Dear gov’t: stop insulting my intelligence

It’s bad enough that our government is working to spend my hard-earned tax dollars bailing out idiots too stupid to realize it’s a losing proposition to lend money to people who can’t afford to repay it, but insulting my intelligence while they’re at it is a bit too much.  From the NY Times coverage of the changes proposed by the Democrats to the bailout plan, in the context of restricting pay to executives whose firms get bailed out:

But Mr. Paulson said that he was concerned that imposing limits on the compensation of executives could discourage companies from participating in the program.

“If we design it so it’s punitive and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the way we need it to work,” Mr. Paulson said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Let’s talk about executive salaries. There have been excesses there. I agree with the American people. Pay should be for performance, not for failure.”

But he quickly added: “But we need this system to work, and so we — the reforms need to come afterwards.”

Yes, because an institution in danger of going bankrupt is going to balk at having to pay their CEO less, because they’d rather go out of business than reduce executive compensation.  Yes, that’s likely.