- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Ondolette - i still don't get it why a grown-up promotes a 'do nothing plan' because he believes in the fairy tale of a little boy crying wolf - while his friends complain that nothing had been done before and if a 'the sky is falling guy' rants against a 'the sky is falling mentality' because it's not about national security - but about the economy that's... well... definitely 'awesome'!
This is very deprecatory, and a little ad hominem for a grown up, don't you think?
You haven't really argued against the null option, you've only disparaged it. I guess the difference is, I was making an argument based on evaluation of options, and you are making a political argument, or possibly just appealing to authority.
Tell me very directly, what happens now in the bailout plan, from start to finish, in very realistic scenarios. Then tell me, again very directly, what happens in the 'do nothing' plan, from start to finish. Or are you arguing that I shouldn't have a right to ask where my money is going when you spend it?
Absolutely nobody argued that we should shore up financial institutions and simultaneously, since it is the correct time for harsh medicine, construct regulations and reign in the ability of the institutions to create bad debt. Nobody. They only argued we should shore them up. We've been shoring up failed Reaganomics for many years here, nobody ever is willing to say it doesn't work. It happens to be a fact that doing nothing is causing lenders to be more circumspect. Since the problem is bad loans, you would do something to help them to be less circumspect. That's what increasing liquidity means.
I read a fascinating article on how the debt crisis was affecting the little guy with the mom and pop business on Main Street in our local paper. They interviewed a woman who suddenly had to meet much harsher terms for her business loans at the bank. To wit, she was now being asked to put up her house and her bank account as collateral for the loan.
She was asking for $400,000 to start a pet day care center in her house. What do you think, pieceofcake? A half a million dollars to start a franchise taking care of peoples dogs, and in the market when things were running right - as opposed to our current crisis economy - she would have had to put up nothing against the value of it? Gee, that's so frozen up. I don't know what this world is coming to. My perpetual motion machine business that only needs a couple of mil to get started is possibly doomed!
Oh, and the next example was SUV dealers that couldn't afford to bring new merchandise to their lots. SUVs are selling like hot cakes, right? Before the crisis started, in early September, they were saying that sales of them was down so low and so slow that nobody wanted to take them in trade.
So now what? They are ready and waiting to receive $700 Billion of taxpayer money like manna from heaven, with absolutely no restraints on the behavior that caused the crisis. If that sounds like a success to you, then spell it out. But until you do, attacking my maturity is hardly a sophisticated economic argument.
