Quote:It's beautiful that GM was able to turn around. That doesn't mean we should have financed it. Ford accepted no government help and has managed a remarkable recovery completely on its own.
Ford was in much better shape than GM to begin with, so it's not a fair comparison. I'll never understand why conservatives hate the government so much, it's effective, works, and does many things as well or better than the private sector. Both sides are important.
Quote:Even if the bailout is a short-term success, it lays down a bad precedent for large corporations in America. They can operate with the assumption that there will be a government safety net to catch them if they falter badly. And, if enough falter badly at once, it could be catastrophic in too many ways to count.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the financial reform legislation as passed, I think that they should have done something about the biggest banks... because you are right, if we have another problem we'll need to bail them out again because they are "too big to fail" and this reform bill did absolutely nothing to really control their size. We used to have laws that restricted what banks could do, and dropping those laws was one of the major causes of the housing bust. It's really too bad that we aren't fully bringing them back, but sadly the banking industry has far too many powerful lobbyists to get any such bill through Congress.
The idea in the bill that companies now have a structure for being taken apart if they're in trouble is good, though. It should reduce both bailouts and problems -- but in some cases, there's no option except spending money to save something. Doing nothing, as Republicans want to do, is one of the worst things you can be doing in a recession.
Quote:People have to spend money in the economy. The government spending money, even to infuse the economy, doesn't work the same way, because the government doesn't have any real money to spend--it's over thirteen trillion dollars in debt.
When you're in a recession, debt doesn't matter much. Worry about that again when you're out of the recession and can afford to. When you're still in it though, you cannot pay attention to that, because that only leads down the path of greater recession, as we've seen time and time again as "fiscal responsibility" efforts undermine recoveries and turn countries instead into prolonged recessions or worse.
Our debt does matter -- but the recession matters more.
Of course, we have that debt mostly because of the cut-taxes-and-raise-spending economic "policies" of Reagan and the Bushes, and the current Republican party advocates continuing Bush II's economic policies, so their entire "point" is a complete joke, but you expect that kind of thing in politics.
Quote:I don't know. I don't think we have any Republicans left here anymore.
There's a subtle, but important, difference between being 'against creating jobs' and 'not believing in the idea that legislation is capable of creating jobs'. The only way jobs can be created is if signs of economic stability and consumer spending stabilize long enough that companies begin to think about expanding their operations instead of contracting them. You simply cannot create this effect artificially. The very concept of a 'jobs bill' is an absurdity. It'd be like trying to legislate a cure for cancer or the creation of Darunia's Martian base: You can legislate all you want, but the only way either of these things will ever happen is if all the required enabling factors exist beforehand. I'd be against these bills too, and it's not because I think cancer is awesome or that space bases should never exist.
I'll never understand how people can hate government so much... Opposition to the concept of government like you do there is ridiculous.
Here's a question -- Why are companies any more legitimate than governments? If government spending somehow isn't "real", why is corporate spending? I don't see it.
The only difference between what you just said and mainstream Republican thought is that they usually try to cover up that horribly stupid stuff with lies about how much they actually care about people. The ones who don't, like Sharon Angle, usually lose -- who'd vote for someone who promises to do nothing to economically help the state they represent?
Because, no matter how much the far right wishes it, government exists, isn't going away, and has many vitally important functions. The US government today has become almost entirely paralyzed by the Republican party's do-nothing, kill-everything approach to "government", and it would be so incredibly tragic if the American people reward them for it in November...
I mean, the current Republican plan for the economy is to do nothing and "allow" the economy to fix itself. That's so utterly absurd that it's pretty depressing that they're getting anywhere with it. People are angry about the economy, that certainly makes sense. But Republicans have no plan to make anything better.
Of course, congressional Republicans actually have an even lower approval rating than congressional Democrats, so it's not all great for them, at least.
But really, the core fact is, jobs bills create jobs. The big rescue bill last year, for instance, that was supposed to create or save millions of jobs, did exactly that. Every analysis of the bill agrees with that fact. That people actually go out there and say anything else isn't fact, it's fiction, and it's putting ideology first and only, actual truth never.
Disagree with the concept of the government spending money to help people all you want, that's your right no matter how absurd it is, but you can't disagree with the fact that that spending creates jobs. You're talking about far-right ideology and then acting like it is somehow economic reality, while the facts, if anyone cares to look them up, make it immediately clear how wrong that is.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010...king-cash/
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/8...g-and-wait
http://iowagop.blogspot.com/2009/02/gras...shows.html (complaining that jobs cost too much is admitting that jobs are going to be created)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/0...0683.shtml
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, there are a million such links.
Quote:The very concept of a 'jobs bill' is an absurdity.
I can't even begin to understand this statement, it's utter nonsense in every possible way...
Quote:You can legislate all you want, but the only way either of these things will ever happen is if all the required enabling factors exist beforehand.
That is not true when the bill spends money to create those jobs. If the government is giving companies money to create jobs and improve the economy, enough companies are going to find a way to support it that those jobs will be created.
Quote:I'd be against these bills too, and it's not because I think cancer is awesome or that space bases should never exist.
So you want the Libertarian dreamworld, a place of perfect anarchy or something like that? The real world doesn't work that way... and NASA is an incredibly great value for the money, we should be spending much, much more on space. It's an utter disgrace that we have no real competent plan for the future of our space program right now. The government is simply better at huge, incredibly expensive, and questionably cost-returning projects like that... companies need to think of the bottom line first, and always make a profit, but countries aren't so restricted. Of course too much losses is bad (you need to increase revenues too, not just expenditures), but companies and countries are not directly comparable. Both are important, and are less without the other...
I mean, companies can complain about government all they want, but they're pretty thankful when the government does something they see as good, like raise tariffs to save a fading industry, bail out a failing company, give them contracts to help out their company, etc, etc...
Getting back to the space program though, if the government didn't have a space program, no private company would, not like the one we have. Look at private space companies today, it's all just about small satellite launches, preliminary plans for short space flights, etc. The big, ambitious plans? No company with the money wants to risk that much, unfortunately. It's quite sad that even the government doesn't really seem to want to anymore. NASA is seriously underfunded, it's no wonder it's got no decent plan for the future.
(Maybe if we hadn't started as many wars we'd have more money to spend on other things that are of greater value...)