ObamaOdrama

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) appeared on CNN’s American Morning last week and offered some insight on the AIG outrage.

CHETRY: … AIG debacle, congressman, what do you think? What do you think about why it happened?

PAUL: Well, it happened because we did something that was outrageous. These bonuses are outrageous — $165 million is a lot of money — but so is $700 billion of unconstitutional appropriations. That’s where the problem came from.

So yes, people are concentrating on these bonuses right now, but they’re missing the point. The point is that we shouldn’t be in the business of bailing out all these companies. And we don’t even know where the rest of the money went. We just discovered — probably inadvertently — that there were bonuses.

Now everybody is outraged — which they should be — so what do they do? They passed $700 billion worth of unconstitutional appropriations; then they come in and they discover this. The public gets notice of it, so the Congress has to act and feel outraged. So they pass a bill which is an ex post facto bill as well as a bill of attainder, which is unconstitutional, so they’re using the tax code to punish people. So they do one harm — one thing wrong — they create a problem an unintended consequence; then they go back, and they will solve the problem by more of the same.

If Ron Paul keeps this up, I may have to really start taking him more seriously.