Let's be clear here: There is no way out of this box, and the corruption and fraud have permeated every corner of our financial, media and governmental systems.

We give "free" education and health care to illegal aliens, paid for out of citizen tax dollars. Our government supports this.

We propose to give "foreclosure relief" to people who lied on their mortgage applications; how many of the so-called "rescue" programs would have ANY uptake among the public if as part of the refinance or assistance process the original paperwork was re-underwritten to discover if you lied, and if you did, you were prosecuted instead of being helped?

We have done exactly nothing to indict and prosecute the banking executives, the housing industry executives and others in the business world who contributed to these lies and frauds, in some cases explicitly.

The Congresspeople who got "special deals" from Countrywide Financial (and others) on their mortgages remain in office and are not being charged and tried for what, in my opinion, amounts to public corruption. The amounts involved here are not small - the "savings" in many cases ran into the tens of thousands of dollars.

We learned that government employees are also profligate tax cheats! Not only the high-profile ones like Geithner and Daschle either - this is an across-the-board problem:

The Internal Revenue Service is trying to collect billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from nearly half a million federal employees. According to IRS records, 171,549 current federal workers did not voluntarily pay their federal income taxes in 2007. The same is true for 37,752 active duty military and nearly 200,000 retired civilian and military personnel. Documents obtained by WTOP through the Freedom of Information Act show 449,531 federal employees and retirees did not pay their taxes for a total of $3,586,784,725 in taxes owed last year.

What?! Oh, and with the exception of the IRS, you can't be fired as a government employee for not paying your taxes either. You can't make stuff like this up folks - nobody would believe you.