So the Senate passed the bailout plan by a rather comfortable margin. I don’t think that momentum will last. When it comes to the bailout, pressure and doomsaying from the President, individual congresspeople, and prominent businessmen/economists don’t seem to be doing much. A lot of people simply don’t believe there’s any crisis - at the very least, they don’t believe the current plan is the right way.
A lot of times, such popular pressure wouldn’t matter. But now, between economic conviction, election year concerns, unpopularity by the general populace, and plain old partisanship, I’m becoming skeptical that the bailout plan passed by the Senate has a chance in the House, especially with all the rumblings still reported from that side of Congress, and the fact that so many Dems didn’t even agree with it.
ETA: Of course, there’s a flip side, what with the stock market’s drop a couple of days ago shifting the polls. Who knows if the volume of opposition is still at a fevered pitch, what with that and the media coverage. And Congress definitely doesn’t want to be known as the group that presided over the start of the Great Depression because they couldn’t agree on anything.
Will this plan pass, or will we see the Dow down 5000 come Monday? If it doesn’t, or can’t, what sort of plan COULD pass both houses? Is it anything that any prominent Congressperson would even consider (“consider” both in the sense of “hear of” AND “agree with”)?
I think it will get through and for a short time it will improve. But, we have a shitstorm of foreclosures waiting to take down the system. if we do not deal with them ,we are still going to have big trouble. This plan ,of course, makes the top healthy for a while. It does not work the loans.
See, in a time of financial crisis, when the government will be forking over a trillion dollars just as the economy is slowing down and tax revenue begins to slide, and with Federal deficits nearing record highs, the geniuses in Washington decided that what would make this bill especially good is to lard it up with a bunch of unrelated spending, new health care benefits, and to top the whole thing off with a 100 billion tax cut, just to push that old fiscal irresponsibility envelope a little bit further…
I do not think the stock market will hit 5000. If it does that will be a staggeringly good opportunity to get in on the ground floor in the market for when it rebounds.
And the popular pressure from the people is unusually large on this one. There are reports that those running Congress’ web sites have had to install traffic cop software because the system was overloaded. They also said their mail servers were being hammered like crazy and they have seen nothing like this…ever (although there were some other notable traffic increases in the past). Members of Congress presumably cannot ignore this.
My cynical, tin foil hat self tells me that big business is offering them fantastically cushy jobs for when they get kicked from office if they get this through so they vote for it…certainly if they followed their constituencies this thing would die. I have no proof for that of course but it would not surprise me at all. Big business CEO will get on their knees and give the lot of them a blow job if they hand over $700 billion.
Military Daily News Of course in an entirely unrelated bill .we authorized a 612 billion dollar defense bill. I am sure only neocons think spending money like this while cutting taxes is a sound fiscal plan. You can not divorce this war from the financial ills.