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In 2006 (immigration), 2007 (immigration), and now 2008 (bailout), the most significant legislation of the year has failed despite having the support of the administration and the leadership of both parties in the house that defeated it. I don’t know what this means.
Posted by Apollo in Politics
It means that the party leadership and the presidency are massively out of touch with the party rank and file in Congress. The president is term limited; it’s a pity party leadership really isn’t.
Or that the party rank and file in Congress care more about keeping their jobs next term than actually fixing a problem.
One if the things it means you have not correctly identified the leadership.
The leadership is the one the sheep follow–which might not be the one that has the title.
And the leadership that does not understand the problems of the people they want to lead will never be leaders.
And the people who fear for their jobs could be said to trying to represent the people that hired them.
Alternatively, they’re standing up for the free market and populist principles of the American people.
One thing I’ve often pointed out about the Bush administration is that while it has significantly increased the size of government, it has not significantly increased its scope. This bailout marks an increase of government’s scope beyond reckoning and establishes one of the worst imaginable precedents for the future.
We’ve got a serious credit problem in America. Whether it’s the outlandish sums we owe for student loans (Dorothy and I will be six digits in before I take the bar exam; it’s not at all uncommon for people to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and $30k in debt), credit cards, preposterous mortgages on over-valued houses, or a federal government that has produced twelve digits of deficit spending eight years running, with no end in sight. A serious readjustment of our credit habits would be useful, while borrowing another $700 billion to continue the same destructive habits that got us here in the first place would be nothing more than enabling.
What turned the 1929 market crash into a Depression was the flailing actions of a federal government trying to help. In the early 1970s, government efforts to stop inflation and lower unemployment led to a decade’s worth of high unemployment and inflation. I have complete faith in the ingenuity of American businessmen to help themselves out of a crisis, and by doing so to help the country. I have zero faith in the federal government to know enough about what’s going on to take helpful actions.
Mark Steyn: “If the entire global economy is so vulnerable that only the stalwart action of Barney Frank stands between it and ten years of soup kitchens, can it, in fact, be saved?”
My favorite thing I read yesterday was that the equivalent of the entire Indian economy was wipe out yesterday in the US stock markets alone ($1.2 Trillion), and yet that amounted to only 5% of our stock markets. The US economy is so much bigger than anyone can possibly imagine.