Now we're told it's "beyond our means" to live as well as we did in 1969. There's a word for that, but it's not printable.
6. Our problems aren't anybody's fault.
This fallacy might be called the "Sh*t Happens" school of economic thinking. It says that the economy just crashes from time to time, recurrent and unavoidable disasters just like earthquakes.
But we avoided these crises for decades by regulating Wall Street and prosecuting crooked bankers. When we stopped doing those things we got another crisis.
Cause and effect.
7. Banks paid back what they owed us from the bailout.
Here's why this is a fallacy: First, we don't have a full accounting even now. Second, we're still responsible for the enormous amount of toxic risk which Wall Street created and the government then assumed on its behalf.
Besides, that's not how business works. Every major bank in this country was a failing business with intolerable risk exposure. Loans under those conditions are of enormous and inestimable value.
When you ask nothing in return -- not partial ownership, not a percentage of the profits, not even an end to their criminal behavior -- you're giving away the store. And when you give those loans to serial crooks and cheaters -- people who serially cheat you -- people, you've been had.
8. Wall Street-ers didn't commit any crimes -- or they're too hard to prosecute.
Which gets us to our next fallacy, or fallacies. There's overwhelming evidence, and a mound of billion-dollar settlements, demonstrating that banks -- and individual bank executives -- broke laws over and over in the run-up to the current crisis.
These mountains of prima facie evidence were ignored, and continue to be ignored, by the Obama/Holder Justice Department.
Now we've learned that all the banks knowingly defrauded regulators in a LIBOR scandal. All of them!
LIBOR is like one of those Agatha Christie novels where all the suspects did it.
9. "Ideologues" are getting in the way of "bipartisan" and "technocratic" solutions to our problems.
This is another fallacy -- one they've been using to sell unwise, unpopular, and unfair policies. It's usually attached to billionaire-funded corporate agendas like those of the "Simpson Bowles" plan, the Democratic group called Third Way, and the corporate CEOs of "Fix the Debt."
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