They will provide earmarked money for all kinds of doodles and dabbles. Good thing too because without that many of these congress and senate people would not get re-elected, must think number one first.
We need specific information on exactly who "in our financial market" is getting the bail out, exactly which banks. Why are these financial institutions which made these bad loans getting rewarded with solvency. This is wrong. Let them collapse. Surely we can make a bail out that does not reward MBAs with shrewd schemes for bloating their accounts. This entire deal is vaguely written about and vaguely discussed by the insiders. Bush's words amount to nothing more than over generalized non sense.
Everybody is very conveniently generalizing about "our financial markets."
Why isn't there a very detailed discussion about how people facing foreclosure can be helped or not. Some people got into mortgages with large ARMs that made the mortgage payment impossible to make. The ARMs were adjusted to make up for previous foreclosures. Some of these people could probably make a mortgage payment if the payment was smaller, very simple. Other people probably cant make the payment for a number of reasons regardless. Fine let those people go into foreclosure. The point is this needs to be addressed on a person by person basis.
Adding earmarked money to this deal so that Senators can go back to their constituents with some kind of rationale for signing onto a deal that no ordinary person wants is ultra ultra contemptuous.
NY Times: Revised Bailout Bill Awaits Senate Vote Tonight
...provisions being added to the measure should lead to its approval by Friday.
The $100 billion in tax breaks, which offer incentives for the use of renewable energy and relieve 24 million households from an estimated $65 billion alternative-minimum tax scheduled to take effect this year, will not be offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere.
...banks will get an open-ended line of credit directly to the Treasury Department — meaning, taxpayers.
7 comments:
They'll eventually get their $$. Nothing will change. The $$ will disappear and 6mos. from now Pres. Obama will be telling us we need another trillion to bail out the bail out. It's just throwing good money after bad.
Yes, there will be a bail out like it or not. The more I think about it the more I don't like it. I am demonstrably offended by the notion that the people who cooked this shit up are going to get "bailed out." This is very wrong.
Read Hunter's post at KOS
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/1/171755/545/358/616963
Yes good article - For my money I like this idea right here -
All of the economists that I have some shred of trust for have been coalescing around a different assertion -- that the government must take an equity stake in companies that it rescues. House Republicans will call this "nationalizing" the companies: they can go to hell. It is rescuing them, but rescuing them in a way that both allows them to fail as they should, while stabilizing the market as they do it.
The central premise is that if a business needs government assistance, that assistance will indeed be given -- but the government will gain some proportionally appropriate investment in the company in question. The taxpayers will front the money for rescuing companies that are too big to fail, but too incompetent to succeed, and will coax them back to health, and will reap whatever rewards are to be reaped. Once healthy, the government sells its stake and the company returns to ownership entirely by the private sector.
There unfortunately is one BIG flaw in all of this. He's assuming the Gov't can do a better job of running these companies. Can it? Who knows? Personally, I'm not a fan of so called nationalization for many reasons. In some areas though we do need it ( health care ) comes to mind in many others I much more leery about it. Finance might me another one that needs much tighter regulations but look at how lousy the Gov't has managed it's own finances and you have to wonder can it do better for a private company. Plus, having the Gov't run these companies gives them quite an edge over the competition doesn't it? I'll use an example here. In NJ the State is very involved in the managing of the Casino Industry and has a special 8% tax on all Gross profits. This has tended toward the State favoring these places over other entertainment venues in the State. The State at your side is Fascism my friend. It's tricky trying use a quasi-socialist solution and at the same time favoring capitalism. Is State Temp. management like an emergency room for ailing companies? How does this work? I like the idea of regulations but management? In certain very narrowly defined instances like health care I want a socialist solution. Nobody should be making obscene profits off of human suffering and illness. This country's medical Industry is more about $$ then health.
Very god points, they're all valid.
Eventually we will have universal health care for a gillion good reasons. In the best circumstances everyone has affordable health insurance but this is not the case. I did not have health insurance until I turned 40 something. There was a good 10 year span where I was without it. I took a community college course so I could by their rider health insurance for $20.
As far as the government running finance businesses, don't like that idea at all.
The problem with regulation is that BIG Corps. and business associations basically have learned how to trump the "publics interest" in most cases. "Playing the refs" is what it's called in sports. How we insulate the refs from this has been a problem of Gov't since cave men days. The GOP's answer is to remove the refs or worse put Industry reps. in as refs. In either case u end up with either anarchy ( no refs/cops) or corruption ( Industry refs.) There has to be a 3rd way. Human nature being what it is though a 3rd way has eluded us as of yet. Professional integrity might be an answer here? Precious little of that these days I'm afraid. :(
Post a Comment