I agree, the whole bailout thing was un-American. Thanks W for starting the processes with the airlines and Wall street. At least we got something back with the auto bailouts, but we still artificially kept the near monopoly going strong when it should have failed and split into numerous smaller companies, and paid through the nose to do it.
I also wish we still broke monopolies instead of giving them MORE artificial advantages. It is disgusting how much of our government has whored itself out to the highest bidder.

Call an ace an ace - this worked. Obama continued a working policy.

Taxpayers on the hook for billions they'll never see recouped: NOT success. These same companies expecting the same bailouts again down the road? NOT success. While we're on the subject: Medicare fraud to the tune of 60 billion EVERY year? NOT success.

Bush was wrong and His Earness was wrong. These corporations should have filed for bankruptcy.

And stop with the Obamacare costing millions of jobs. You don't have any evidence to back it up.

SIGH.

These weak sauce "success" stories are nothing more than obamedia shills defending their king.


P.S. LIBERALS run Detroit and have for decades. Until that changes, it has NO chance.




>> ^heropsycho:

So are you admitting partisan vitriol is bad or not? If you are, then stop doing it yourself. Call an ace an ace - this worked. Obama continued a working policy.
And stop with the Obamacare costing millions of jobs. You don't have any evidence to back it up.
>> ^quantumushroom:
Had Bush executed these erroneous bailouts (oh wait, he did!)...
Answers your question about Bush approving of the auto bailouts.
...the left would be howling about their obvious failure.

Meaning if Bush were President now, the left, using the same exact stats, would declare the bailouts a failure. Which, by the way, they are.

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^quantumushroom:
Treasury Admits What Everybody Already Knew: Taxpayer Losses On GM Bailout Are Going to be Massive
Had Bush executed these erroneous bailouts (oh wait, he did!) the left would be howling about their obvious failure.
But let's say Obama did save "thousands" of jobs. The economic uncertainty created by obamacare has cost millions more.

Didn't Bush make those bailouts? I mean weren't they done up but Bush people?

So are you admitting partisan vitriol is bad or not? If you are, then stop doing it yourself. Call an ace an ace - this worked. Obama continued a working policy.

And stop with the Obamacare costing millions of jobs. You don't have any evidence to back it up.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Had Bush executed these erroneous bailouts (oh wait, he did!)...
Answers your question about Bush approving of the auto bailouts.
...the left would be howling about their obvious failure.

Meaning if Bush were President now, the left, using the same exact stats, would declare the bailouts a failure. Which, by the way, they are.

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^quantumushroom:
Treasury Admits What Everybody Already Knew: Taxpayer Losses On GM Bailout Are Going to be Massive
Had Bush executed these erroneous bailouts (oh wait, he did!) the left would be howling about their obvious failure.
But let's say Obama did save "thousands" of jobs. The economic uncertainty created by obamacare has cost millions more.

Didn't Bush make those bailouts? I mean weren't they done up but Bush people?

People also forget that it wasn't just people who work for GM and Chrysler whose jobs were saved. There's a whole supply chain to think about. Ohio's job market was helped out a lot by the auto bailout because we have a lot of companies who supply parts to GM and Chrysler here.

And of course those effects just keep rippling out, because people who kept their job at the parts supplier also spend their paycheck in the local economy. They buy houses here, eat in our restaurants, shop in our stores, etc.

People seem to have this notion that economic growth is all about profits, but really, it has more to do with making sure money keeps turning over in the economy. You want people to spend money on things, so people selling things have money to hire people to make more things, which gives those people money they can use to spend on things. You want money to flow in a circle, so everyone's kept employed making more stuff which over time makes us more prosperous.

Something like the liquidation of Chrysler or GM would've been a major disruption to that flow, right at a time when the financial crisis was creating a giant disruption of its own.

The bailouts prevented those disruptions, and the amount of money it saved us versus the alternative is much, much greater than the costs of lending the money to GM and Chrysler would be, even if we never got a dime back from either one.

Had Bush executed these erroneous bailouts (oh wait, he did!)...

Answers your question about Bush approving of the auto bailouts.

...the left would be howling about their obvious failure.

Meaning if Bush were President now, the left, using the same exact stats, would declare the bailouts a failure. Which, by the way, they are.


>> ^Yogi:

>> ^quantumushroom:
Treasury Admits What Everybody Already Knew: Taxpayer Losses On GM Bailout Are Going to be Massive
Had Bush executed these erroneous bailouts (oh wait, he did!) the left would be howling about their obvious failure.
But let's say Obama did save "thousands" of jobs. The economic uncertainty created by obamacare has cost millions more.

Didn't Bush make those bailouts? I mean weren't they done up but Bush people?

Replies within message:

>> ^quantumushroom:

I was 100% against the failouts, but not much you can do against a leviathan government made that way by worshipers of leviathan government as the solution to every problem. You don't create a Kong then act surprised when Kong does what he wants instead of what you want, do you?


If I recall, Bush pushed for the bailout. Here is the Fox News article.


Due to increasingly efficient software and other tech advances, over time a job that once required a thousand workers can be done with only 300. It's called "creative destruction" and yeah, it requires you to be on the ball.


I agree with you. This happened to the TV repairmen in the 80s when the Japanese firms starting making better TVs. It's a problem that we will have to deal with regularly. It happened, and it will happen again. If it wasn't for prescriptions, most General Physicians would be out of the job today as internet self-diagnostics have become extremely popular in the last 10 years. We still subsidize farmers, cotton growers, and steelworkers. I say let's drop them! The same rule should apply to all. If we are willing to support outsourcing, then we should be willing to cut all subsidies to farmers, oil companies, pharmaceuticals, etc. I'm all for that.

I've never been offered a job by a poor man, have you? Unless you're a vote-buying politician, you shouldn't overly concern yourself that someone else has more than you, nor blame them. Economics is not a zero-sum game.

I don't see your point at all here. People do not want to tax the rich more, they just want repeal the tax breaks that Bush implemented. Unless you know otherwise, over the ENTIRE lifespan of these tax breaks, the economy has been on a downhill. How can you justify them then? Remember this is tax breaks over income only, if the rich invest their money into their businesses, they are never taxed on that money anyways.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/krugman-vs-will-auto-bailout

All these people give Obama way more credit than I do. What has he done so far? The auto bailout... and... and... talk a lot. We've heard all about what he'd like to do and what he's going to do but he hasn't convinced me that he's capable of getting it done.

Comparing Obama to Hitler is an insult to Hitler. Hitler worked way too hard to bring about the Nazi revolution to have his name slapped on every Tom, Dick and Harry that says they want to mix things up a little.

edit:
The DCFD PIO estimated the crowd at 60k-75k people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/12_March_on_Washington

http://www.videosift.com/video/Ron-Paul-s-Auto-Bailout-Speech-12-10-08-1 done.

In reply to this comment by radx:
While you're scavenging, you could also dig up Dr. Paul again, mate.

While you're scavenging, you could also dig up Dr. Paul again, mate.

>> ^gtjwkq:
Setting working conditions and minimum wages is the art of benefiting the hired at the expense of the employers and the unemployed. Pretty soon a black market for illegal hiring will grow as businesses and people try to survive in tough times despite such ill-considered regulations. So you actually end up with 3rd world salaries that way.

Minimum wage is a whole other topic, but my read of what you're saying here is that 3rd world salaries in the US are unavoidable, and we should just accept it. Suffice to say, I disagree.

Just FYI, almost 70% of America's GDP accounts for consumer spending, its not reliable as an indicator of a nation's productivity. Over the years, a lot of that spending is just people borrowing with their home equity extractions and mostly credit card debt. Now that we're in a credit crunch, GDP will probably fall (unless statisticians come up with a more hedonistic interpretation for it).
In a recession like we're having, in the private sector you need more productivity and you need to flush out the malinvestments and money wasting businesses.

I agree with this, though I'd replace the Austrian-defined "malinvestment" with just plain "bad investments." Why did the market go for an asset bubble, rather than go after investments with a real long-term prospect?

In the public sector, you need less govt so it can be less of a burden on the private sector.
How can that possibly happen if govt borrows/taxes/prints a stimulus into existence (adding to the burden of debt), then proceeds to use all that taxpayer money to expand govt programs and spending (more burden),

How does laying off schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, closing VA hospitals, etc. Help recovery? It seems like a highly ideological statement to say that no one the government gives money to should be employed.

Being worried about the debt seems natural, but why you would say the spending itself adds burden? That seems to presuppose that money spent by government is automatically, intrinsically going to purchase nothing of value to anyone.

[It] bails out the inefficient businesses that should've failed otherwise (more burden)

For what it's worth, the left (myself included) isn't pleased about the bailouts. We're mollified slightly when the CEOs of several of these institutions is asked to resign. I'm not so worried about the auto bailouts (since they're all loans, and I suspect they'll be repaid), but the bank bailouts should involve more pain from people who aren't taxpayers.

and poorly hands that money out to businesses via govt contracts instead of letting consumers make better choices with their money themselves (burden burden burden)?

As a general proposition, I would agree with this, though we're "fortunate" in that successive rounds of conservative politicians have let our infrastructure crumble, so we have a very convenient, worthwhile target for stimulus. That's in contrast to Japan, whose stimulus mostly went towards things of little long-term economic benefit, like increasing their level of hurricane and earthquake resistance.

Blaming mostly investment banks for this recession is like force-feeding alcohol to a bus driver and blaming him for killing all the passengers in the resulting crash. Don't you have any idea of the Fed and other federal institutions' role in causing the market distortions that led to this recession? How can you give them a free pass as the major culprits?

I've seen Peter Schiff use this metaphor (and others like it) several times. It makes no sense.

You say government force-fed them alcohol, when really what it did is give them money. Why is government solely or primarily at fault for the investment bank using that money to make bad investments?

To me, this seems like trying to jail the CEO of Smith & Wesson for a murder committed with one of their guns, while holding the person pulling the trigger blameless.

It is a kind of selection, just not as brutal as you described, because its not the end of the world: people get fired, businesses go bankrupt, the assets of incompetent people are transfered to the competent people, people are hired again somewhere else and eventually the economy resumes growth.

Yes, people get fired, lose their health insurance, lose their savings (what's left of them), go even more deeply into debt, potentially lose their home...yep, nothing at all brutal in that!

The market is not an omnipotent unstoppable force, its complexity just eludes the narrow-mindedness of the fools that try to plan it, specially when they're the same fools that screwed it up in the first place. A market is already planned by those in it, and they have the best incentives in place to make the best plans, because they are usually the first ones to pay for their mistakes. Politicians and bureaucrats, on the other hand, are exempt from responsability and are seldom punished when they waste huge amounts of money. They are the ones who commited the worst sins.

Why are politicians exempt from accountability? Don't we have elections?

Which CEO of these companies is now on welfare or in jail? Seems to me, other people wind up paying for their mistakes, government bailout or no.

The terrible mistake in your criticism of the market is that you constantly blame its "emergent" irrationality as an excuse for thinking on its behalf. What you correlate to auto-immunity on an otherwise healthy body I would compare to a heavily medicated pacient that undergoes daily surgeries after years of treatment for what started out as a sore throat.

I think anyone familiar with the history of the Great Depression, and the 1920's generally would view things my way. This is why I decry Austrians with such venom -- they engage in revisionist history rather than adapt to the revelation that government isn't Satan, and that the market can indeed do the wrong thing all by itself.

I like *market better than *finance. Finance is a particular industry within the economy, but the whole series of videos about the auto bailout and associated pro- and anti-union commentary would seem weird being in *finance.

I'm not so sure channels really need a person owning them so much as a clear description of what should and should not go there.

For example, Politics does just fine without anyone running it at all. If anything, I find the problem with politics is that people don't include it when it applies.

Yes, I voted "Whatever, just make the freakin' thing already."

>> ^Psychologic:
^ Steele was basically saying that the stimulus is creating short-term "work" rather than long-term "jobs", and that doing so doesn't help the economy. Disagreeing with that point would be fine, and I would have loved for her to do so. Steele has plenty of opinions that would be easy to pick apart.
But Maddow did not attack the point, she attacked the wording.

Actually, she attacked the point. A job that pays you income is an economic stimulus. A full-time job that lasts for 2 years puts food on your family's table for that much longer. A job you get a paycheck for is a job, period.

It's not permanent demand in the system for employment, but the idea is that employing those people creates demand that spreads (or trickles) through the economy, encouraging more hiring throughout, and builds the confidence of investors who start believing that there are good bets to be made on our economy because sectors of the economy start improving.

It might not work out that way, but these histrionics about refusing to concede that jobs are being created by the stimulus bill are disingenuous.

She extended his wording to imply the he was saying that short-term work doesn't help those employed by it and that any job with an end-date is the same as being unemployed. She avoided his point to attack his wording, and she does not do the same with Democrats.

Yes, over time you can say Rachel exhibits a bias towards criticizing Republicans. It doesn't mean a particular instance of that criticism is biased and unfair, because she does it too often.

A lot of time what she says highlights my own confusion with Republicans, and why they think their ideas will work. Usually I understand what they're trying to convey, but with Steele, I had no fucking idea what his point was.

I think he was trying to echo the Keynesian quote about digging holes to fill them up again, but he'd have done better to actually use the quote (which is clear), than just try to make a semantic argument about whether jobs created to service government contracts are "jobs" or not.

To me, that argument is an attempt to assume your conclusion; the government can't create jobs because jobs created by government aren't jobs because government created them.

She did the same with the auto bailout. Some Republican Senator said that union jobs "cost the auto companies an average of ~$75/hour" (paraphrased) and Maddow said "show me the auto worker that takes home $75/hour." Workers cost companies more than their hourly wage and she knows that.

And so do the Republicans, yet they repeatedly phrased this data point as "Union workers are paid $75/hour" -- there wasn't just one, it was all of them, repeatedly. She was calling them out for trying to fudge facts to fit their political need, and explained how the $75/hour figure was reached in excruciating detail in order to try to counteract those misrepresentations being pushed by Republicans.

Maddow is too intelligent for me to believe she doesn't know the difference in these cases.

The reason you have that impression is because she's been explaining the difference between the words people are actually using, and the facts.

Yes, Olbermann and O'Reilly are worse, but that doesn't mean Maddow is completely fair when she is talking about Republicans. She often avoids disagreeing with what people mean so she can take a funny jab at their word choice. If she did it to both sides then maybe I'd call it unbiased, but I've only seen her do it to Republicans.

Why is it her job to try to divine a sensible explanation for people's ridiculous words that they themselves did not put forward? Steele's case and the $75/hour UAW thing are great examples; the Republicans put out these talking points, and don't try to explain a "real meaning" they just try to put out a soundbite for the uneducated and hope they don't have to defend it against any real scrutiny, because they have spent decades decrying such scrutiny as "bias".

When one party has been saying stupid things, it's not "bias" to report that what they're saying is more stupid than the things the other party is saying. Bias is trying to claim that the only objective report is the one that finds both parties equally wrong.

^ Steele was basically saying that the stimulus is creating short-term "work" rather than long-term "jobs", and that doing so doesn't help the economy. Disagreeing with that point would be fine, and I would have loved for her to do so. Steele has plenty of opinions that would be easy to pick apart.

But Maddow did not attack the point, she attacked the wording. She extended his wording to imply the he was saying that short-term work doesn't help those employed by it and that any job with an end-date is the same as being unemployed. She avoided his point to attack his wording, and she does not do the same with Democrats.

She did the same with the auto bailout. Some Republican Senator said that union jobs "cost the auto companies an average of ~$75/hour" (paraphrased) and Maddow said "show me the auto worker that takes home $75/hour." Workers cost companies more than their hourly wage and she knows that.


Maddow is too intelligent for me to believe she doesn't know the difference in these cases. Yes, Olbermann and O'Reilly are worse, but that doesn't mean Maddow is completely fair when she is talking about Republicans. She often avoids disagreeing with what people mean so she can take a funny jab at their word choice. If she did it to both sides then maybe I'd call it unbiased, but I've only seen her do it to Republicans.

I'm holding my applause until we get a hold of the fine print.

Precious little is available on details, but what there is looks alright, possibly even good.

It's essentially the Senate bill that Republicans successfully filibustered, with the Shelbyite union-killer parts made non-binding.