WASHINGTON – In these grim times, readers want to know whether their tax dollars are being spent to help the ailing economy or are being wasted on schemes that don't make sense.

Two examples from the e-mail bag:

First: Is Congress going easy on the big bailed-out financiers because congressional pensions are tied to these Wall Street plutocrats?

Second: Are we sending aid to countries that aren't doing much to stimulate their own economies? The Europeans, for example, are loudly declaring that they've done enough to get things moving again.

After the thunderstorm over AIG's bonuses led the U.S. House to approve a 90 percent tax on such payments, "go-easy" suspicions seem moot. Like millions of Americans, members of Congress saw their retirement savings plunge over the last six months.

The foreign aid question seemed far-fetched because most of the $27.7 billion spent each year goes to a handful of countries that have their hands full dealing with al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.

But there are surprises behind these programs. Members of Congress get a generous pension from three sources: Social Security; a guaranteed pension payout for a minimum of five years of service; and tax-deferred savings similar to 401(k) accounts. Two of the three legs are still standing.

On foreign aid, a recent Congressional Research Service report found that the money was going to "about 154 countries." Among the countries getting some are China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – America's biggest creditor and three of the wealthiest Arab oil producers.

The Czech Republic, whose prime minister last week said U.S. stimulus plans are "the way to hell," got $8 million in U.S. economic assistance as recently as 2006. The Czechs aren't getting any more U.S. aid this year, but you'd think they could be a bit less damning.

What about congressional pensions?

Earlier this month, an e-mail rumor was burning through the Internet to the effect that Congress had gone soft on AIG and its bonus payments because AIG insured congressional pensions.

Nope.

"Totally bogus," said Michael Orenstein, a spokesman for the federal Office of Personnel Management.

A rank-and-file member of Congress gets $174,000 a year in salary. Of that, 1.3 percent goes into a federal employee's pension fund, while 6.2 percent is withheld for Social Security.

The pension fund pays according to a formula based on years of service and the top three years of salary. You can collect with five years of service, but that won't pay too much. The average pension for members elected after 1983 is about $50,000 a year.

On tax-deferred savings, members of Congress get the same incentives as all other federal workers. The government matches employee savings of up to 5 percent of salary.

This federal savings is split into five stock index funds and a conservative government bond fund, all of them administered by Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco. The funds had $235 billion in July. They're now down to $191 billion – a loss of more than 20 percent.

"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," said Martin Frost, who represented Dallas in Congress for 26 years. "If you encourage investments for retirement in the private sector, Congress should be the same as everybody else. ...

"Though, in the private sector, I'm not sure there's anybody left with a defined [guaranteed] benefit pension," he said. "They're all 401(k) plans now."

Exactly.