Beltway Bailout

Let me begin by saying that Comcast sucks canal water…my cable, internet and phone have been out since Saturday morning just as it always is when we’re struck by that climate anomaly called rain (I’m posting this by pirating my neighbor’s wireless connection), so needless to say, I’m woefully behind in the news.

We wouldn’t even be discussing this bail out if it wasn’t a presidential election year. The Republicans wouldn’t have presented it as an option and the Democrats wouldn’t have voted against it because it goes against the principles of both parties. Government bailouts are always a bad idea – the same people who can’t deliver a 2 ounce letter across town want to lift the economy. Won’t happen. There is evidence that Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act did more to hurt during the Depression than it did to help. No one can deny that government’s failures to address the problems in New Orleans have prolonged the agony of the residents and magnified the shortcomings of bureaucrats.

This bail out was doomed from the beginning. Republicans didn’t want to interfere in the free markets and Democrats didn’t want to give money to the evil corporations. Both sides saw it purely as a vote-buying opportunity. Do I think Nancy Pelosi intentionally tanked the bail out? Of course. Just watch the video and tell em her intentions were otherwise;

Her intent is clear. She knew that many Republican votes were hanging by a thread, she also had conservative Democrats (more than 90, it turns out) who couldn’t vote for it and still winin November, so Pelosi intentionally sabotaged the bailout to cover for the failures of her own leadership. The Democrats are still dealing with the fact that fewer Americans support them than they supposed when they began this session.

So what will the Democrats do now? What they always when they fail…go further Left. The Wall Street Journal agrees with me;

What next? One option is that Democrats will tell Mr. Paulson that they can pass his plan with more liberal votes, but that their price has gone up. This would mean more of the tax, spend and regulate provisions that House GOP leaders stripped out before their rank-and-file headed for the exits. These would only raise the price for taxpayers of the Treasury rescue and, if the equity provisions were too onerous, make the Paulson plan far less workable.

Of course, the Washington Post blames those dumbass voters who’ve been calling Congress without really understanding how important it is to WaPo’s editors that the Washington Post’s share price fell more than $30 yesterday;

We understand that angry constituents have been bombarding members of Congress with e-mails and phone calls protesting the bailout. We understand that the bill did not offer enough breaks for homeowners to please the populist left and that it contained too much federal intervention to please the populist right. That’s what happens in a compromise. Given the poor marketing of a proposal whose advertised $700 billion price tag will probably never materialize in full, and given the fact that the rapidly developing credit crisis has not quite been felt on Main Street, we are not surprised at the angry correspondence from voters — or, rather, from certain self-selected voters.

The US economy is always resilient – it depends on the innovation and determination of a free people. There’s a reason that the foreign markets are tanking this morning, that reason being; we are the model for the world. When our markets panic, theirs do, too. Will our recovery be as fast as would without the hot meat injection of $700 billion? Nope. But after all of the smoke clears, we’ll be stronger than we would have been  with it. The intent of the Democrats has always been to make us dependent on their political longevity – and that bail out would have made the markets weaker.

Do I think Obamawill ride in and save the day by bringing Republicans and Democrats together (or at least make the republicans look partisan)? Yup. That’s been the plan. The Democrats will never admit that they’re wrong, and they’ve been wrong on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since their inception, the Democrats’ plan to loan money to poor people has always been a fool’s errand, but they’re bound and determined to use their failures to their political advantage. With the information technologies on their side.

Category: Politics