About Monday the wingnuts in the blogoshpere will figure out how to make this whole debacle the fault of the New Deal. The MSM will pick up on it about Wedensday because Matt Drudge tells them to. By Friday next week it'll be the conventional Wisdom that if we just eliminate the capital Gains tax entirely and finish deregulating all US markets that we will never have another recession and the budget will be balanced by 2012.

Government has failed us?!?

Say rather that we have failed government, or at least those of us who voted for Bush and the GOP in the last 8 years have. The job of government is to "provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity". Government can only do that job if the people in government aren't actively seeking to warp and twist its power to their own ends - and the people who voted these scumbags into power, despite plenty of evidence that they were scumbags, are as much to blame as Karl Rove himself.

This is more-or-less the same people who took a massive national security failure and turned it into enough political gold to get them years of rubber-stamping.

A little setback like this is hardly a blip on their screen. They've just promised $700,000,000,000+ of our money to prop up the very people who put our economy at risk and then held it hostage. You think some of that money isn't -- essentially, eventually -- going to end up in some oh-so-deserving campaign funds?

At some point early next year, if not before, we'll be presented with a bill or series of bills sold to the public as the "Intelligent Regulation Act" or the like, and it will be touted as a combination of "getting rid of archaic, unenforced regulations and replacing them with 21st century regulations". A few non-corporate financial wonks will dig into the several hundred pages and realize that the essential effect will be to make finance both less regulated and less competitive.

But they won't be Serious People, and MediaCorp will be able to ignore them with impunity.

"Government has failed us?!? Say rather that we have failed government, or at least those of us who voted for Bush and the GOP in the last 8 years have."

And yet, isn't it interesting that the Bush Administration warned of this possibility in 2001 and 2003 and McCain tried to pass legislation to regulate this in 2006 - but no one would listen.

Democrats Defend Fannie/Freddie from Regulation - 2004 Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL36nwCSYUM

McCain's Early Recognition of Fannie/Freddie Crisis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63siCHvuGFg

Your mention of 1980 reminds me of the connection between the passage of Prop 13 in 1978 and the Governor's notice to the Treasury Department today that California may need a $7 billion dollar bailout shortly. The whole idea that cutting taxes drastically enough is the only route to prosperity clearly has failed. What I'm waiting for is a politician or two who will stand up and point out that, without taxes, there are no roads, no schools, no courts, and on and on. Instead we have had three decades glorifying selfishness.

Regards a possible California bailout, I hope you'll tell us where the line starts for bailouts. Surely our individual needs are less than billions...

I look at Palin and think "here we go again" (hopefully not). Wasn't there a certain folksy, non-partisan governor who was going to clean up Washington eight years ago?

Whatever happened to that guy?

toward a fully socialist government. I hope those of you that make money like being forced to give to those too stupid or lazy to make it themselves.

Deregulation is not what caused this. Regulation, in part, called the CRA is what cuased this.

Andrew Leonard is an incredibly stupid person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N8_u1FLu30

Looks like he's come off a long bender signing this bad legislation.

is fractional reserve banking. Plain and simple. Regulated or unregulated, it makes no difference. Ever since the silo owners of the ancient agrarian world started speculating with grain deposits that did not exist, fractional reserve banking has destroyed economies time and again. Then, it was famine. Now, it's depression. But it's the same mechanic exacting the same cost. Short term bounty, long term devastation.

You can thank Barrack Obama for the passing of this bailout:

Democrats say Obama key in bailout vote switch

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081003/pl_afp/usfinancebankingvoteobama_081003161525

so now that we've socialized mortgage securities and freddie and fannie do we now have to admit that we lost the cold war?

the russians are an energy rich economic powerhouse and we've just socialized over 1 trillion of our 'private sector' with money we borrowed from the chinese....funny how no one seems to care

Andrew, I think that, unfamiliar though it is, you and I may need to start getting used to being part of a majority!

How appropriate your name is! Since you obviously have muy poco intelligence.

The "CRA caused this" meme has been floated by you right-wingers for at least a week now, and it's not getting traction. That's because people recognize it for what it REALLY says:

"It's Carter's fault for pushing banks to let TEH DARKIES buy houses!! The whole world goes to Hell if you do anything to level the playing field for TEH DARKIES!! Only TEH WHITES should be allowed to hold property/vote/etc.!! And don't get me started on TEH GAYS!!

"Oh yeah-- DUH!!"

Racist pigs. We see through your code. EPIC FAIL.

have been the beneficiary of the Reagan deregulation legacy. Let's try for starters: airlines, telephones, internet and electricity.

This is not a general failure of regulation, but rather a failure of due-diligence magnified by leverage. The leverage is the one point where regulation *might* have helped, but would not have been necessary if the DD had been done.

Your assertion that we should constrain ingenuity through regulation is as ignorant as Bush placing restrictions on stem-cell research. God forbid people listen to you.