The Mother of All Bailouts = The Death of Fiscal Conservatism
Scroll for updates…10:54am Eastern Bush speaking now…bailout will be “grease for the gears”… “we expect this money will eventually be paid back”…HA-HA-HA…
Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson just wrapped up his press conference announcing the Mother of All Bailouts. He said a “bold” approach was needed to achieve “stability” in the market.
Let me translate that.
“Bold” = Massively massive, taxpayer-funded rescue.
“Stability” = Privatizing profits and socializing losses on a scale we have never seen before in our lifetimes.
I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the “fundamentals of the market are great!” line.
The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged.
Yes, yes, crony Democrats are to blame for much of how we got here. You don’t need to recite all the talking points back to me. I’ve been writing about the Fannie/Freddie debacle for years.
But it is September 19, 2008. And this is a Republican White House presiding over the Mother of All Bailouts. Every step along the way since stimuluspalooza began last summer, we’ve heard that every bailout step was just a one-off. Each step was supposed to calm the markets. Each new government intervention and allocation of taxpayer dollars was supposed to achieve “stability.” Each new package of goodies rewarding irresponsible behavior and bad financial decisions was supposed to prevent new ones.
None did. And now, here we are.
This is your Bush legacy — not Pelosi’s, not Reid’s, not Obama’s: A ginormous bailout of every last, failing, panicked financial institution’s illiquid assets that may reach into the trillions — TRILLIONS – when all is said and done.
Reader John in Venice, CA e-mails: “Going forward there is no debate a conservative can win when pitted against a liberal wanting to spend money on social programs. What would the argument be against spending money on terrible social programs? Government money does not work? Conservatives who are supporting this welfare bailout are no different than Maxine Waters or Barbara Boxer. We have lost. Conservatism has absolutely no more moral high ground to speak from.”
Fiscal conservatism has been on life support for quite some time. Bush/Paulson pulled the plug permanently today.
***
I mentioned the other day that both presidential candidates from the Evil Party and the Stupid Party support bailing out the automakers next.
Here’s more:
The auto industry and Wall Street took center stage in the presidential race Wednesday when Republican John McCain, after touring a suburban Detroit auto plant, declared in his strongest language so far that he will fight for government loans to help the U.S. auto industry retool.
Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign retorted that he’s late to the game.
McCain made an unscheduled stop at General Motors Corp.’s Orion assembly plant in the morning before joining his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for a town hall meeting in Grand Rapids.
He told a crowd of supporters in downtown Grand Rapids that the economy can be fixed.
“I reject the doom and gloom that says our nation is in decline, because our best days are ahead of us. We will restore America, we will restore this economy,” McCain said.
At the GM plant, McCain spoke to about 100 workers after a short tour.
“I’m here to send a message to Washington and Wall Street: We are not going to leave the workers here in Michigan hung out to dry while we give billions in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street,” McCain said. “It is time to get our auto industry back on its feet. It’s time for a new generation of cars and for loans to build the facilities that will make them.”
McCain’s support of the auto industry on Wednesday contrasts with his position last month when he visited the GM Tech Center in Warren and said he wasn’t inclined to support loans for the auto industry.
McCain, who also did not vote on the energy bill creating the loan program in December 2007, said then through his campaign that his proposals — a $5,000 tax credit for consumers to buy more efficient models and a $300-million prize for battery technology — would accomplish the same goals as the loan program.
Auto industry officials said they believed that without McCain’s support, the funding would get labeled a Democratic ploy. Michigan’s Republican lawmakers, especially U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, are credited with convincing McCain to back the loans.
Obama has backed up to $50 billion in loans for automakers.
***
Here’s Jim Pethokoukis’s take.
Hans Bader at OpenMarket.org: Trillion Dollar Bailout Will Lead to Future Bubbles. Read it all.
***
Update 10:54am Eastern: Bush speaking. He says the bailout will be “grease for the gears”…”we expect this money will eventually be paid back”…HA-HA-HA.
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Very well said, especially point #2 on propagandist media at both left and right. I woudl add point #5 – Laziness or stupidity from people on now doing their homework.
One intervention into the market begets the next. The Fed tried to engineer a soft landing from the bursting of the tech bubble, and we got the housing bubble, the bursting of which has given us the current financial crisis. What crisis will today’s intervention bring somewhere down the road?
To quote Hayek
1) The “bust” is not the sickness; the “boom” is. The 20′s was one big drunken party financed by an inflationary monetary policy which was inherently UNSUSTAINABLE. The Fed did the right thing by putting the brakes on the credit train. If the market had been left to its own devices, as it had been in every single previous depression, including the depression of ’20-’21, which began every bit as ominously as the ’29 meltdown, the fundamentals would have reasserted themselves. But Hoover had other ideas.
2) You see, Hoover was an interventionist. Nearly all of FDR’s so-called “New Deal” anti-depressant programs were simply retreads of Hoover’s failed policies. He was immensely pro-union and anti-laissez faire. Hoover propped up both wages and prices, enlisted labor in “make work” projects and paid out welfare and unemployment benefits on a scale theretofore not seen in America. And what did he accomplish? That’s right: the same thing FDR’s New Deal accomplished – he made things worse.
FDR’s celebrated New Deal dug the country into a deeper hole than the one he tried to dig them out of. Only the full mobilization of the war economy brought modest improvements to the US economy. That, together with the destruction of virtually the entire industrial base of the rest of the world made America’s prosperous post-depression era possible.
BTW, socialism was indispensible to American prosperity? Hardly. Always remember: Socialism is not an economic system, but the lack of rational economy.
This was a big problem too:
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (sometimes known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act)was an act signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. In the United States 1,028 economists signed a petition against this legislation, and after it was passed, many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. In the opinion of most economists, the Smoot-Hawley act was partially responsible for the severity of the Great Depression.
On September 20th, 2008 at 11:15 pm, Digshot said:
All politicians are liars and idiots. They are also kleptocrats and corrupt scumbags. Bush is a politician. Kerry is a politician. Gore was a politician.
The reason we have this particular idiot and liar in the White House is because the other two were bigger idiots and liars, with a huge dash of collectivist evil and a sprinkling of pacifistic appeasement.
Maybe your “party” should nominate JFK style democrats instead of a communist community agitator (Obama), a dirty old hippie who hates the military and marries for money (Kerry), and a dorky slow-talking retard concerned with imaginary threats like global warming that makes him want to abolish the combustion engine (Gore). And let’s not even get started on Cigar Man.
If your party stopped actively pursuing the destruction of the United States and nominated sane liars and idiots, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Care to take responsibility?
No?
I thought not.
Good point! What are hard-working, tax-paying and patriotic Americans going to do about this “catch-22″, which politicians are exploiting to sell-out America to enemy for any petro-dollar or a peso?
We’ve only got two choices for POTUS this election, sorry Ralph. McCain is competent and Obama is unthinkable. So let’s go vote.
Sorry if someone has already brought up this point, but I forgot where I left off reading the massive no. of posts to this topic.
Did anyone see Judge Andrew Napolitano on FOX the other day, fuming about these bailouts? He said they were unconstitutional and cited the passages where govt. was forbidden to get involved with biz entities. He said if anyone challenged these bailouts that the fed govt. would lose.
Ron Paul? Bob Barr? Anyone? (crickets chirping)
307:
Actually, Mojave Mark…there is only one candidate who deserves to be elected: Bob Barr. McCain and Obama is not a choice.
Obama’s “Lehman Leap” just may have put an end to this election. I bet he wishes he went with Mitt Romney.
Who Really Runs Obama’s Campaign, and What is Their Agenda?
My last link is not directly related to this post, but is most certainly indirectly related.
If I am correct, Vladimir Putin and certain Communists in this country had foreknowledge of 9/11, and are actively exacerbating the current financial situation in order to make an even bigger power grab in the US Government.
President Bush, I pray for you to have a spirit of discernment that can see clearly who among your advisors (and members of Congress) is trustworthy, and who is trying to deceive you.
Here’s a hint: Don’t trust Paulson, Schumer, Reid, Pelosi!
In my opinion it appears that they are all domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States.
Please don’t be deceived.
Awww… Isn’t that cute!? And here I was, thinking “irony” was dead “on the Right”…
For the irony-impaired; it is precisely Bush’s LACK of discernment that allowed this catastrophe’s environment to take root and fester in the first place. Looking to Bush, of all people, for leadership in this time of crisis is to willfully disregard his “performance” over the past eight years. And you wonder why Bush-BFF McCain and his Wild Arctic Tootsie Pop are such a laughable choice for the Right to have made – do you REALLY want four more years of THIS?!
Where is George Soros’ hand in all of this. Obama’s money man????
He brought down the Bank of England…
On September 21st, 2008 at 4:11 pm, reshas1 said:
Soros is most definitely involved. Sure, the problem originated as a result of what Bill Clinton did in his administration, and grew worse with time, but the pulling of the right strings to create a panic right now is the doing of George Soros. They are trying to manipulate President Bush and the Congress into signing a massively Socialistic bill, and then blame the Republicans in the process.
Why are some companies being saved, and otheres forced to go bankrupt? Who is deciding who gets saved and who doesn’t? In my opinion, the people who have controlled Goldman Sachs are ultra-left, and have been working to “take out” competitors owned by Republicans.
JP Morgan Chase got all of the assets of Bear Sterns for a firesale price…who were the winners and who were the losers? The owners of JP Morgan Chase (some of whom are part of the Trilateral Commission) won big, while the former owners of Bear Sterns, along with US taxpayers, lost big.
Now, who wanted to see Lehman put out of business, and why?
There are very evil forces at work in the world right now.
It’s interesting to me how many different very diverse groups think we are living in the “last days”…
In these end times, it is essential that you know the truth.
Islam, and those who follow Mohamed, who enjoyed murder and rape, is a religion based on violence. A religion where allah wants you to murder in his name. The 12th Imam, which about half of Islam look for, is hidding in a well.
Eckhart Tolle is a New Age religion where you can find god within yourself, or the old lie of you can be as G-d.
True Christianty where individuals accept G-d’s gift of love when he died for human sin will be seen through Christ rather than standing by themselves unclean with sin come judgement day.
The secular New World Order does not believe in sin, morality, or borders. Therefore, homosexual marriage is OK, abortion as a form of birth control is OK, Christianty is hate speech, and the Constitution of the United States is bad, because it reads G-d given rights, not what the State gives is all powerful.
Strange indeed, that the world would rather follow a lie, refuse to repent of thier sins, and await an Anti-Christ to usher in the New Age.
This stimuluspalooza is like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors“:
The more blood (in this case, money) that you feed it, the bigger it grows and the more blood (money) it demands.
Top Drudge Headline right now:
On September 21st, 2008 at 6:51 pm, ITookTheRedPill said:
Oh for the love of God. Time to buy gold. The dollar will be worthless when this goes through.
In all seriousness, what is the best way to buy gold?
(I’ve never bought gold before)
Is e-gold a good way to go?
This is off the subject, but I see where Fox News is already spinning a possible Obama loss by blaming it on a huge amount of the population being racist against blacks.
On September 21st, 2008 at 11:04 pm, Misscheryl said:
That is exactly how:
want the loss explained.
Then, they will riot. Make no mistake about it. Obama is even caught in You-Tube clips talking about the long brewing “Quiet Riot”.
Just some reminders:
I believe that we are all one race.
On September 21st, 2008 at 11:04 pm, Misscheryl said:
That is exactly how:
want the loss explained.
Then, they will riot. Make no mistake about it. Obama is even caught in You-Tube clips talking about the long brewing “Quiet Riot”.
Just some reminders:
I believe that we are all one race.
So who is the unifier, and who is being divisive?
Beleiving, as I do, that we are all one race unites us.
While the hustlers of “Black Liberation Theology” use race to divide us.
And then they lie and say that they are the uniters while those who don’t accept their unBiblical doctrine are being “divisive“.
Sorry for being Off-topic, but Misscheryl’s comment got me worked up. I am so tired of these liars and their willing accomplices in the MSM.
I guess this isn’t so off-topic if you realize that the election of Obama would be the fulfillment of Malcolm X’s dream, and would be “the death of fiscal conservatism” along with “the death of all things conservative”.
Fortunately, Obama will lose, because the ACORN corruption and other corruption will continue be exposed, prosecuted, and prevented.
And those who riot can be jailed for violating the Smith Act, while Obama is (at a minimum) thrown out of office for violating section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Personnaly, I’m disgusted by it and though I saw it last night on Geraldo (whom I never watch), I had seen it a couple times prior on Fox.
It was headlined on Fox and I’m truly disapointed they have stooped to this. There has been a lot of talk by them over the past week about how Obama cannot win simply because he’s black.