Bailouts Should Create Jobs, Not Cut Them

So we (you, me, every other U.S. taxpayer) hands Citigroup 45 billion dollars to help the economy. In return, Citigroup cans 53,000 workers, including 122 workers in Sioux Falls, who will be in a much worse position to help the economy themselves. Does anyone else see a problem with handing out tax dollars to corporations who then fire workers?

Robert Reich does, as he looks at the proposed Big Three bailout:

As a condition of getting a federal bailout, the Big Three are promising, among other things, to cut costs. Among the costs to be cut will be jobs. This is paradoxical, since the reason Congress is considering bailing them out in the first place is to preserve jobs and avoid the social costs of large-scale job loss (unemployment insurance, lost tax revenues, pension payments that have to be picked up by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and so forth) [Robert Reich, "The Bailout Paradox," Robert Reich's Blog, 2008.12.04].

Perhaps we could protect workers with three little conditions placed on all the corporate welfare checks we're writing to Citigroup et al.:

1. Any worker laid off by a company receiving TARP or other federal money in a given year will owe zero dollars on his/her federal income tax for that year.
2. That worker's former employer will reimburse the federal government ten times the amount of lost income tax revenue from each laid-off employee. (And to make sure we receive these reimbursements, we will apply strict late fees and interest rates.)
   

We're not paying Citigroup to fire our neighbors. Let's focus our tax dollars on, as Reich says, "the workers and communities that need the most help," not the bankers, brokers, and corporate execs who could quit now and live the rest of their lives in gold-plated comfort.