TARP Bonuses

Remember the crash of 2008? If you’re mad about all the execs getting $20 billion in bonuses from taxpayer bailout money, you should really know about TARP bonuses. TARP stands for Troubled Asset Relief Program, which funneled $426 billion of government money to bail out the banks for being reckless idiots and liars about how they were packaging subprime mortgages into shiny wrapping paper.

While the bailout helped many Americans not get completely screwed over by the big banks, it also was used to pay bonuses to the very people whose fault the crash was. TARP was basically the government buying all of the bad assets from the big banks to save the American people, and the US from potentially decades of recession. When the government unloaded all of the crap assets from the big banks, they used $20 billion of that government paycheck as executive bonuses—the same executives that almost collapsed the entire American economy. Cool guys. Real cool. TARP bonuses are a snide way of saying “2008 bailout money that went into the exec’s pockets that caused this mess”.