I’m pleased we both agree that the free market ideology that’s been in the ascendency since 1980 has been a failure. However the housing bubble and the dollar size of the financial meltdown and subsequent bailout was entirely due to decisions made between 2003-6, a time when the GOP controlled all three branches of government.
And further down the thread you’re blaming the bailout on the Democrats because og how many votes they got. What happened was that after the Bush administration created the bubble and prevented anything being done to stop bad lending while the bubble was forming, let the banks massively increase their leverage etc. which created the need for the bailout, then grandstanded against the Democrats to try and blame them for the bailout that their President and ideology had made necessary. These people claim to be the party of personal responsibility. Truly grotesque.
Remember who you’re dealing with, Dick. The content of the typical Shodan post boils down to “Everything is the Democrats’ fault”, while the content of the typical John Mace post boils down to “Both parties are at fault for everything”. Neither is enlightening.
(I know you’re an Obama supporter and I respect that but there must be some things you won’t defend him over, no? )
I’d tend to agree with the “both parties are at fault for everything” statement. The GOP are a wholly owned subsidiary of American corporations. The Democrats have an actual progressive contingent that isn’t but enough of them are bought and paid for that they may as well be the GOP. The Demmocrats are absolute rubbish at doing what’s needed to be done and are effectively bad for America but the horrific thing is they’re better than the alternative.
In this case however to be the party tha’ts been the vanguard of free market ideology since 1980, to ramp up the ideological nuttiness to dangerous levels from 2000 onwards and then to grandstand against a bailout your ideology and policies made necessary and blame the bailout on the other side is genuinely disgusting.
Sure, as long as you’re careful about false equivalences. I generally agree with your assessment, but it’s still important to support the people who are generally trying to move us forward over the ones who are actively opposed to the broader national interest.
It’s not a free market when you know the government is going to bail you out when you fail.
Bush couldn’t do the bailout without Congress. That’s all. They passed the bill, mostly with Democratic support. Could be that the Republicans were covering their asses knowing that their votes weren’t needed to pass the bill. Could be, but I think at least some were voting against it on principal. Personally, I’m not sure what I would’ve done. Normally I’d be dead set against this type of government intervention, but a lot of smart people on both sides of the aisle supported it.
Whoa. I can’t wrap my hands around that long sentence with all it’s dependent clauses. The Bush administration didn’t create the bubble (it’s a lot more complicated than that) and it’s the Republicans in Congress criticizing Obama and the Democrats, not the Bush administration.
That’s a different issue from our agreement that free market ideology has failed.
The GOP don’t have principles over fiscal discipline. Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress passed a Deficit Reduction Act in 1993 which put teeth in the PAYGO law, a law that said that any new spending had to be paid for with tax increases. This law was a big part of what brought us from then-record deficits to s urplus by the time Clinton left office. Bush took office and the GOP congress abolished PAYGO and went on a spree, the biggest spending increase in history, completely unfunded. The Democrats brought in legislation today that would have reestablished PAYGO – every GOP Senator voted against it :
3. The Bush administration did indeed create the bubble, scrapped mortgage lending standards then prevented any stste law enforcement stopping the explosion in bad lending. They also let banks increase their leverage from historically safe levels (ten to one) to thirty and forty to one in 2005. Every major decision that created the bubble and let the banks take enormous leveraged bets on it was done between 2003-6.
Here’s part of that explained in a previous poast :
I don’t see what this has to do with the price of butter in Denmark, or who was responsible for the bailout, for that matter.
My post is my cite. Ok. Anyway, I don’t really care to argue about who caused or didn’t cause “the bubble” (which name, in and of itself, is a gross oversimplification).
I made a simple statement above that it was Congress that passed the legislation for the bailout in response to your question. If you want to debate who caused “the bubble”, we can do that in a thread dedicated to that subject.
I was just commenting on your claim that the GOP have principles on matters fiscal.
There are cites in the post. I don’t think this is the first time a post in this board has veered off topic and mostly people just continue debating whatever it’s veered off onto, don’t they?
I’m willing to accept that some Republicans in Congress voted against the TARP legislation on principle. Extrapolating that to all members of the GOP all the time is your statement, not mine.
I don’t know what most people do. I usually try to avoid taking a simple statement like I made up-thread and turning it into a debate about an entirely different subject.
Absent a bailout the financial system would have continued to melt down. We would have had a much worse situation than the one we have now. The TARP and what followed was a horrible way to prevent meltdown, it bailed out the banks who screwed everything up first and the system out second, and we only needed to bail out the system. So there were definitely grounds to oppose how it was done. But the TARP and what followed was created by a GOP Treasury Secretary, GOP-appointed Fed chair, and backed by a GOP president. More importantly the Treasury topper, the Fed chair, the prez and senior people in the banking community were telling congress that they didn’t have time to argue and they’d better pass it quick or we’d face financial armageddon. And in this climate almost the entire GOP grandstanded against a bill they knew had to pass and tried to attach the blame for the whole thing to the Democrats. Now there were definitely some people on the GOP side with some integrity but as a congressional aucus as a whole they were pretty reprehensible.
Today not one of them showed any principle when it came to fiscal prudency. They all voted to allow spending to increase without matching tax increases topay for the spending. So they must have selective principles when it comes to fiscal matters.
You made a statement that Obama and the Democrats were responsible for the bailout and we’re still debating responsibility for the bailout.
Thanks for the news update. I have no doubt that that the Republicans, in general, have “selective” principles when it comes to fiscal responsibilities.
You wanted to debate who caused “the bubble”.
But the fact is, the bailout could not have happened w/o Congress. Bush couldn’t have done it without their approval.
You had one group in congress who did what they were being told to by the top officials in government and the banking industry to prevent economic meltdown and one group who shamefully grandstanded against it even though it was a direct result of their ideology and policies.
Nonsense. Even if the bill were originally passed by congress with more than 2/3, it is not at all uncommon for legislators to change their vote to sustain a veto by a president of their own party, or to arrange that the override never come to a vote. The stem cell bill Bush II vetoed would be an example.
