Banking on Taxpayers

Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter needs a little support for his lower jaw:

Have you seen the application the banks had to fill out to receive their slice of the multi-billion-dollar TARP pie? It runs just two pages, with a mere 20 questions. Two pages. Twenty questions. If you wanted to open an account with FedEx to send the application back to the Treasury, you'd have to fill out a three-page, 74-question form. Even when you're giving money to the bank, not the other way around, a checking-account application at Citibank (with minimum required deposit) is six pages long and has 46 questions. The California food-stamps application is five pages long and comprises 38 questions. The Treasury must have some misplaced trust in bankers and other such miscreants, for, unlike on the California food-stamps application, there is no place on the tarp form where someone has to certify "under penalty of perjury" that all the information provided on the application is "true, correct and complete."

Whole thing here.

Comments

[Jeff Wiebe]

I recall a dinosaur whose body was so large that it took the nerve impulses too long to travel for him to reliably avoid possibly chewing his own foot off before the pain alerted him to what he was eating.

I don't know if there is any truth to the story, but as a fable it seems apt here.

[hermesten]

Except this isn't a dinosaur chewing on its own foot....but more like a pack of jackals in a feeding frenzy climbing over one another to get at the best parts of the carcass.

[George Arndt]

We don't need a ban on gay marriage. We need to ban the obscene marriage between Big Government and Big Business.