Do you want a new age progressive or a traditionalist progressive? Otherwise, I’m not seeing much of a difference between the two.
McCain should oppose this bailout and rail against the Democrats who let Fannie and Freddie get out of control.
The only people who were “bleeding” were the maggots on Wall Street who gave bad loans to other maggots who couldn’t afford them. It doesn’t make sense to give them 700 billion taxpayer dollars so they can continue doing it.
What’s to stop the blood from spewing out of my eyes, ears, and mouth tomorrow?
The only people who were “bleeding” were the maggots on Wall Street who gave bad loans to other maggots who couldn’t afford them. It doesn’t make sense to give them 700 billion taxpayer dollars so they can continue doing it.
This was from yesterday!
His hero is Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a progressive, a big-government liberal in his day.
Well, even Roosevelt might’ve balked at bailing out Wall Street.
When and at what time was this interview conducted?
God I miss Fred Thompson. I’ve pasted Fred’s take below.
The Danger of Government Guarantees
I’ll bet it came as a surprise to most folks that the financial stability of the world as we know it depends upon the survival of a couple of outfits called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet that’s what the so-called experts are telling us. Moreover, we taxpayers are now being asked to guarantee Fannie and Freddie’s tab, one that could make the $124 billion S&L bailout of the late 1980s look cheap.
So how did we get stuck with this bill? Well, Congress wanted to “do something” about what it saw as a “housing problem.” To them that meant that they should create an even bigger problem.
So Congress passed laws that made it easier for hopeful home-buyers to buy houses … even when they couldn’t afford them. Then the Fed and other regulators helped, in the form of easy money and loose credit standards for mortgages.
Not surprisingly demand for houses grew, home prices rose, lenders financed additional questionable mortgages, fueling even higher prices and so on. You get the picture. This is called a bubble.
Then an amazing thing happened – apparently impossible to foresee. Home prices did not continue to rise forever! Home prices came down and easy money dried up, causing the above mentioned cycle to reverse. In other words, the bubble burst.
So you’d think the in-over-their-heads homebuyers and the mortgage bankers would take the hit, and the market would right itself. No reason for an international meltdown here, right?
Not so fast my friends. Years earlier Congress established Fannie and Freddie as purchasers of these mortgages, which they could bundle up, repackage and sell to investors, freeing up more mortgage money. As government creations tend to do, the two companies grew until they either owned or guaranteed about half the nation’s $12 trillion dollars in mortgages.
Fannie and Fred were “government sponsored enterprises” which means heads they win, tails you lose. If they make money stockholders, creditors and Fannie and Freddie employees – some making millions annually – get the benefit. But now that mortgages have hit the skids, with mounting losses, the taxpayers potentially face trillions in exposure. This is because there is an “implicit” (read “actual”) government guarantee of Fannie and Freddie’s obligations and both are now too big to be allowed to fail. This is called the “bailout phase,” which will probably lead to a bigger bubble in the future.
Lost in this immense, complex mess is the root problem most people are missing: the government is gradually becoming the guarantor of seemingly every important aspect of American secular life, creating incentives and bureaucracies that cause failure and invite fraud.
In Fan and Fred’s case, it was in no one’s interest to turn off the bubble machine. Just the opposite. The system induced borrowers to take on financial obligations they could not afford and lenders to lower lending standards. Fannie and Freddie went along because their managers’ compensation depended on the firms’ short term financial performance. And investors continued to buy complex security packages they didn’t understand, because the securities were viewed as government-backed.
Heavy campaign contributions by those benefiting from this scheme induced Members of Congress to avert their gaze from the ugly mess that was unfolding.
You’d think we’d have learned by now: when the backstop of the federal treasury makes it easier for politicians, lenders, borrowers, welfare recipients, government contractors, or anyone else, to serve their own self interest at the expense of the taxpayer, many will do just that.
That is why we continue to see self-dealing, moral lapses, outright fraud and lack of management and oversight in a wide array of programs and government-sponsored entities, from housing to Medicare, education and the Small Business Administration, all costing taxpayers billions, even trillions of dollars.
Our Founding Fathers knew more than a little bit about human nature. It is one reason why in the Constitution, the federal government was given certain delineated powers and no others. I hate to burst another bubble, but our government simply doesn’t have the authority or the capability to be the guarantor or insurer of our every need or desire. Isn’t it time we started sending that message loud and clear to the big enablers in Washington?
Fred Thompson
What the Dispatch isn’t saying is WHICH rescue plan. Is it the revised one, or the original? At this point I’d be happy if they kept the ACORN, La Raza, etc. junk out of the plan.
I hope he gets the opportunity to vote NO on this pile of sh1t bill at least as a point for the next debate. nObama has sucked all the air out of the media for two days and if not, we will have to hear John McCain at the next debate going Me Too! Me Too! I agree with Senator Obama that the pile of sh1t we just passed was the best thing to do...
The tragic crime of all this is that it is not an economic crisis but a political one.
This is OLD News from Sat and he is talking in general terms .
Why does everyone freak out all the time here .Something does have to be done just like the S&L solution in 1988-89.
We will wait until tomorrow. Everyone needs to be on the phones. This isn’t as bad as the bill could’ve been but it still is ugly and the more I look at the more it looks like a scam to protect the few the powerful and Democrat constituents. This bailout will make it easy for the same banks who issued high risk loans to continue doing so. They should be more cautious but when they see the government willing to bail them out and buy their bad loans it becomes an invitation to fleece the government and the taxpayer. Where is the crisis? 95% of Banks and most loans (only 13.6% are sub- prime and only a fraction of those are in default) are ok. The problem is the biggest and most heavily regulated banks issued the most subprime loans so the idea that some how this destory the market I think is an exaggeration. We is the structural instability to suggest this? It seems to me that it would be a good thing for people with unreliable credit not to be taking out huge loans for homes and business or tuition. Why not freeze tuition rates at a rate so people can go to college without taking out loans. Liberals are always talking about sacrifice. ;-)
And here I thought a good old fashioned blood-letting was in order.
You're a follower John not a maverick.
This should be no surprise to anyone. McCain never fails to make an effort to disappoint conservatives with bi-partisan stuntsmanship. He’s a pro at it. Maverick and all that. But, he is the 36% back door nominee. So he’s got that going for him.
My fear?
The government bailouts keep coming.