Might I Suggest A Bake Sale.

I pay attention to the news, but I usually zone out during the stock market stuff because the flashy charts and ticker thing scrolling along the bottom of the screen at the speed of sound make me dizzy. So all I ever hear is "blerg blah blah...Bear Stearns..blah blah, Fannie/Freddy...blerg blah...oil....bloop blah...subprime... blah blah blee poptarts..." and then i'm like, "Hold up. Poptarts?" until I realize I just want a breakfast pastry and I shut off the TV.

But to use a lyric from an old Alan Greenspan song, "The economy is fucked, and I hope you have a new place to stay because chances are you don't live here anymore, and the government now owns all of this Wall Street debt meaning you taxpayers out there are basically screwed for a few years while we try to figure this out. Baby."

That song was called, "Milkshake" and later remixed by Kelis, where it lost most of its economic undertones.

I won't go into a rant about the state of things and how we got here, but I have to question these huge government bailouts for these irresponsible companies. Yesterday the Fed gave the failing insurance company AIG an 85 billion dollar loan saying the economy would be in worse shape if the company was just left to die. OK, I don't know if that's true or not, but dude. $85 BILLION??!!! And we're giving that money to a company that has clearly demonstrated that they can't handle their ish. It boggles the mind.

I'm sick of Wall Street giants messing with everything and then pulling a Steve Urkel, "Did I do that?" when Americans start to feel the strain. And I'm even more upset with the fact that the government just keeps throwing money at these businesses that didn't really try to help themselves.

When we were in school and needed money for a school trip, what did we do? We sold shit. We made everyone we knew buy $1 candy bars and crappy coupon books. Yes, it sucked, but it usually worked. If companies like Lehman Brothers had stopped whining for five minutes to pick up a big-ass case of M&M's and sold about one hundred million of them in the subway, maybe they'd still be around. And if someone in Washington had told the people at Bear Stearns or AIG to have a car wash to raise funds before asking for federal cash-monet, maybe normal citizens wouldn't be so mad right now.

All these Wall Street big shots were bright enough to make millions of dollars for themselves while creating this mess. The very least they could do before having the rest of us pay for their mistakes is bake and sell a few hundred billion trays of brownies. That's all I'm saying.