Leftists view conservatives as selfish and greedy. Conservatives view leftists as pompous do gooders who think the masses are too stupid to take care of themselves. The current economic crisis has enough greedy fingerprints and do gooder DNA on it to keep a crime scene investigator busy for a long long time.
Just to be honest, few of us here in small town America understand this mess. It makes no sense to those of us in the Heartland. We understand that we have to pay our bills; our mortgage payments, our car payments, our credit card bills or we will lose our homes, cars etc. We understand that if our law office, convenience store, hardware store, farm, car dealership etc. can't pay its bills then we will have to shut the doors or at least file bankruptcy. Asking the Federal government to bail us out? Yeah right. We wouldn't even consider such a ridiculous idea.
Another thing that makes no sense to us is the idea of the GSE. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were known as government sponsored entities. Supposedly, that means they were privately run but with a guarantee, implicit perhaps, that the Federal government would protect them. Either a company is privately held or it isn't. If you splice a duck with a pig all you get is a bunch of muddy feathers. Private businesses have inherent risks associated with their actions. Apparently, the big dogs at these two CSEs weren't worried about the inherent risks because of the sponsorship of the Federal government. The closest analogy my unsophisticated small town mind can draw is there is no reason for Paris Hilton to worry about driving her car into a telephone pole because Daddy Hilton will cover the bill for any mess.
Another puzzling aspect of all this is the pressure that do gooder groups like ACORN put on do gooder liberals to demand that people with no assets or incomes be eligible for home loans. Here in small town America, we believed that in order to buy or build a home we had to be able to afford that home. Apparently, that is a parochial narrow minded view.
Starting with the Jimmy Carter administration, there has been a move afoot to expand homeownership to deadbeats. Excuse me, lower class individuals who have been denied the American dream by discrimination. There, does that make it sound better?
Do you remember the newspaper headlines about "redlining" from the 1990s? Lending institutions were viewed as discriminatory because they expected to only loan money to those who had enough money to pay the payments. Politicians began getting pressure from community activist groups (ACORN was one of those) and as a result, the Clinton Administration's Justice Department threatened to sue these lending institutions if they refused to change their lending policies. During the Clinton Administration, the Federal Reserve demanded that banks and other sources of loans look at unemployment payments and SSI checks as "income" for purposes of home loans.
What did they think would happen to those loans? Of course these people defaulted. Now, the sophisticated and powerful are shocked. Of course Claude Rains was "shocked" to find gambling going on at Rick's Place in the movie "Casablanca" too.
Now, they want us, small town America, to bail them out. I say "small town America" because a study in 2000 showed that over half of us still live in communities under 25,000 in population. They want us to provide cover for the businesses. They want us to give cover to the deadbeats who didn't pay their bills.
The establishment elites, both right and left, are constantly arguing that small town America isn't bright enough or sophisticated enough to run this country. If you don't believe me check out how similarly a supposed conservative like David Brooks and a kook leftist like Paul Krugman express their disdain for Sarah Palin. The sophisticated elites, both the greedy Wall Street conservatives and the do gooder Northeastern liberals, believe they are smarter than us.
We weren't the ones who made this mess, though, the elites did. It's time for small town America to shake up Washington and inject some small town common sense into their "sophisticated" world.
3 comments:
I disagree on this one, Lone. We need to kick populism to the curb and support the Paulson Plan. Right now, we're too busy being more ANGRY than worried--and it should be the other way around.
I'm not fond of bailing out either the "pirates with neckties" of the banking industry, or the idiots who took out a loan with little knowledge of how to pay for it. Still, I trust Paulson's and Volker's and Buffet's economic expertise more than I do, say Huckabee's, Shelby's or any president of a labor union.
I understand why the labor unions don't like the plan. However, if the GOP truly means what it says about "Country First," then they need to put aside the petty squabbles in the House, as well as the populist outrage against the banks, and support the Paulson plan, which, IMO, is kinda ugly, but more sensible and definitely necessary.
There's an old saying that if you owe the bank $1000, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $1,000,000, you own the bank. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case here.
This whole mess is just another example of why government shouldn't meddle in the market -- ordering banks to make loans to poor credit risks, for example. And people wonder why Republicans don't want the government in charge of our healthcare!
I don't see the Paulson plan as "bailing out the pirates with neckties". they've already abandoned ship with billions in gold bullion. The Clinton/Reno cronies who ran Fannie Mae aground have taken their cash cache and moved on. And half or more of our 401k's and investments with them. McCain could have buried Obama last night with this and the pork stuffed into the bailout bill and the rider Harry Reid buried in it extending the ban on shale oil exploration. 20 cents per dollar for ACORN? McCain, imo, missed a HUGE opportunity. I much prefer Gingrich's idea of loans, buying the mortgages at pennies on the dollar, selling them in a couple of years at a profit and, eventually, we, the taxpayers make a profit instead of losing our shirts. here's a video that needs a lot of passing around, if you haven't yet seen it. the only additional argument I might add to it is that President Bush cited many times about how home ownership was way up during his first term and deserves some blame for taking credit of an untenable situation.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o
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