Bailout Manure Heap!

About: the end of wall streets boom - national business news - print - portfolio.com

The trouble is none of the stimulus is going to make much in the way of instant jobs nor lower CC interest rates nor fix the financial institutions which are broken on a permanent basis. Tax cuts, & incentives to business is the best bet. The about link (recommended by a daily KOS blog) provides an answer as to where all the money went in the real estate market. (It was never there in the first place!).

RS via GW says that it is a bad idea to sink "money" into land & housing as that is not real capital. Capital should circulate & provide the wherewithal to make & sell goods & services. Capital sunk into the ground does nothing - it is of no value until someone does something with it. The companies, new & old producing useful products that can compete on the foreign & domestic market should be encouraged

with any stimulus. Just spending money as fast as you can will just build a huge debt that acts like a tax on future generations. The ~800 billion stimulus becomes 1.2 trillion with the interest on that debt which has to be paid back by we tax payers current & future.

1/30 - I guess I don't have to spend nights looking through the stimulus pork bill since a google search yields ~ 6,120 articles on the subject!

2/7 - I thought it appropriate that we look at the term slush fund which is appropriate for the so-called bailout of ~ $$$$80billion.

Wikipedia: ... The term "slush fund" was originally a nautical term; the slush referred to the fat or grease that was obtained by boiling salted meat, the sale of which could then be used to provide the crew with special luxuries. The money obtained from this sale was placed into the so-called 'slush-fund'. [1]

... the Wikipedia is interesting in other details - please readit. If you google slush fund you get ~272,000 links but answers.com in brief says:

source: ... A fund raised for undesignated purposes, especially: A fund raised by a group for corrupt practices, such as bribery or graft.

... If you think that I am miss-labeling this than think that a large portion is not designated with specific targets in mind nor numbers of jobs saved/created. It is not appropriated in the legal sense of the term. Secondly, members of Congress have been urged to pass the bill without extensive review of the details. Therefore it is a slush fund!

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Mark de LA says

M 2009-01-28 21:52:52 11360

In case you are need help going to sleep

http://readthestimulus.org/ which you can search.

google stimulus pork !!

Mark de LA says

... the bailout piggies circulate like buzzards

Mark de LA says

$335,000,000 FOR STD PREVENTION IN ECONOMIC STIMULUS BILL - This might stimulate something, but not jobs & the economy except perhaps prostitution which probably needs no stimulus in Washington DC.

Here is a contest to find some of the other goodies & pork in the bill - win $100 - the manure is here.

Mark de LA says

Again, a picture saves words:

Mark de LA says

source: ...

President Obama pressed the Senate to move quickly on his massive economic-stimulus plan, saying Saturday that Americans "have little patience" for political bickering and noting that while the bill isn't perfect, it can jump-start job creation.

... The stimulus package should differentiate itself from a giant political slush fund by assigning line by line (or item by item) how many jobs are targeted to be created by each expenditure. When/if it is passed then those items which fail to meet their targets assigned by the spending bill within a targeted amount of time should be removed from any future funding or consideration.

That's my idea of real accountability.

Tax cuts for small, medium & large businesses should be handled similarly. The good thing about tax cuts is that they produce immediately & don't cause more expenses to cut checks & determine who gets them (filtered by political payoffs). If tax cuts fail to produce the activity desired they expire! One could also include the bailout of banks & financial institutions in a similar way. It a bank begins to increase loaning money then it is a valid bailout target; otherwise let it fail.

Mark de LA says

The trend line for tax cuts: 300 --> 275 --> 212 --> 182 (billion$) see this article in TIME.

Mark de LA says

Pelosi Lies through her teeth!!!

How can anyone possibly believe anything she says at all? Gross partisanship & exaggeration is all you find at http://www.speaker.gov/ . P.S. you should probably be aware that there are only ~ 300,000,000 Americans today.

Mark de LA says

I knew I would have a use for this cartoon:

credit

Seth says

Well i'm not a Pelosi fan either; but it's kind of funny watching you and Matt Drudge hyperventilate over what's no more significant than a typographic error.

One wonders when, if ever, Republican style hyperpartisansip is going to change and start parsing out what makes real differences - like for example "subsidizing equity holders in insolvent banks" rather than just letting them fail and be replaced by healthy ones. It seems to me that standing up for real capitalism, even when it hurts, would be a good place for Republicans to start getting serious. Ask yourself why this is not happening? Seems to me it is not the "warm bodies" who are looting the country ... rather it is the wall street mentality who have invented the concept "too big to fail" and are now taking it to the bank (pun intended).

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-02-04 11:13:34 11360

It's not so much the error as that she could believe that unemployment was that much. I guess when you are dealing with trillians - a billion or two one way or the other is just pocket change. The crisis mentality in washington is what is hyperventillating the $$$$$ out of your pocket & mine in taxes current & future. I think that future historians will note that the crisis was a lot less than the hype needed for liberals to socialize US all. Blame Wall St. is the Obama way. Read Pelosi's site & wonder who the hyperpartisan really is!

Mark de LA says

Too big to fail is a Democrat talking point to get the TARP slush funds, not mine. I would let them fail.

Mark de LA says

I should point out that Drudge was rather kind in his headline - whoever posted it titled it as Nancy Pelosi: Dumber than Soap

Seth says

M 2009-02-04 12:10:06 11360

Too big to fail is a Democrat talking point to get the TARP slush funds, not mine. I would let them fail.

Well its not at all true that "too big to fail" is a Democrat talking point. Politicians like Paulson started using that back when they invented the TARP. I know the Obama administration is continuing with the assumption that taxpayers must fix the banking problem which arose because banks did not prudently manage their risks. But some banks did and if the big banks that have all these toxic assets are allowed to fail, then that banking business will just go to those banks who can survive. If we want to put capital into banks, put it in those healthy banks that can lend it out in 10 to 1 ratios. Too bad that the bad bankers who risked their capital will loose all of their wealth - but why should I pay for their mistakes? True, nobody in the new administration or even in the republican Congress is talking that way ... or if they are they are, they are so marginalized that nobody is listening. I just wish that there was some serious discussion of letting these bad banks fail as the solution to their toxic assets.

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-02-04 14:02:57 11360

M 2009-02-04 12:57:07 11360

There was a lot of Obama consulting in the TARP mess setup. I should also like to see those who started the mess by encouraging, demanding, requiring lending to those who could not pay for it to loose their spots in government & help pay for restitution of the Tarp FUNDS. Barny Frank would be #1 on my list. The heads of Fanny Mae & Freddy Mac should roll as well as those who help cause their behavior. Maybe even ACORN.

Oh yeah, by all means don't let challenging assumptions distract you from repeating last year's talking points.

You & B. Hussein Obama like to sweep shit under the table by calling shit "old news". Some day you will step in a great big brown stinky pile of Huffington when you least expect to. Almost everyone these days wants to "move on" & forget accountability in the rear view mirror.

Mark de LA says

I was looking for some way to tag BHO's continual urgency on the non-stimulating bill - First a couple of cartoons: (urgency is what puts the con in congame).

Mark de LA says

Then some context provided by Krauthammer :

source: ...

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."

-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

...&...

ibid: ...

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

...

well said!

Mark de LA says

M 2009-02-06 09:34:34 11360

The Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) own review of the non-stimulating pckage"

source: ... CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

...

the link is here for the source.

Mark de LA says

M 2009-02-07 06:57:57 11360

NPR: ...

As it stands now, says David Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general, the bill appears to have no mechanism for directing spending. It's left up to those state and local officials, who may or may not have the ideas or the means to spend it appropriately. And that will lead to "a series of disappointments that it's too late to do anything about," Walker says.

The bill does make it possible for lawmakers and the public to track the money ��" but only after it's spent. And that, he says, will lead to bad surprises.

...no CHANGE here! Maybe that's something to ask at a presidential news conference. It appears to me that the now ~ $$$$800 billion dollar bill really is a slush fund & not an appropriation - something directed specifically to create jobs &/or stimulate business (except that of the governments).

Mark de LA says

MR 2009-02-23 09:41:41 11360

a corroborating point of view:

source: ...

How do we square the double standard in reporting required of Chrysler and GM, whose combined request is in the range of $40 billion, with the inability of even a pit bull like U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, to get answers as to exactly where and to what end the TARP money has gone?

It may be that the situation on Wall Street is so complex, and the stakes so high, that lawmakers themselves have little confidence in their abilities to map a successful recovery for the industry, so they are relying on the sheer magnitude of their spending and the ingenuity of those left standing on Wall Street to work their market magic and revive the economy.

...

shame on this government

So, after all that restructuring & closings will the emerging auto companies still be too big to fail? Will they be solvent?

ibid: ...

The bad news: it won't happen until late in President Obama's first term, if at all, and in the meantime they will eliminate at least 50,000 jobs this year alone, close even more plants than previously announced and discontinue several of their most recognizable lines of cars.

...

Bailout Manure Heap!

About: the end of wall streets boom - national business news - print - portfolio.com

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