I was talking with a friend of mine about the horrors and pitfalls of our current economic crisis. We discussed such relevant topics as, how in God’s name can we afford $4.6 TRILLION worth of bailouts? And also, why are AIG executives taking taxpayer-funded retreats?

While we generally agreed on a great many debatable points, my friend balked at that last one. “That’s not really fair,” he said. “They had already planned that retreat prior to the bailout, and essentially used their own existing cash flow to pay for it.”

Wait a second. I don’t quite get that. Their own existing cash flow? “How does that compute?” I asked him.

As a response, he offered me an analogy. It went a bit like this:

Say you’re a kid with five dollars. Your mom asks you to go up to the store and buy some milk. She gives you five dollars to pay for it. You take your five dollars and her five dollars and you go up to the store and buy milk, and also a couple of comic books for yourself. Sure, you ended up spending ten dollars in the end, but you bought milk with the five dollars from your mom, and comic books with the five dollars you already had. You spent mom’s money on the things she asked for, and your money on things for you. In the end, everything is a wash.

A wash? No. I’m afraid that analogy didn’t really tell the whole sordid bailout story properly. I offered this friend of mine an analogy of my own that I felt was a tad bit more realistic:

Say you’re a kid with five dollars. Your mom asks you to go up to the store and buy some milk. She’s a bit short on cash at the moment, so she asks you if you wouldn’t mind spending your five dollars getting the milk. “But mom!” you say. “I wanted to spend that on comic books!” “Well, little Timmy. Times are tough. How ’bout you step up for mom here, hmmm?” You decide to fall back on your old standard: lying. “Oh, actually, I think I spent that money already.” “Fine, whatever,” mom says. She digs around the couch for some change, and then goes to the Chinese lady next door, and she somehow manages to scrape together five dollars for milk. You go up to the store with your five dollars and your mom’s five dollars and you buy nothing but comic books. No milk. Just comics. You come home and mom asks the obvious question, “where’s the milk?” “Oh,” you say to her. “I didn’t get it.” She’s not overly astonished, having traveled down this path before. “Well, then, what did you do with the money, little Timmy?” You say “Well, I spent it.” Not only is mom not angry, but she doesn’t even bother to punish you. All she does is warn you that next time, you had better be a bit more transparent about where the money is going.

Now, don’t you think that’s a much more accurate analogy of this gigantic monstrosity our lovely government has hobbled together? My friend didn’t think so.