U.S. taxpayers have suddenly noticed where much of the first tranche of the Wall Street bailout is going. Bloomberg's Christine Harper asks people how they feel about that:

``I may not understand everything, but I do understand common sense, and when you lend money to someone, you don't want to see them at a new-car dealer the next day,'' said Ken Karlson, a 61-year-old Vietnam veteran and freelance marketer in Wheaton, Illinois...

``Even really sober people are saying this is the worst financial crisis since the Depression, and they're saying bonuses are just going to be reduced?'' said Patrick Amo, a 53-year-old retired merchant marine in Seattle. ``Oh my God, you read that and your jaw drops.''...

``This is the real economy these vultures have wrecked once again,'' said Leo Gerard, president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers, which represents 1.2 million active and retired members. ``Workers are taking it on the chin through no fault of their own.''...

``The executives in companies that get bailout money should have their base salaries reduced by 10 percent for 2009 and they should pay back a substantial portion of their 2007 bonuses to the government for the financial devastation they oversaw, fostered and, in some cases, directly caused,'' said S. Woods Bennett, a 57-year-old lawyer in Baltimore. ``Their sense of entitlement is appalling.''...

``The argument of saying we're not using the bailout money is just crap because money's fungible, money's money,'' said [compensation consultant] Crystal, who writes the newsletter graefcrystal.com...

``Please explain how miserable performance of biblical proportions warrants any bonuses, particularly using money from me the customer and taxpayer,'' said Glenn Brown, 67, who recently retired after 21 years as a researcher in the department of surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston and as an adjunct assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. ``I don't understand how they can even conceive of doing that.''...

``If these guys were so talented how did this problem happen anyway?'' said Mark Whitling, 63, who works as the chief financial officer of a steel service company that employs 125 people in Eastern Ohio. ``We don't feel sorry for them.''...

``It's crazy, it's all one company, it's the same thing,'' said Scott Floyd, a 37-year-old marketing executive in Manhattan Beach, California. ``For people to say the guys in the brokerage should get bonuses because they did well, but it was just the mortgage lending division that did terribly, that's a bunch of BS.''...

Karlson, the Vietnam vet, said he thinks Wall Street executives are ``thumbing their noses at the common people'' if they pay themselves bonuses while people in the country are losing their homes. ``The rationale that they depend on their bonuses, come on, how are we supposed to relate to that?'' he said. ``You don't get a bonus from your company if it doesn't do a good job."...

`My mother always told me, don't ever do anything that you would be too ashamed to tell me about, and I thought, would they really want to tell their mother that?''

Care to respond, folks? How do you feel that your firm is taking taxpayer money and handing it out as bonuses. Is this fair? Will you storm across the street if you get stiffed? The hell with what 'America' thinks?

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See Also: Good News For Wall Street! Bailout Will Cover Bonuses