JUST SAY NO

The next time your credit card statement rolls in, just say no.

No to paying the bill. Just tell your credit card company that until they repay you the taxpayer, you want to renegotiate your own payment terms with them. Be specific: you want to reduce your monthly payment to say $25 or $50 and you also request that they not report you to the credit agencies as delinquent. If they say no (and I GUARANTEE they will), then I urge you to tell them to take their unsecured debt and write it off because you're not going to be sending them any more money.

After all, you'll never see most of the taxpayer's bailout money again. Don't kid yourself, these companies receiving the bulk of the TARP & TALF money (Citi, BofA, AIG) are BANKRUPT companies that will never bounce back from their bottomless losses. If you as a taxpayer are more concerned with how your family will survive and pay your rent or your mortgage or your electric bills, STOP sending these criminal enterprises your hard earned money.

I call these banks and insurance companies criminal enterprises because although they apparently broke no laws bankrupting the world's economy, they all lied to investors about the enourmous nature of their exposure to risky investments and bad loans. Six months ago, most were telling investors that their fundamentals were sound (kinda like John McCain telling us the fundamentals of our economy were sound, remember that?).

Well unfortunately for these executives, there are laws that govern what executives running publicly held corporations can or cannot say about the state of their businesses. It's simple, they ALL mislead us right up until the total collapse of the financial markets in the last quarter of 2008.

For this, they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Since that means that the SEC would be involved, I wouldn't count on this scenario playing out so:

The only way for you as a taxpayer to recover some of your money that's being dolled out to these criminal enterprises is to STOP paying them. After a few months of collection calls, they'll be willing to negotiate a lesser payoff of your balances. That's when you can make your best offer and potentially save thousands of dollars in principal and interest payments. Just do it.

What do you think?