Iowa Senator Charles Grassley suggested Monday that AIG executives should accept responsibility for the company’s collapse by resigning or killing themselves.  During an interview with radio station WMT in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Republican lawmaker said:  “I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.  And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”

Grassley spokesman Casey Mills quickly responded with damage control:  “Senator Grassley has said for some time now that generally speaking, executives who make a mess of their companies should apologize, as Japanese executives do,” Mills said.  “He says the Japanese might even go so far as to commit suicide, but he doesn’t want U.S. executives to do that.”

The senator’s remarks added to the public outrage over the disclosure that AIG intends to pay its executives $165 million in bonuses after causing the company to fail and accepting billions in federal bailout money.  President Barack Obama criticized AIG for “recklessness and greed” and pledged to try to stop payment of the bonuses.

Story at FoxNews

Where were our fiscally-conservative Republicans when President Bush and the U.S. Congress took a budget surplus and turned it into a $1 trillion budget deficit, and doubled our national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion?

The Republican concern for fiscal responsibility in the recent budget debate rings hollow.  I think it’s clear that NONE of our elected officials on either side of the aisle have any clue what it means to balance budgets and be financially responsible.

Check out this political cartoon

It’s official, trillion is the new billion.  The U.S. Congress is no longer spending our taxpayer money in terms of a mere ten digits.  With the recent flurry of government bailouts and stimulus packages, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all.

One trillion dollars; it’s a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator.  There have been attempts to put this number into perspective before.  A trillion one-dollar-bills laid end to end would reach the sun; or you spend one dollar per second for 32,000 years; or one trillion dollars in pennies would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses (the largest known dinosaur).  Fanciful as this may be, the real story behind one trillion dollars is in its economic impact.  Mint.com investigates what one trillion dollars can do.

One Trillion Dollars at Mint.com

From Late Night with Conan O’Brien:

Toyota is developing a miniature environmentally-friendly car that’s powered entirely by a rechargeable battery.

Meanwhile, Detroit is still hard at work on an SUV that runs on rainforest trees and panda blood.

From Jay Leno on The Tonight Show:

Congress says this week that they are looking into the Bernie Madoff scandal.

So the guy that made $50 billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $750 billion disappear.

That should work out well!  NOT!

Banks that are receiving taxpayer bailouts gave their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, according to an Associated Press analysis.  Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, company jets, limousines, country club memberships and more.  The 116 banks have so far received $188 billion of our taxpayer money.

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The one thing we can always count on Congress accomplishing is to enrich themselves at our country’s expense.  We see it with still-legal special interest donations, illegal favors such as house renovations for convicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and of course the yearly Congressional pay raise.

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