Although it may be an exercise in futility with our liber Senators, I tried to voice my opinion this morning on my way in to work (I keep my Senator’s and Rep’s phone numbers in my cell phone to call on long trips or when big votes come up) with varying success.
US Senator Herb Kohl (Regional Office 414-297-4451)
Senator Herb Kohl’s voicemail box was unavailable (I assume full) and after 3 attempts I finally spoke to his staff and let them know I oppose the bailout boondoggle in all forms. It’s really just bailing out those who need to be re-elected and I think it will make things worse in the long run.
US Senator Russ Feingold (DC Office 202-224-5323)
I tried 2 times on my way in and got busy signals every time. I tried again at lunch and got a “All Circuits are Busy” message both times. I will probably look up a regional office again.
US Rep Moore (DC Office 202-225-4572)
Even though already voted and they have no planned second vote, I left a message that I didn’t agree with a bailout in any of it’s current forms.
For more office information, call Capital Hill at (202) 224-3121 and write your Congressman and Representative.
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No, I haven’t called to oppose the ECONOMIC RESCUE PACKAGE but I did give up trying to reach any Senator’s office on the phone today as the switchboard was tied up all day long, preventing anyone from reaching a staffer on business.
Luckily for me, as staffers were erasing voicemails from constituents, they still diligently answered their cellphones to attend to business.
Why has the Administration fumbled the PR on this plan? Instead of talking about how a major corrective action is needed to prevent severe problems instead we’re talking about $700b and a “bailout.”
In a perfect world the free market works; in reality intervention is needed in a crisis. Buying up toxic investments benefits not only the men wearing $3000 suits in NYC but also the shareholders of the companies (that’s YOUR 401k) and insulates all Americans from the risks of 15% unemployment.
Alex, that’s the same type of fascistic re-working of the rhetoric I’ve come to expect from the type of people who put together a neo-Nazi video supporting Barack Obama. It is a bailout. You can’t put lipstick on a pig and make it anything but a pig. Didn’t you guys just state that, recently?
Brian,
There’s nothing fascistic about my response. The only reason this bill failed in the House (yet a very similar bill passed the Senate tonight) is because the extremists on right wing talk radio inadvertently sounded the same note as the extremists on moveon, causing a bipartisan bill to be killed on its first pass, allowing so many Members to be able to claim that they voted against it in their re-election ads this month. Do you enjoy hearing conservatives screeching this populist rhetoric?
Yes, this is a “crap sandwich” as Boehner so eloquently put it, but its one that we need to chomp down on if we don’t want to end up swimming in a sea of those sandwiches. No true conservative wants to admit that the market needs intervention — Paulson may not be a conservative but on fiscal issues he’s as sharp a mind as we’ve had in the treasury in our lifetimes. This rescue package is as ideologically unpalatable to him as it is to you and me but sometimes reason needs to trump ideology and this is one of them.
Alex,
Give me ONE example during this decades long debacle when the free market has been allowed to work. It has NEVER been allowed to work.
- Was the free market being allowed to work when Lyndon Baines Johnson created the socialist faux-private enterprises of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which have NEVER been held to the same private-market standards that now-gone entities like Enron and Aurthur Anderson?
- Was the free market being allowed to work when Jimmy Carter – responsible, I’m convinced, for 99% of what’s wrong in today’s world – passed the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks etc. to make loan decisions based not on rational decisions but on social(ist) engineering goals?
- Was the free market being allowed to work during the 1990′s when Barnie Frank and Chris Dodd were getting money hand over fist to NOT perform ANY oversight over monopolistic, illegal activities of Fannie/Freddie (and Boehner as far as Sallie Mae)?
- Was the free market being allowed to work when in 2005 President Bush demanded new reform/regulation but lobby whores Frank and Dodd and everyone else refused to pass anything?
- Is the free market being allowed to work today when we have a worse capital gains / corporate tax rate than places like Sweden?? Eliminate capital gains and watch the liquidity issue disappear. It’s time to compete realistically with China.
WHEN has the free market been allowed to work? It’s purely populist BS to support this bill — it’s not populist to oppose it, it’s to have a strong belief in the power of freedom and the free market. You seem to even admit this by your doubting of the free market’s ability to solve this issue.
Alex and Daniel-
I would ask you to consider the following:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITI.....index.html
Jeffrey A. Miron is senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University. A Libertarian, he was one of 166 academic economists who signed a letter to congressional leaders last week opposing the government bailout plan.
…
The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.
The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.
Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This “moral hazard” generates enormous distortions in an economy’s allocation of its financial resources.
Thoughtful advocates of the bailout might concede this perspective, but they argue that a bailout is necessary to prevent economic collapse. According to this view, lenders are not making loans, even for worthy projects, because they cannot get capital. This view has a grain of truth; if the bailout does not occur, more bankruptcies are possible and credit conditions may worsen for a time.
Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.
Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street’s hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.
So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.
The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer.