Federalist Paupers

On Bailouts

Color me confused. I’m as libertarian as they come. I hate government intervention in the free market, but sometimes, and I believe Ms. McArdle will back me up on this, it may be necessary to forestall total financial collapse. The reports coming out this evening regarding the contentious meetings at the White House over the bailout plan anger me to no end. THIS is the issue that the House Republicans have chosen to take a stand on? They spent like drunken sailors for 6 years on things that are largely unnecessary (like massive prescription drug entitlements) and yet with the potential collapse of the entire financial system on the line, they suddenly find their fiscal conservative balls?

The current crop of Republicans are a massive joke. They deserve the political spanking they are about to receive.

Posted by Jamie in Uncategorized

8 Comments »

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “On Bailouts”

Apollo says:

I read that they put a capital gains tax cut in their proposal. Obviously I’m of the Milton Friedman any-tax-cut-any-time-for-any-reason school, but I’m not sure this was the appropriate time to bring up that issue. They might as well have blown a raspberry at Her Royal Speakerness.

September 26th, 2008 at 1:07 am

Apollo says:

However, I’ll also say this: the House Republican Study Committee contains the last rump of conservatism in Washington. A bunch of blowhard Republican senators (redundant, I know) had been telling Democrats that whatever they agreed to, House Republicans would go along with. It seems that House Republicans weren’t consulted until today, but Pelosi says she won’t pass anything without Republican support.

So there they are, trying to represent their constituents, but being spoken of as a bunch of lackeys by Republicans in the Senate, and being used for political cover by Democrats in the House.

In that situation, perhaps blowing a raspberry at Pelosi actually was the appropriate thing to do. House Republicans don’t have the votes to stop this from happening; they can only withold their approval. If there’s going to be some big government takeover here, that is, at the very least, what I would expect conservatives to do.

And who knows. Pelosi’s demand that the Republicans cover her may be a sign of weakness. There are a lot of red state Democrats hearing from constituents that they don’t like this plan. Maybe the Republicans actually do have enough votes to stop this.

September 26th, 2008 at 1:36 am

Hubbard says:

In fairness to the House Republicans, a great many of the anti-pork and anti-prescription drug benefit congressmen are now the anti-bailout crowd. People like Jeff Flake and Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan have been consistent. Knowing Congress, I suspect that the bill that got killed yesterday had some provisions that deserved killing.

That said, it appears that they’ve forgotten the lessons of the 1995 government shutdown. The House Republicans have picked the wrong hill to die on.

September 26th, 2008 at 8:43 am

Jamie says:

Without knowing the full contents of the legislation I can’t say whether there were any troubling clauses that needed to be removed. Still this smacks of partisans playing a dangerous game when it is least needed.

September 26th, 2008 at 9:41 am

Larry Sheldon says:

“it may be necessary to forestall total financial collapse.”

It is not necessary to add more pork, handouts to ACORN, supply golden ‘chutes, etc.

Golden showers, I say.

September 26th, 2008 at 10:04 am

Apollo says:

If Obama and the Democrats were really trying to funnel money to ACORN, then that bill needed to be killed. That really pisses me off, and puts the capital gain tax cut in perspective. So long as the Democrats are using it as a vehicle to give taxpayer dollars to their friends (especially considering the Democrats who personally raked in millions of dollars from Fannie and Freddie), the House Republicans have my support to obstruct anything they feel like. The Democrats can pass anything they want, but if they’re going to send up crap, they should at least be the ones taking the political hit for it at the polls.

Basic democratic principles here. When there are two parties, and both support the same garbage legislation, who should people vote for? Republicans ought to oppose handouts to community agitators (seriously: wtf?) and if the Democrats are committed to using this crisis to fund their community agitator friends, let them take that in front of the American people. But then let the Republicans give the American people a choice.

September 26th, 2008 at 10:10 am

Asher Zelig Chakansky says:

The government should take the 700 billion dollars and start their own new lending institution.

September 26th, 2008 at 12:12 pm

Jamie says:

Ummm no.

September 30th, 2008 at 4:27 pm