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akuma587 on 24 November 2008
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TheRealMafoo said:
akuma587 said:

Do you just hit the snooze button when Republicans do something you don't agree with?

No one ever said that anyone but Congress passed the bailout, but the Bush Adminstration (specifically Bush and Paulson) were the ones who 1) proposed what the bailout should be and 2) pressed Congress to act immediately to adopt the bailout plan.  Hell, they were acting like it was so urgent that they ended up hurting markets by inciting fear that a bailout was necessary, which of course led to egg-in-the-face syndrome when Congress voted the bailout down the first time, which led to even more urgent pleads to Congress to pass the bailout.

They really made the situation as bad as it was by trying to hastily push through a plan that had not been thought out that well through Congress, which in turn made the markets worse, which in turn made the apparent need for a bailout greater, which made things even worse when the bailout plan turned out to be pretty poorly designed in the first place.

So the president proposed a bad plan, and it was passed.

I got an idea. Why don't we have, oh, I don't know, three equally powerful branches of government that keeps things like this from happening? We could even appoint one in charge of our spending, so the president can't just pass whatever he wants.

Man, if we only had something like that.

P.S. Did you miss Nancy Pelosi fighting for this bill to pass? Did she do it because her hero, Bush, proposed it and strong armed her? Is she that much of a slave to him?

You are completely ignoring that there was a lot of pressure from outside Washington entirely to get some kind of bailout passed, no matter what it was.  The financial sector was plummeting like a rock when all the squabbling over the bailout was occurring and the public was equally jumpy about how quickly the economy was souring.

I agree that the bailout was poorly designed and poorly implemented, but you act like the Republicans have no responsibility whatsoever for the disaster that has been the bailout (which could have actually worked really well if Paulson had not implemented it so poorly.  Most everyone in the financial sector thinks he is incompetent).

And some people assume that the $700 billion is an automatic liability, which is not necessarily true since the government can in theory make a profit on some of that capital once the market recovers (which is actually what happened with the Chrysler bailout that happened years ago).  Its not like we took the $700 billion and just buried it underground so that it was a complete loss, it could actually end up making the taxpayers money.

Paulson especially and the rest of the Bush Adminstration are as much to blame as anyone for the bailout going as badly as it did.  And you act like Congress doing something to help the financial sector was a crime.  If the financial sector crashes, guess what happens?  The entire economy crashes.  Without a financial sector, out economy would disintegrate. 

You also have a knee jerk reaction whenever you see the word government and spending in the same sentence, since you assume that anything the government does (except spending money on the military of course) is completely unjustified and is nothing less than an expression of complete incompetence.  The private sector left to its own ends was what caused the whole financial crisis in the first place.  The private sector does correct itself eventually, but there are certain situations the private sector can't handle on its own.

 



We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  The only thing that really worried me was the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke

It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson