I better get in the queue for the stimulus package that the US Treasury and Congress are planning to extend to banking institutions and certain types of businesses (i.e. the US auto industry). I am not a bank or a car company, but I wish I were. I would have been able to pay myself millions of dollars in bonuses over the years despite having made horrible decisions and producing crap that nobody wants. But since I am just a pajama entrepreneur in the tech industry, here are the reasons why Congress should help me and my fellow small entrepreneurs:

• self-employed programmers and web designers create the websites and applications without which there would be very little commerce or entertainment, so they play a critical role in the US economy;
• without money, entrepreneurs could not afford any of the cars that Detroit will be making (not that many of us have bought their metallic junk in the past two decades), but let’s assume that we MIGHT just buy them if we had money;
• without any earnings, no savings so what would we put in the banks?
• we stop going out to dinners, lunches, conferences, meetups and all kinds of mildly entertaining events that support an even bigger industry that employs more people than the car manufacturers: restaurants, hotels, conference centers, cafes.

What truly galls me is that the auto industry wants money from us, the taxpayers, so they can . . . (drum roll please) . . . INNOVATE. Can you imagine Apple crawling up to the federal government asking for a loan or a subsidy to innovate?

Bear in mind that the US auto industry has lobbied Congress to prevent the imposition of better fuel standards and other rules that would have made their cars more fuel efficient and safer. Now they’re stuck making those miserable gas guzzlers nobody wants. Meanwhile, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan have gone on to produce fuel efficient cars that are also better in quality. And we’re going to bail out Detroit?