$700,000,000,000 and the lame duck hose job supreme

David Traver

So, let's say you are a Necon tool who happens to only have four months left to starve the federal government, hand your pals the largest lame-duck giveaway in the history of the world, drown the entire federal government in the bathtub, and ensure that no subsequent administrations will be able to enact or continue any social programs due to dire national poverty (such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). (See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist )

What do you do? What do you do?

Well, here is a script that has been a bang-dead winner for the last 7.7 years.

First, there has to be a crisis that affects the American people. I mean a really big crisis. A HUGE crisis. Losing an entire city is not big enough!

Second, the crisis demands big action, right now. No time to debate for Chrissakes! This is a real crisis!

Third, the whole destiny of America, perhaps the entire Western World rides on what we do!

Fourth, this is no time for pansies and politics! Do this without oversight, do this without asking questions, do this with no chance of accountability. Let's not tie the hands of our beloved savior(s) behind their backs!

Fifth, If you don't do what we say you are a traitor. We know things you don't know. We see things you cannot see. You can't understand the problem, you have to take our word for it. Would we lie to you?

Sixth, if you don't take the urgent, extreme, history-making, one-time, likely unconstitutional, remedy that we propose you are playing right into the hands of the people who [hate America] [want to destroy our way of life] [sell us oil] [sell our oil] [not drill everywhere] [want to see our markets fall] [use our own communications infrastructure against us] (pick one or more).

How has that script worked out?

Invade Afghanistan? Check!

Invade Iraq? Check!

FISA (ver. 1.0)? Check!

FISA (ver. 2.0)? Check!

Nationalize AIG? Check!

$700,000,000,000 Wall Street bailout? _______!

Am I the only one that sees a pattern here?

I say let's call the bluff. Eat it. Eat all your bad paper and die you conservative wizards. This time we won't play. This time we've got the balls to say no.

deltajudge · Joined: 05 Nov 2007 Posts: 287

Who came up with affordable housing, tell us. Who wanted to go out there and give out loans to people that couldn't afford them.Who? Democrats, that's who, Joe Biden and Barney Franks. And who is right in the mist of this latest fiasco, Chris Dodd and Barney Franks. Cool

David Traver · Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2008 12:50 am Post subject:

Bullshit Tom, The question is do you want to give $700,000,000,000 to a bunch of losers under these circumstances? The answer is no.

Olan Barnes · Joined: 17 May 2004 Posts: 1175 Location: Michigan

And a related story:

http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,27753,24395308-462,00.html

David Traver · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 02:39 pm Post subject:

I now get the basic thinking behind the liquidity crisis. I have paid attention to the reporting regarding the changes added by the Congress. The plan now conforms to everything Senator Obama said he wanted from the start. He was right again.

So, now the plan is not what Bush first presented. I support it now, having overcome my initial gag reflex.

I doubt it will pass until such time as the credit crisis reaches our wallets. It will reach us very soon. Examples would be that some of our credit cards stop working without notice, your kids cannot go back to school in January because their student loans are canceled, we cannot buy a new car because there is no credit, and we cannot sell our house because nobody can get a mortgage. This is bad news for folks living on the edge of their incomes when it comes to buy heating oil. The heating oil company will not have the credit that is usually available and home owners and renters will have to pay COD.

As the credit failure progresses, examples will be the closing of major and minor manufacturing plants due to the termination of lines of credit. Just-in-time delivery contracts will stop working in the manufacturing sector. There will be lay offs due to lack of parts and lack of sales. Airlines will park their planes because they cannot meet payrolls, buy parts, perform routine maintenance and fill fuel tanks. Similarly, small business like law firms will not be able to get parts to fix a copy machine. Municipalities will not be able to buy salt for the Winter due to lack of liquidity. International trade will slow dramatically because nobody will be able to get the necessary line of credit needed to ship products from one nation to the next.

Hospitals will not schedule surgery due to lack of materials and inability to meet payrolls.

You get the picture, I suppose. Established lines of credit stop. New loans are not created. The world economy stops expanding and begins to contract. Prices rise dramatically. Food becomes scarce and democracies begin to fail. It's your basic international credit meltdown. A working world economy goes into recession, followed by depression, followed by a world war. Herbert Hoover all over again.

So, the money is not going to "Wall Street" it's going to reboot the liquidity market. Rebooting is what you do when you get the "blue screen of death" on your Microsoft computer. Rebooting is what you do after a Republican Administration. Sometimes the reboot does not work and we have to install a new operating system. I suggest Obama. It's a clean, light, fast operating system that does not crash.

YellowDog · Joined: 28 Nov 2006 Posts: 52

The bankers and other financiers must be rescued from their various bad bets. Their immediate need is hard cash in place of debt instruments whose value is now widely accepted as unknown and perhaps unknowable. If we must give them cash, so be it. But why can we get nothing in return? If the foundational problem is bad home mortgages, why not pump cash into the system via partial payoffs of delinquent residential mortgages, conditioned on rewriting the remaining balances at lowered and fixed interest rates? Sweeten the deal with federal guarantees of the remaining mortgage balances. That way Joe Six Pack gets some relief for my trillion bucks (yeah yeah, I know, they say it's only a paltry 700 billion, but goverment people have been known in the past to sometimes underestimate costs a tiny bit), and Joe's banker gets some cash in hand, as well as added security that his future cash stream from Joe's mortgage is safe. I'm out a trillion dollars, but what the hey, any version of the bailout is going to do that anyway. I'm no economist, so I'm sure there's something horribly and stupidly wrong with this approach. Feel free to tell me what it is.

David Traver · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 04:33 pm Post subject:

I love that plan except for the sad fact that it would not work fast enough.

Infusing capital to the credit system by funneling it though the mortgage market would take months, if not years. We have days, if not hours, to kick this horse in the butt and get it on its feet. If we cannot get this horse up and walking shortly and pump some mineral oil down its throat, it will die of colic.

We don't have any other horses so we better get him on his feet and call the vet.

After our horse is up and working again we should figure out who sold us the bad hay and kick his ass too.