualism and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get government out of the way of the entrepeneurs turned Socialists on a dime when it was their ox being gored.

Can’t let a banker’s kids go hungry. Banker’s kids experience hunger? Get out. Maybe make him give up his mountain home, but go hungry? No!, I say, NO! His kids will still go to Yale while your kids will learn welding in community colleges. Guys who drive businesses into the ground are too big to fail. Guys who do their jobs and just try to pay their taxes and their bills, well, sometimes the Adam Smith invisible hand can be harsh, but don’t worry about it, the ship will right itself. We’re good capitalists unless it’s a guy who got a multimillion dollar bonus from his Wall Street firm last year. This year, he needs a bailout from the guys who pay their bills and try to hang on. He wouldn’t piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire, but he wants you and millions like you to pick up the tab for his reckless investment in some frothy derivative that he couldn’t explain to you in an 8 hour seminar if he were so inclined, you stupid taxpaying voter.

I want to be too big to fail, don’t you?

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