Iphone, Ipod, Icare

One of the recession's favorite whipping boys, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. or PBGC as Belt-Heads know it, has announced that it will assume responsibility for $6.2B of bankrupt Delphi Corp. pensions. While many Delphi pensioners will make do with modified benefits, UAW members will be paid in full. This may be a good time to remind you that you own GM, and that this pension move is a way to have GM avoid holding the bag itself on these pensions. Instead, you hold the bag. If you don't realize why that's a benefit, nobody's going to explain it to you. Remember when $6.2B was a lot of money? Me neither.

Let's re-cap:

• The aforementioned PBGC is underfunded due to this year's crop of 135 bankruptcies.
• Social Security is well-underfunded, due to too many reasons to list, but mostly because Congress has stolen from it so many times to plug holes, it has become a whole hole.
• 401K's went south with detritus from socialized subprime housing.
• The President last night mentioned that our deficit will soon be over $7Trillion, but that we should feel really good, since it would have been nearly $10T, but for him and his Dems. Remember when $7T was a lot of money? Me neither.
• The same people who helped make us owners of GM, allowed underfunding of pension plans and agreed to adopt them for taxpayers, stole billions from Social Security, and arranged about $1.5T in stimulus spending, are reforming healthcare. It won't add a penny to the deficit. Oi.

Some of us are still wondering how bankers and traders managed to slip subprime by managements and boards, who believed reckless is the same thing as risky. Some of us are wondering how AIG, which we also own, managed to insure all of that. There are still a few people who didn't see the AutoWreck coming for at least twenty years, and believe the new Camaro will save GM. Many still cannot believe that investors and the SEC were gullible enough to believe that Bernie Madoff could really make those returns.

We might get some real insight into how bad stuff happened by watching closely how Congress and the Administration are selling healthcare "reform" to us. We are being asked, as in a science fiction film, to suspend our disbelief that Congress can provide anything that won't turn into a giant taxpayer sinkhole, because they cannot manage money without being reckless with it.

Citizens believe that this is Subprime II, because nobody has explained how much we will pay and how much care we will get, so that we can compare it to what we currently have. The 48 million who are not now covered, 11 million of whom are illegal residents, don't care a hoot; it's all for free. The wealthy don't care about the Charlie/Nancy-Tax; they can buy coverage anyway.

We gave houses to people who couldn't afford them, promised pensions that couldn't be paid, let subprime suck up our 401K's, and now we are asked to TRUST the same people who drove us off those cliffs.

It isn't working. If Congress were a company, it would be GM, AIG or Citi. That's not good enough.

Please, put Steve Jobs and his designers in a room with Google's engineers and let them re-design healthcare. It will take them about three days and icare/Googledoc will work. Then, let them tackle that $7Trillion. Please.

Remember when....ah, forget it.