Congress Lies Low To Avoid Bailout Blame

IBD Editorials ^ | September 18, 2008 | Terry Jones

[Kaslin]

Congress says it likely will adjourn this month having done nothing on the most important issue in America right now: the financial meltdown from the subprime lending crisis.

Can Congress just walk away from a problem it helped create? Maybe, maybe not.

There's now some talk of a grand deal between the Treasury, the Fed and Congress for a "permanent" solution: creating a government agency to buy up all the bad subprime debt, just like the Resolution Trust Corp. did with bad real estate in the 1980s and 1990s.

Already, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep the subprime crisis from crashing the world economy. The collapse of twin mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the failures of Lehman Bros., Bear Stearns and insurer AIG, expose taxpayers to more than $1 trillion in liabilities.

Until now, Congress has been surprisingly passive. As Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, "no one knows what to do" right now.

Funny, since it was a Democrat-led Congress that helped cause the problems in the first place.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently barked "no" at reporters for daring to ask if Democrats deserved any blame for the meltdown, you saw denial in action.

[grey_whiskers]

Refer to them by name and party affiliation (and throw in a couple of Dems from known liberal strongholds, like Barney "My Boy Lollipop" Frank and Nancy ("San Francisco") Pelosi.

People will get "it's a liberal" thing.

Cheers!

[AndyJackson]

Where do they propose to get all this money?

That is the easy part.

[Paladin2]

Both the RINOs and the ‘rats constitute an ongoing criminal enterprise.

[norraad]

Yes, but just as the insurance industry calculates risk, so do these criminals.

Therefore, equally (or maybe more)guilty are the gullible & the lame who ( I say choose )not to notice or understand the implications, thereby providing a major "ignorance cushion".

This "Ignorance cushion" is integral to the problem as "e" in e=mc2.

Very rarely does this formula fail for these criminals (French Revolution).