Voter's remorse, like buyer's remorse, is what you feel when you get home and find you're no better off than you were before. Only with voter's remorse, there is no 30-day return policy. There is no customer service window where a rational person can lodge any kind of complaint. And you can't even expect to reduce your losses by pawning your unwanted acquisition off on someone else. Or even to someone who might actually want what you've got. Because with voter's remorse, there's only one shopping day every two, four, or six years.
The government is a monopoly, so it has no competitive incentive to be efficient in any way. Well, your local ones do. You could always move away to a place that's more to your liking. But the federal government, they have you no matter where you go. Its almost as if you have to be financially capable of relocating your family out of the country, in order for your opinion to matter to anyone in DC or on TV.
Monday, the House stood up for the people they're presumed to represent every day they're there, by voting down the Billionaire Bailout Bill. Or the Papa Paulson plan, or whatever you want to call it.
Tuesday, the news channels couldn't stop repeating the now-tired 'something must be done, and this is something' routine, reassuring us that now we just have to get it to pass Congress and the good business owners on Main Street won't have to suffer the tight credit situation that Wall Street's bad decisions have caused.
Wednesday, the Senate voted on and approved the Bailout. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but according to the Constitution, all spending bills are supposed to originate in the House. Of course, since the folks in DC who are asking for this bill are the same ones who've been appointing judges for a good while, they can probably redefine 'spending' so that this doesn't qualify.
Are they so confident in their grasp for power, that they think its inevitable, and they're just trying to lo-ball their offer, in order to pass the bill with a minimum of strings? Well, they did just create $630B out of thin air when the proposal failed on Monday, so maybe it is inevitable. But if they can just create the money anyway without Congress' approval, what were they really asking for? Power, of course. Any new bill they propose will likely serve to reduce their responsibility to Congress, and hence, the taxpayer.
How serious is the situation, really? Did you know that the Corporations whose names are on these junk assets are still paying dividends? If they stopped paying dividends, they could finance half their recovery themselves! So why don't they? Well, if they stopped paying dividends, their rating would necessarily drop, and that's what we're all trying to avoid.
Long ago, we all traded our gold for beans. We did it because everyone else was doing it, and we had to keep up, even though we knew it wasn't the best idea. But since everyone else was going along, we saw our beanstalks value rise in value year after year. Now, our bluff is being called. There is no longer enough loose credit available for us to keep pretending that our beanstalks are worth their weight in gold, even though they're not producing any beans. If you haven't figured it out, the beans are dollars, and beanstalks are bubbles. This time its housing.
So that means, we're being told that $700 Billion is needed right away, in order to keep the stockholders of these failing companies getting their dividends, and preventing their stock rating from being automatically downgraded. After all, top rated paper always pays dividends. Hidden in this audacious request for cash is a request for unchecked authority for the Treasury Secretary, permanently removing any of Congress' limits on the Federal pursestrings. And tell me, if the Executive branch can spend whatever it wants, whenever it wants, on anything it wants, without any oversight, just what does it need the other branches of government for?
I was going to attach a poll, but got errors trying to add responses to the poll. I may try to add it again later.
