For Just the Price of a Starbucks Latte', You Can Save AIG

Remember those old "Save the Children" commercials?

A very bloated Sally Struthers implored people to give money to save starving children in Africa.
The main hook was something to the effect of "For just the price of a cup of coffee a day, you can save a child."

Wait, that might have been a different late-night TV charity, but you get the point.
The idea was, set aside some of your coffee money, and you can save the world.

I, for one, never felt compelled to give to those charities, for a couple of reasons:

(1) I've never been a coffee drinker. So, in order to help those kids out, I'd have to give up something even more important, like bubble gum perhaps.

(2) Have you seen Sally Struthers? Forget the cup of coffee. If she had only scaled back a bit at the buffet table, she could have single-handedly saved much of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Fortunately, most people in this country are more generous than I am, so the campaign was a major success. In fact, given the skyrocketing price of coffee, I've been told that some of those African kids now spend their time jetting around on their private Gulfstream 4 jets, going from one home of theirs to another. Good for them. They seemed so sad on TV.

Well, it looks as though we're going to need to tap into the generosity of the American public yet again.

AIG (American International Group), by some measures the world's largest insurance company, has spent the past couple of days frantically attempting to raise cash to meet its short-term needs. Apparently, they need oh, say, about $75 BILLION, just to tide them over. The problem is, the company can't seem to get anyone to spot them the money, and has asked the U.S. Government to help them out. That option is still being considered, and the latest reports, as of about an hour ago, indicate that the government might engineer some sort of bailout, whereby the government simply takes over the company.

I won't get into when it is, or isn't, appropriate for the government to intervene. I will say that a collapse of AIG would be an absolute disaster, considering the amount of insurance they've underwritten. Despite the current overcapacity in many insurance markets, it would be near impossible to replace AIG as an insurance underwriter in the short term, leaving millions of customers exposed to risks they have always been able to insure against. Of course, if there was a way to insulate the insurance subsidiaries from the parent company's troubles, and let the parent go bankrupt, that wouldn't be nearly as big a deal. In my opinion, that's not a bad solution.

Of course, there is another option, and this is where the average American comes in. By my calculation, if every man, woman and child in America would simply pony up $250 apiece, AIG would have its $75 billion. Imagine, for just the price of one extra grande vente latte' thing, once a week for an entire year, we could save the world's largest insurance company.

We can do this, people!

And, if that sounds like a major price to pay, consider this: If the government ultimately bails out AIG, who going to pick up that tab?

Every man, woman and child in America.

Forget the coffee. I think we all could use a beer.