I didn't start out wanting to be a business reporter or a commentator on personal finance. Not by a long shot - I wanted to cover politics. And, like a lot of grads today - I hit the job market at a terrible time. A deep recession hit this country in the early 1980s, and in 1981, I was happy to even land a job.

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Taxpayers are getting some payback on their bailout of one of the world's biggest insurance companies: AIG.

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You've heard me talk about the ridiculous loan guarantee program at the Department of Energy before - and goodness knows if ever there was a waste of taxpayer money it was the half a billion dollars we gave to a solar power company called Solyndra that then went belly up.

But wait: It gets worse.

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The trouble with government handouts is that once you get hooked on the free money - it's really hard to give it up.

And it doesn't matter what kind of entitlement you're getting -- just this week, for example, we learned that the executives at Solyndra applied for a second government grant after wasting half a billion dollars in federal loans.

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