NEW ERA

A Feb. 6 relatively small front page article "Bush overpaid banks in bailout" reports that "The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released today, said the overpayments amounted to a taxpayer-financed $78 billion subsidy of the firms...The American International Group, which the Treasury Department deemed to be too big to be allowed to fail, received $40 billion from the Treasury for assets valued at $14.8 billion, the oversight panel found."

WATCHDOG:The story was available on the Internet a full day earlier. The Intell missed it completely, perhaps because of a failure on the part of the Associated Press since the
later New Era account comes from New Era wire services.

NewsLanc thinks the story deserved a lot more attention than it received here in Lancaster and elsewhere. The $78 billion purposefully given away is almost three times as great as Pennsylvania's 2008/2009 projected budget of $28.3 billion.