What if we let them all fail?

I'm definitely not an expert in macroeconomics, I'll be honest there. But I do research what's going on the floor of Congress and am fairly informed about the bills. I'd like to hear a compelling argument about what would happen if we did not bail everyone out instead of blindly passing this quickly while giving the bankers unchecked power.

As far as infowars.com, I do check that site regularly for the articles that aren't always available in mainstream media. Do you have any comments as to the validity of that site and its articles?

 

Infowars is the site for that insufferably obnoxious fringe paranoid conspiracist Alex Jones.

If you find his delusional rantings as anywhere in the neighborhood of credible, well, you have lost all credibility.

 

Are you smarter than a 5th grader?

Any kid will tell you if you steal money out of your mom's purse to buy candy for all the kids in the neighborhood you will be popular until you finally are caught and take your whipping.

Now when the kids start demanding the candy and they threaten to beat you up if you don't get more and more candy, you probably aren't smart enough to stand up and do what is right, cause you weren't smart enough in the first place.

So you end up going along like it will all turn out good somehow in the end.

Good luck with your bailouts. Govt. spending. and other forms of stealing, errr I mean borrowing more taxpayer money.

 

You sound well informed about this guy, which of his pieces or quoted associated press articles on his site can you point to as being delusional ratings?

 

rhester im fed up with your insistence upon using basic common sense. I need my CNN and Fox news to tell me everything will be okay and that bailing out failed companies with no oversight or regulation is a good thing!

 

what would happen is you would see a huge downturn in the economy, unemployment would skyrocket, spending would go way down, and you wouldn't be able to get a loan for a while until the economy re-invented itself.

Bad news. That's why they're doing it. I don't think anyone disagrees about that.

I think what people are concerned about is all of that stuff is going to happen EVENTUALLY anyway, and if you start bailing everyone all you are doing is making the situation much worse and much longer and more painful 1 or 2 years from now.

 

yeah the point is we're going to see it anyway, why throw good money after bad?

 

Not to mention once that starts happening, crime starts to go up, and then the govt. will have to pay for more prisons, trials, police, and at what point is it more efficient to avoid the increased crime and use the money to bolster the economy now.

Of course the way it was handled initially with the lack of oversight was horrible. There needs to be oversight, and accountability.

 

Bailouts are somewhat necessary because in a country as big and democratic as ours, we have to prioritize relative economic stability and parity to an equal or greater extent than aggregate growth.

 

Congress is debating an amendment to the auto bailout that will require banks to certify how they used their TARP bailout money on their 10Ks.

I love this.

 

Looks like the amendment is going to pass rather easily ... perhaps unanimously.

 

what exactly does this mean?

 

Trying to force some transparency into the system, since every time Paulson and Kashkari show up on capitol hill and are asked "so what happened to the money you gave Bank X, why didn't they use it to lend to people?" they respond with "we can't comment on the details of X, they have their own regulator, blah blah blah."

If this bill passes with the amendment then the banks that get TARP funds have to say that they used the money to fund X amount of loans and whatever other commercial activities they do, and if they didn't, they would have to explain why. And since the 10-K/8K is a publicly available document, we get transparency by force.

 

Btw, the bill just passed the house.

Vote was extremely partisan -- most Republicans voted no, almost all democrats voted yes.

*sigh*

 

Any GOP backers want to justify this? I wonder if Bush is still in a position to veto it?

It is a strange game with the GOP. Railing against the bailout often, but now voting to let the banks do whatever they want with the money with no publicity.

 

The bill he's talking about is the car company bailout, not the transparency thing - that was just an amendment.

 

I will admit that some of his issues are valid concerns but his presentation and personality destroy the message.

We used to have fun laughing at his cable access show in Austin for years.

Have you seen it?

It was unintentionally hilarious.

 

Valid concerns? Like the Frost Bank building bearing an "owl" as a symbol of the secret Illuminati plot to control the world?

Our hero enters at the 1 minute mark:

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I looks like in the Senate they won't approve it unless the UAW makes some concessions. I haven't agreed with the republicans on much lately but I do agree with them on this. The workers for the big three are making way too much money and are getting way too many perks when their companies are failing. Everyone needs to make sacrafices if this is going to work.