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Kasz216 on 26 August 2010
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Rath said:
Killiana1a said:
 

I have to disagree. Government bailouts of big companies is not capitalism. It reeks more of socialism with fascist tendencies.

If a company cannot survive without tax payer dollars, then it should fail because it is failing to put out a product consumers will buy. The consumers voted with their wallet, while Government said, "Oh noes you have 2 million union employees, we Democrats don't want to lose your union votes, so we will bail you out because we don't want to lose an election!"

All of these epitomize "too big to fail:"

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, and Chrysler were bailed out because the employees of those companies can be counted on to vote Democrat. The blue collar union boys especially, but it gets a little bit murkier with the quasi public/private corporations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

AIG on the other hand is another beast. If the US Government let AIG fail, then it would have wreaked absolute HELL on the international banking system. AIG in many cases was as big if not bigger in Europe than in the US. AIG had to be bailed out to save globalization.

If AIG failed, you would see conservative Democrats like myself saying, "I told ya so! Globalization is nothing but cheaper goods at Wal-Mart and a year round produce department at Safeway, while the American worker sees his/her living wage blue collar/white collar/manufacturing job exported to third world countries such as China, India, the Philippines, and on. Now that AIG has failed, lets bring those jobs back home."

Then again, this never happened as all were bailed out, while the US housing market continues to see record lows and an intolerable unemployment rate of 10%.

The bailouts were very much started by George Bush. He was not in any way or form a Democrat. Also Freddie and Fannie failing would have done at least as much damage to the financial markets as AIG failing, those companies were (and still are) absurdly intertwined into the financial dealings of all the major players.

And I fail to see how bailouts are fascist..?

Probably based on how they were done.

The Bank bailouts for example were forced opon all banks.  Including those that didn't WANT loans because they didn't have any problems.

Those banks who were forced to have the money used them to buy up troubled banks and grow.   After which teh government was pissed because it wasn't used for loaning to other people... even though those banks weren't really effected and were loaning to people less.

The government was basically trying to force healthy banks as well as the poor banks to except money and then loan it out irresponsibly.

Which by the way... never happened.  That's how you can tell the banks "failing" wouldn't of been a big deal.   The money the government gave them mostly was just held in the banks reserves instead of lending, because the Fed also greatly raised rates and paid interest to banks who kept a certain amount of money in their banks.  That's why we have deflation instead of inflation.  By raising reserve requirements and bonuses for exceeding them... they've incentivized against lending at the same time they were trying to incentivize lending.

That and the bonus payouts... which the government tried to retroactivly prevent.

 

Additionally the way the bailouts were structured was that the government owned part of said buisnesses until they paid them back.  While they were content to let them sit back... they made if very clear they weren't above replacing it's members and overruling the ceo when it thought said buisnesses were making a mistake.