It seems the federal government is indeed going to bail out private companies?to the tune of $700 billion?in one of the most perplexing and costly moves ever made.

I wonder if they’ll start bailing everyone’s business out now. If things start going sour for The Pulse, I’m looking at you, Congress, you’ve set the precedent.

Hey Milano’s, don’t shut your doors just yet, get the taxpayers to throw some money at you. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to work that way.

There’s been a mass e-mail circulating lately suggesting the government simply divvy out the money among the taxpayers?another stimulus, if you will. While it’s a nice angle, the math in the e-mail isn’t exactly correct. However, that didn’t stop one local publication from printing the theory?though at least it was as a letter to the editor.

The letter claimed dividing up the $700 billion between the approximately 200 million U.S. taxpayers would give each one $3.5 million apiece.

I’m not really a numbers guy, but I can tell that’s simply not correct. If you were to run this simple division problem through a calculator, one would see dividing the total between 200 million people would give each one $3,500. I expect this sort of blatant disregard for the truth from a mass e-mail, but please, area sources of information, check these things before you put them in print.

And Mr. Jaeger, and everyone else who forwards information without thinking about it, expect any mass e-mails to be false and subject to scrutiny before you accept them as truth.

Anyway, beyond the erroneous division, it’s still probably not a good idea to give this money to the general public?they’ll just blow it on gas.

Our country is being sucked dry of money! Spending everything on gas sends the cash overseas. The Arabs profiting off the gas revenue are not coming back over here and eating in our restaurants, shopping at our mall or buying my newspaper advertising; they don’t come to Murfreesboro to reinject this cash back into our economy, helping Americans. The economy will never improve if this continues. Our wealth is going to oil producing countries, not being circulated within the U.S.?this is not good.

Let’s figure out a way to buy fuel from our country’s corn farmers. Forget whether you believe in the global warming theory or not, let’s get off the gas for everyone’s benefit.

Republicans are blaming Democrats, and Democrats blame Republicans, but I applaud Mr. Valentine for taking it upon himself to create an alternative form of transportation and understanding American ingenuity will always be more powerful than government action and people who wait for the government to solve problems are SLAVES.

Peace,

Bracken Mayo, Editor in Chief