Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Former Vice President of Dallas Federal Reserve: Failure of the Government to Provide More Information About Bailout Could Signal Corrruption
You know things are getting bad when even Federal Reserve officials are questioning whether we're being ripped off. In an article today, ABC includes the following quote:
Gerald O'Driscoll, a former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said he worried that the failure of the government to provide more information about its rescue spending could signal corruption.I couldn't have put it better myself.
"Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don't see why it wouldn't be here," he said.
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I think that public corruption is an INTERNATIONAL phenomenon, spread from Alaska to Ankara, from Madrid to Mongolia, and all points in between. To assume that the people that have the authority to extract money pretty much indiscriminately out of other people's wallets for purposes esoteric and largely obscure will be 100% honest and forthright in their practices sans public oversight is to beg on bended knee for economic disaster. Reform sucks, but it doesn't have to hurt, you just have to start with the basics, improving accounting standards, improving accountability standards, and reducing the size of the overall budget. When people can't get a wild hair and get billions for a bridge no one needs, and the public starts running recall petitions on a regular basis against politicians with 'interesting' friends and equally interesting business practices abroad AND at home, then you'll see the symptoms reduced.
ReplyDeleteThere's no reason, on God's green earth, with all these computers running all the time, that they can't 'share out' the task of managing the federal budget, just like SETI does with their distributed computing. It's something that's got to be done, the federal budget is most likely an accountant's nightmare from hell, so they need a large staff of highly qualified, educated, and well-informed people overseeing our budget, with intervention authority to prevent further fiscal abuses. If you can get a handle on the money, then that will serve the greater good, because people from all over are honest/dishonest in varying degrees, and you can't rely on people to be saints, which is why you need external oversight over the whole darn mess. Make honesty the national standard, and politely ask for the resignations of people that don't exhibit it. We have a potential recruiting pool for representatives and so forth that probably numbers a hundred million easy, and some of these old farts have been in their chairs for decades. Turnover ain't such a bad thing, and if there's evidence that someone's been skimming, or just throwing it away, well, ixnay on the erelection-ay, I say. Eh? LOL