The sky is falling and Congress doesn’t see it.
A friend, in another post, asked me if he thought I believed we as a people had any moral responsibility to help the unfortunate in our society. I’m not sure I have an answer to that question personally as it depends on who we’re talking about. Are we talking about the people who are skilled but can’t get a job? Then yes. Are we talking about those who live off the welfare system? Then no. Are we talking about people who can’t afford their mortgages because they took a loan they couldn’t afford? Most definitely not. Are we talking about families who can’t pay their mortgages because food, gas, medical and other expenses have risen faster than their pay, sometimes by orders of magnitude? Yeah… I can see that…
In general, the people have said through polls enough is enough. Its something around 70% of American’s are worried that our government doesn’t have the money to pay for bailouts (considering that our budget was already in deficit before any bailouts were made… that is a safe bet). Around 80% of Americans want the bailouts to stop… Congress, in their infinite wisdom of knowing what Americans want more than Americans have now given a blanket YES to bailouts it seems. Off hand, I don’t remember all of the numbers to what industries but the total was somewhere near $2T… How are we affording the bulk of this now? We’re borrowing large sums from China and printing the rest… How will this help the economy exactly?
The auto industry says if they fail 3-4 million jobs will be lost. However, if we just give them $25B, they’ll just fail next year… so where is the benefit? Of course they don’t mention that Chapter 11 bankruptcy doesn’t halt business… it just lets the company renegotiate contracts and liabilities. So perhaps it is telling that the hardest lobbying for the auto bailout is coming from the UAW… who flat-out refused to reduce pay and benefits to keep the companies afloat… much less keep jobs. If the government approves this bailout, they had better replace the money lost in my parents’ 401k plans… its the same damn thing. It is also interesting that when asked if he would be willing to reduce his pay to $1 like the Chrysler CEO in the ’80s, the GM CEO said, “I think I’m good where I’m at.”
Add on top of this the recent mortgage bailout approved ($200B directly to banks and $600B to buy up “toxic assets”), the fact that the home builder’s association is now asking for money because not enough people are building homes, the possibility that Hollywood will be asking for money since not enough people are going to see their (SHITTY) movies, the money just given to CitiGroup, and the second bailout given to AIG… American’s can’t possibly afford the tax burden that most definitely must come… there isn’t enough in the budget for Obama to cut to cover this… and now he’s is talking of a $600B minimum economic stimulus package… most of which would not go to the people but instead would be spent building roads (… yes I mis-characterized that on purpose, a lot of money would go to schools, etc).
I know I’m not the only person worried about this… but why the hell isn’t Congress scared shitless?
The only thing I can say about Obama is that a couple of days ago he mentioned getting a panel together to cut a lot of useless fed programs, reorganize and restructure other parts of the fed purely for the intent of reducing costs and (if I remember correctly) help recover the costs of these bailouts. however, this was mentioned the day before the new $800bln bailout, and it was also mentioned that such trimming would inevitably mean cutting jobs too, so really, how this plays out in the grand scheme of things…well, seems I don’t have much of a choice but to sit back and watch.
Sorry my reply got way to long, so you’ll find it here:
Who do we bailout?