When Bush was president, Krugman opposed financial bailouts.

Now that Obama is president, he changed his mind. We aren't spending enough.

So...

>> ^Porksandwich:

I wasn't referring to stock as a bonus, they give these people pure cash as bonuses. Hell they used the bailouts to pay bonuses, that's not "performance based" anything and it was using tax dollars to pay them.
But it's still a race to the bottom for the majority of businesses, they pay less and less and move the jobs overseas when they can no longer lower them here. And yet at the top, the salaries continue to go up or at least be maintained to create the larger multiplier.
And we should be complaining, because they continue to complain about "free market", lower taxes, and subtly implying they are creating more jobs than they are eliminating in the pursuit if higher and higher profit margins. Lots of companies are posting record profits while using the same arguments. The CEO margin is just another indicator that what the people have spent their lives and tax dollars on are being coopted by business interests and funneling the money into the hands of a few. It's not trickling down, it has steadily been cut back.


*promote

I wasn't referring to stock as a bonus, they give these people pure cash as bonuses. Hell they used the bailouts to pay bonuses, that's not "performance based" anything and it was using tax dollars to pay them.

But it's still a race to the bottom for the majority of businesses, they pay less and less and move the jobs overseas when they can no longer lower them here. And yet at the top, the salaries continue to go up or at least be maintained to create the larger multiplier.

And we should be complaining, because they continue to complain about "free market", lower taxes, and subtly implying they are creating more jobs than they are eliminating in the pursuit if higher and higher profit margins. Lots of companies are posting record profits while using the same arguments. The CEO margin is just another indicator that what the people have spent their lives and tax dollars on are being coopted by business interests and funneling the money into the hands of a few. It's not trickling down, it has steadily been cut back.

Guys, most times companies *don't* hand out stock as a bonus/award and you get them the day they are announced.

There are different ways to award employees. For example, you sign a contract that in turn for meeting performance expectations for x amount of years, you get x amount of stock on this date X years in the future.

Another one is a stock option agreement. A larger and larger pool of stock options are available for purchase at a discount price as each year passes by.

These are policies that are in place before the crisis began. Both the company and the individual sign contracts such as these so they are legally binding.

Besides, *it's not YOUR money*, so you can't do a thing about it. Even with companies that got bailouts/lines of credit, once the money is out of our hands, we can yell and scream all we want, but they can do what they want.

This is unpopular, I know. But that's how it goes.

Everything but private businesses, right?



Well, officers of public companies are (or should be) held to account by their board, their shareholders, and the market. Those are the people with interests at stake. The reason why public spending is held to such standards is because every taxpayer (and citizen) has interests at stake.

Conversely, there is not much good reason to hold a private business accountable for spending. If you have a lemonade stand and you want to spend all your profits on candy, then that's really up to you. If you're mad that your boss spends all the company money on candy (or lets the secretary do so), work somewhere else.

To be clear, I don't like how the US handled the bailouts of private enterprises because it blurs these lines. But that's a generally separate issue.

First off, Romney does not equal Obama. This kind of thinking is truly what frightens me, and it's not because of the reasons you probably think.

Some 20 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the population were ignorant of politics and apathetic. Political games were played, cheap shots were utilized, but in the end, in the big scheme of things, on the truly big issues, both sides would compromise and do the right thing. Clinton and the GOP Congress balancing the budget, Bush Sr. raising taxes, etc. etc. Stuff got done. And the majority of people were wholly ignorant on things like federal budgets, that kind of thing. There was also some kind of understanding on basic principles where regardless of your ideology, you couldn't do catastrophic things just because it suited your ideology.

Now, that's gone. Extremists in both parties are labelled fascists or communists, or whatever, but now moderates are being labelled as either part of the same extremist groups, or they're called sell-outs, part of a completely corrupt system, and perpetrators of that system, not as agents trying to work within a system that was built long before they got there, who could change the system while they work within it. When they do the right thing that violates ideology, it's not because it was the bipartisan right thing to do; it's because they're extensions of the corrupt system. The bailouts are an absolutely perfect example. I hate to break it to people here, and I know most won't agree with me, but the bailouts were the right thing to do, even if you're against too big to fail, etc. The banking system was already in place when the economy collapsed. It's like being in a boat as its sinking. You can critique the design of the boat all you want, but the boat sinking kills you all. It's ridiculous to talk about actions that will blow up the boat. Plug the holes, do what you need to do to get the boat to land. THEN figure out how to fix the design, or build a new boat. But what happened? The bipartisan policy by both a Democrat and Republican president was tarred and feathered as government being in the pocket of big business. Those same people don't seem to realize the boat didn't sink. We didn't face another depression. Be critical the banking system wasn't significantly reformed after that was done, I have no issues with that.

To the person who said Obama's policies haven't worked in three years? Again, are we in a depression? No. Those policies worked. And how can you expect a macro-economic shift within a year or two of his other policies? Go back and look at economic history. Things don't change on a dime just from macro-economic policies instituted by the government. It takes several years before the effect can be measured. Again, sheer ignorance. The difference today is the ignorant are far more willing to participate in the political debate even though they don't have a clue what they're talking about. This is a problem on both sides.

Both sides are stoking the ignorant to get involved in the public debates, and not encouraging a very very basic understanding of crucial facts about history. Like... WWII was a Keynesian economic exercise effectively, which in the end was a gigantic gov't deficit that did end the Great Depression. This is a very straight forward basic economical historical fact. But there's 30% of the population that will not believe it because it blows apart what they politically favor today. It's ridiculous.

I disagree with Romney, and I probably won't vote for him. But he's not a fascist. There's a significant difference between him and Santorum. And there's a significant difference between him and Obama. Is there a choice as clearly different as say Ron Paul vs. Ralph Nader? No. Is that a bad thing? Not in my book.

My fear is in our political ecosystem, the moderates, the good ones who truly aren't compromising for the wrong reasons, but do it to get things done, and have a willingness to ignore ideology for practical solutions that help the country are getting drowned out, and characterized as corrupt when they're not. I disagree with Romney, but he's not corrupt. I disagree with Obama, but he's not corrupt. We don't need a revolution to fix our current political system, but an increasing number of people think we do. And the last decade we're seeing a rise in the extremists on both sides enough to drown out the political moderates we desperately need. This just can't continue indefinitely.

>> ^deathcow:

>> ^lantern53:
Obama's policies have not worked for the past 3 years. If you believe some improvement is coming, you have far more faith than the average Catholic bishop.

obama = romney = anyone else they put forward

"Most economists" did not see the collapse coming, so why believe "most economists" know anything now?

The economic collapse was set in motion with the Free Houses for Poor People Act in the 70s, a liberal creation muscled-up during the Clinton years.

Government "guaranteed" bank loans to people who had no business owning homes, because it's "unfair" that not everyone has a house. So, half-coercion, half promising bailouts with taxpayer money.

Even in decades-old systems like Medicare, where you'd think there would be built-in watchdogs, we lose 60 billion A YEAR to fraud, waste and abuse, so how anyone sane thought a one-time scamulus would be closely monitored for fraud...

A similar Nude Eel scamulus was attempted in the 40s with little to no effect. FDR's bacon was only saved by WW2.


Government: If you think the problems are bad, wait till you see our solutions!

Oh I am not pro or anti Obama on this bailout stuff. I think all of the politicians should hang for what was done before, during and after. Not putting a stop to that crap at any point is not serving anyone but themselves and their big donors. And those politicians who think it's a sham and don't speak up or call out others are just as guilty.


I think the bailout could have been done another way to accomplish more, or at least get stiffer regulations back in place as part of accepting it...across the world since they loaned to so many businesses in such large amounts.

Porksandwich,

I'm totally onboard with criticizing the Obama administration for not breaking up too big to fail banks, punishing the banks for their misdeeds, etc. That should have come part and parcel with the bailouts. But, the bailouts were still successful because they stopped the bleeding.

There's plenty to criticize the Obama administration and Congress for. It's not the bailouts that I have a problem with. It's the inaction afterwards to prevent another crisis.

Unfortunately, the GOP is bound and determined to nominate a candidate I can't consider voting for.

Some sort of spending policy was needed, but the bailout as it was put forth was pretty dismal in it's results. The companies that received it were the ones who created the mess for the most part (banks), and we really still haven't addressed punishing them OR putting laws in place to either:
A) Punish them if it happens again, really the laws now should be sufficient.
B) Make it impossible to happen again....all those acts, they repealed over the last 20-30 years.
C) Prevent some of the more insanity driven investing, such as over abundant speculation and similar cost creating but non-value creating (Call it a Private Tax, if you will) things.

Really the more I look back on the bailout, and look at the attitudes of most of the politicians at that time...they were saying let the auto industry fail. But the bailouts to the auto industries have at least halfway been paid back. Chrysler is likely going to short the government 1.3 billion last I read. GM gave the government stock and 22 billion. Stock is worth about 13.5 billion. They borrowed 50 billion. So 28 billion is what we have to get out of that stock to recover fully. And as far as I know there is no interest accumulated, so losing money in those deals is a kick to the crotch considering.

I think the auto industries might have been able to enter bankruptcy and come back out of it with some lessons learned. But vehicles like the "Volt" show that......they don't really know who they are selling to. Chrysler ended up being taken over by Fiat. And Ford handled it's own business. The one in the worst shape was GM, and I can't say that they probably didn't have it coming. And they still ended up pretty much killing the economy dead in my area despite the bailout when they shut their plants down that they really hadn't "kept up" in DECADES...place was really dumpy looking. No one would take it over because it was just utter trash when they left. I'm more against than for the bailout of the auto industries, but I can see that they were probably beneficial there although GM seemingly learned nothing of note from it.

Banks on the other hand......they took in 1.2 trillion. And a bunch of the borrowed money went to European firms. Along with other financial institutions. And many kept taking loans into 2010.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/that_federal_bank_bailout_in_2008_was_bigger_than_we_knew_a_lot_bigger.html

Has lots of info on it. I haven't taken the time to confirm every last portion of it, but we know the bailout/loans of 2008 that were announced ended up being MUCH larger than they told us. So the information is kind of hit and miss since they kept it hush hush for awhile.

But, the money was to help keep the banks off people's backs about foreclosures. It hasn't, in fact they took the money and foreclosed anyway to get both the cash to make it possible to allow the person to keep the house AND the house. That should be criminal.

The bailout of those institutions probably did stop a economic meltdown, but I think that bailout still should be criticized. The people who caused it suffered no punishment by law, financially, or by failure. And they have been fighting have regulations and such put in place to stop it from happening again and from practices like speculation being allowed in such quantities. It's affecting the oil prices and they are using it as a argument for "foreign oil" ALL the time.

Sure the bailout saved us from financial meltdown, but we aren't safe from it happening again. In fact we're probably even more precariously perched at the edge than we were before, and people are making money off that instability. If they could have made money during the total collapse, I don't think they would have gotten bailout to all those institutions.

So, we should criticize the bailout, simply because it has made it possible for the people who control the money to continue making money, and no one has corrected the conditions that caused the collapse in the first place. The people who caused it keep on keeping on, the politicians get some money stuffed in their pockets, and the people who got hurt most by the crash whether you lost your house, job, savings, pension, etc are just lined up to be knocked down again and no one is trying to fix it. The people who had money to weather the crash, are recovering and the people who didn't are still hurt by the crash they had no way of avoiding.

Too big to fail institutions are still too big to fail. Now they know that they can leech all the money from the government whenever they start to lean a little as a collective. Nothing was learned by anyone there, because nothing ended up happening to them besides some bad press...when they should have gotten a major investigation that was more like a full cavity search to determine wrongdoing.

If we're measuring the success of the bailouts by who got income gains, we're missing the big picture. The point of the bailouts wasn't to redistribute wealth. It wasn't to fix the economy long term. The point of the bailouts was to stop the bleeding, and fix a short term crisis.

I'm disappointed Obama hasn't done more to fix the economy long term. Yes, some wealth redistribution is necessary for the health of the economy. Criticize him for that, I have no problem with it.

Criticizing the bailouts via statistics of income gains broken down by economic class is ridiculous. It's like criticizing using water to put a house fire out because it didn't fix the termite problem. The bailouts were fantastically successful because we're sitting here looking at a excruciatingly slow recovering economy instead of staring at a second Great Depression with no end in sight.

Señor Lutz doesn't believe in the liberal global warming "religion", which is totally different than "believing" in natural global heating and cooling cycles.


Besides, who's arguing at that table? Lutz is another looter like the rest of 'em, only via Government Motors bailouts and not green-tax socialism.

Unemployment has went down some, but they don't qualify that. Some people haven't found work in years, and they may not be counted. Some people may be employed, but at half their previous wage. Etc. The measurement for this may even be the same, but on the whole while the numbers are going down it doesn't appear that the people who've been affected by the initial crash are actually recovered from it. Whether due to unemployment, partial employment, or that they were so damaged by the crash that they are going to take a lot longer to recover to some kind of sustainable living, or at least behave like they expect the living to be sustainable.


On the reverse side of the coin, the rich were telling everyone how they need low tax rates to create jobs. They kept sticking to that message and still are. Evidence of rather high unemployment and people getting by with less than they used to earn shows that while taxes are low, they are not creating jobs. And here we have evidence that they are actually earning substantial amounts more than the rest during the recovery. No matter what the reason for this is, the plan is not working if the richest people in the country get 93% of the recovery...that least 7% for the rest of the 99%.....that's RECOVERY from a crash, not in addition to reaching the old levels and then more on top..it's not even back to where it was and they are getting 93% of it.


The bailout may factor into their gains, but that just shows that the government should have done something different. Showing a gain in the market that virtually no one in the market actually gets is not helping the country. The rich can not possibly circulate as much money as regularly as a bunch of normal people living pay check to pay check. Yet the programs that showed the most growth, which was coincidentally unemployment was hated by near everyone. It generated 1.6 dollars for every dollar spent into it. I haven't seen numbers on showing what the bail out generated for each dollar spent into it, I would assume it was all gobbled up and squirreled away before anyone could record it.

Arguably the nation had the best results following WW2, everyone was generally earning more. The rich had to invest back into the company or face losing most of their earnings to taxes, meaning employees of worth earned more in line with the CEOs and such. Tax rates were high, but people could also live on one salary and raise 2-3 kids often more quite easily. We are steadily moving away from that mindset and moving into the mindset of "the people with the money know what to do" but they leave off the ".......to earn themselves more money no matter the cost."

Take an unbiased point of view. You must realize that is not the only money (stumulus, bailouts) in the world. People, and banks, have money that earned through their own private investments. Now, the government gives a business a million dollars, then you read later they earned a million, that is not a legitimate reason to get pissed at them. But that's what is happening.

Here is a 100% true story that servers as an analogy:

I worked at a grocery store when I was younger outside Philadelphia in a bad section. I would watch people pay for groceries with food stamps, then pack the groceries into to their lexus suv. No joke. Yes I got mad, but it wasn't illegal. The same thing happened to the banks. They need help, but they also have money to afford other things that they value. If the government stepped in, they would be powerless because the shopper spent money that was not the government's money.

And before you start replying with proposed government regulations, realize that government isn't the cause of that food stamp SUV problem. They can't fix it either. The problem was that that person was able to afford the SUV by leasing it. The problem is not that the government failed to check her income level. Now the question becomes whether it SHOULD be fixed at all. Ponder that further.

>> ^Grimm:

...he's blaming the current administration for not taking measures to help insure via the bail-outs and stimulus packages that the vast majority of the recovery isn't being funneled to the top 1%.

If our government was truely interested in generating income,the simplest way would be to tax the profits of stock transactions to start,and tarrifs for all these imported goods we no longer generate to make sending manufacturing overseas less attractive. Taxing the rich at a comparable rate to the working class will help tremendously as well. Taxes are on PROFITS-that's what is left over once the expenses of creating that profit are paid-so no whining how the poor billionaire is getting robbed. The difference can be made up in volume...more people capeable of spending money because they have jobs means more profits in any case...China may have super cheap labour,but they pay their taxes to China,not America. Eroding the middle class tax base seems as clever to me as Wile E Cyote sawing away at the cliff holding him up,and pointing this out to him makes him saw defiantly faster. Until he falls.

Capitalism could work if our government's corporate masters realize they have a vested interest in providing livings for their workforces. A worker who appreciates a good job will go that extra mile to promote that company willingly,to the benifit of all. This short term nonsense of using bailout money to reward the top tier of executives with incentive money is rank madness,high treachery and ultimately self destructive. A pity whatever puppet we elect will just continue the sad dance whomever gets in.

Its why I'm voting for Goldman Sachs in November. They are already running the place,and they may value me as an exploitable resource even after I cast my vote. They can't be worse than these clowns running about now.