The Bailout Buzz
Time looks at the reaction to the House bill in Why Main Street Is Mad: Scenes from a Financial Crisis. The article includes remarks from Jay Inslee, the only Washington State Democrat to vote against the bailout in the House:
The correspondence from his constituents fell into three camps, Inslee says. The first group thinks any bailout is an outrage at a time when CEOs have been getting such huge bonuses. These people, says Inslee, “are so outraged, they don’t get past that.” The second group comprises people who recognize the need to intervene to avert further financial calamity “but are absolutely outraged that we’d do something that is so inequitable to Main Street.” This group, he says, is considerably larger than the first and wants a more balanced bill. Finally, Inslee says, there is a third group that “is in favor of doing anything because the situation is so dire. And his name is Bob.” Inslee isn’t being facetious: it is a group of one, a constituent named Bob, who avidly promotes the view.
All 451 pages of the Senate bill [PDF] would seem to be the House bill with tax breaks, so the government will be even less able to pay off its huge deficits. There is still no input sought from economists. The Senate is sugar-coating the bill with tax cuts to suck in more Republicans in the House.
This isn’t policy, it’s politics. It’s still a bailout, not a “rescue”, and it only helps Wall Street.
2 comments
The majority of these Senators are completely out of touch with their constituents. They don’t understand that there is a lot of anger out here in regular-folk-ville. We don’t want to help wall street. We want them to take their lumps. We realize there will be financial pain if we don’t. But we also suspect there will be financial pain for us if we do bail them out. We want some protection for our tax dollars but we don’t see that in this bill. They act like it’s business as usual. It’s time for new representation.
The people voting on this bill don’t understand the problem, and it is in the interest of Wall Street that the ignorance continues. Wall Street was allowed to go crazy, and there are elements of this bill that increase the likelihood that the insanity will get worse, not better.
You don’t decrease regulation on the people who have broken what few rules still exist, but that’s included in this bill.