This stimulus thing

Welfare used to be a highly debated topic. back in the days of Newt, the agenda was to get every welfare recipient on the job and earning their wages. handouts were going to be a thing of the past. Strict rules were put in place. If you want government money, you need to abide by the rules. It all sounds so well thought out, so well intentioned and well, common sense. A new Welfare is upon us. Banks, Investment firms, car manufacturers, all want government money. Did they do anything to earn this money? Not really. They all have one thing in common: They are going broke - or went broke. How did they get that way? Was it just bad luck, bad circumstance, too competitive of a market? Not really. It was bad policy, bad strategy, and a whole lot of greedy bad dealings. OK, I get it, our economy will absolutely die, bringing on an economic apocalypse and Mel Gibson riding around on motorcycles or oil carrying trucks. So what are we going to do. We are going to give these companies billions of dollars. Hundreds of billions of dollars. That kinda sounds like welfare doesn't it? Except they don't think it should have any rules attached. What would Newt say? I bet he would say something like: America needs to aim at reducing recipient dependence on the government; welfare programs, as they stand, act counter-productively towards their stated goals by perpetuating poverty through creating dependence on the government. He had absolutely no problem designing welfare reform back in 1996 prohibiting welfare to mothers under 18 years of age, denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, and enacting a two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. H.R.4, the Family Self-Sufficiency Act, included provisions giving food vouchers to unwed mothers under 18 in lieu of cash AFDC benefits, denying cash AFDC benefits for additional children to people on AFDC, requiring recipients to participate in work programs after 2 years on AFDC, complete termination of AFDC payments after five years. That seems to be a lot of rules to get a few dollars a week to live on. Today, the US Congress is capping CEO compensation at $500K per year to those companies that have failed miserably; failed to make ethical decisions, failed to hold to honest fair profits, failed to maintain a standard of wages that kept CEO compensation within the 100 times the value of the standard wage earner. To me, if you want government money, it is reasonable for the government to put some small restrictions on it. Newt felt that way. I agree with him.