Should have heard more of this before November. Congress' approval was only 14%, but 95% of incumbents got re-elected. How does that work?
Fat chance! We could have had them by the gonads in November, but sent 95% of the incumbents back to Washington. "Things" will have to get MUCH worse here before the American voter even gets a clue, let alone considers doing anything about it.
Just a reminder there were a lot of people who were concerned Obama was a wild card. We knew Bush sucked. We knew McCain was not qa brain. So we watched as the nation got Obamarized. We still hope he has the right team and the right plan. But we are growing more concerned that he is just another servant of bankers and the left. My concern is that we have a choice - save the country, save the banks, or bolster Democrat parties power.... I am quite concerned Obama will wind up picking 2 and 3. Which I suspect will make us an ally of Chavez. South American style inflation and failed socialism.
I was going to write something in response, but this op-ed piece sums it up. It's too bad that the best, the brightest, and the richest in our country caused our economic collapse. Rick fails to mention that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- February 20, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist Money for Idiots By DAVID BROOKS Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. Itâs based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice â people get what they deserve as much as possible Over the last few months, weâve made a hash of all that. The Bush and Obama administrations have compensated foolishness and irresponsibility. The financial bailouts reward bankers who took insane risks. The auto bailouts subsidize companies and unions that made self-indulgent decisions a few decades ago that drove their industry into the ground. The stimulus package handed tens of billions of dollars to states that spent profligately during the prosperity years. The Obama housing plan will force people who bought sensible homes to subsidize the mortgages of people who bought houses they could not afford. It will almost certainly force people who were honest on their loan forms to subsidize people who were dishonest on theirs. These injustices are stoking anger across the country, lustily expressed by Rick Santelli on CNBC Thursday morning. âThe government is promoting bad behavior!â Santelli cried as Chicago traders cheered him on. âThe president ... should put up a Web site ... to have people vote ... to see if they want to subsidize losersâ mortgages!â Well, in some cases we probably do. Thatâs because government isnât fundamentally in the Last Judgment business, making sure everybody serves penance for their sins. In times like these, government is fundamentally in the business of stabilizing the economic system as a whole. Let me put it this way: Psychologists have a saying that when a couple comes in for marriage therapy, there are three patients in the room â the husband, the wife and the marriage itself. The marriage is the living history of all the things that have happened between husband and wife. Once the patterns are set, the marriage itself begins to shape their individual behavior. Though it exists in the space between them, it has an influence all its own. In the same way, an economy has an economic culture. Out of billions of individual decisions, a common economic landscape emerges, which frames and influences the decisions everybody makes. Right now, the economic landscape looks like that movie of the swaying Tacoma Narrows Bridge you might have seen in a high school science class. It started swinging in small ways and then the oscillations built on one another until the whole thing was freakishly alive and the pavement looked like liquid. A few years ago, the global economic culture began swaying. The government enabled people to buy homes they couldnât afford. The Fed provided easy money. The Chinese sloshed in oceans of capital. The giddy upward sway produced a crushing ride down. These oscillations are the real moral hazard. Individual responsibility doesnât mean much in an economy like this one. We all know people who have been laid off through no fault of their own. The responsible have been punished along with the profligate. It makes sense for the government to intervene to try to reduce the oscillation. It makes sense for government to try to restore some communal order. And the sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on precisely those sectors that have been swinging most wildly â housing, finance, etc. It has to help stabilize people who have been idiots. Actually executing this is a near-impossible task. Looking at the auto, housing and banking bailouts, weâre getting a sense of how the propeller heads around Obama operate. They try to put together programs that are bold, but without the huge interventions in the market implied by, say, nationalization. Theyâre balancing so many cross-pressures, they often come up with technocratic Rube Goldberg schemes that alter incentives in lots of medium and small ways. Some economists argue that the plans are too ineffectual, others that they are too opaque (estimates for the mortgage plan range from $75 billion to $275 billion and up). Personally, I hate the idea of 10 guys sitting around in the White House trying to redesign huge swaths of the U.S. economy on legal pads. But at least they seem to be driven by a spirit of moderation and restraint. They seem to be trying to keep as many market structures in place as possible so things can return to normal relatively smoothly. And they seem to understand the big thing. The nationâs economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, weâre all in this together. If their lives donât stabilize, then our lives donât stabilize. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Fair Use
Rick Santelli expressed what most Americans feel: we have no problem cutting off our nose to spite our face, so don't you dare sell us something that might involve a fellow American getting a better dealâbecause perception is everything. I'm all for moving forward and hanging the guilty by their scrotum later on. Too bad I'm in the minority.
"We're creating... an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property." - President George W. Bush, October 2004
Your point, Troy? Bush, like all politicians, wanted more home buying (let's not indulge in the fiction that 0% equity is "ownership" for anyone except ACORN). people who buy houses tend to vote for incumbents. Makes sense. If you're long an asset (not an option), you're short volatility and a new guy in power could start shaking up the status quo. Better stick with the idiot you know.