A new Pew Report tells us that Americans think that the rich got the biggest benefits — government handouts — after the collapse of financial markets in 2008. That’s my perception, too.
The banker class — including, perhaps focusing on, financial intermediaries on Wall Street — sure made out like the proverbial banditti, many of whom had their fortunes handed back to them after they lost billions and billions in 2008 and 2009.
Other programs bailed out Big Auto, to the advantage of stockholders and managers and union workers, but not to the discernible advantage of consumers or creditors or the bulk of non-union workers.
And yet, consider the extent to which government intervention in the labor market — including tax breaks, mortgage re-deals, and extended unemployment insurance — “helped” middle class and lower middle class workers and families. These programs had huge consequences, leading hordes to forego (hard-to-find) paid work for (comparatively easy-to-find) paid inactivity.
Americans are split on the lesson to be drawn from what they perceive as “scant signs of recovery” and government’s apparent lack of interest in “helping the poor”:
Although Americans were worried about the economic system, they remain starkly divided over federal regulations to control it. Nearly half thought that government regulation of markets did not go far enough, while almost as many said government regulation had already gone too far.
I’m in the latter camp. Government as Big Brother Bailout for businesses and families and individuals seems to just scuttle the necessary reshuffle our economy needs.
We don’t need more of the wrong response. We need less.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Equal Bailouts?”
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” — Benjamin Franklin
In my neighborhood the majority who were unemployed four years ago are still unemployed. Those who closed their businesses, still have closed businesses, those who were forced into bankruptcy are still dealing with job posts that state if they filed bankruptcy do not bother to apply, and some who landed a good job, lost it due to their new employer loosing work that was due to the Obama admin attacking the coal industry, an industry that is shutting down. That ripple effect is felt in jobs across the nation.
The apology money forced on the mortgage lenders to be paid for their bad behavior was a pittance to my neighbors compared to how it damaged their lives. Obamacare has caused a grocery store that is part of a national chain to cut their long time employees hours from FT to PT under a union, they had to seek out a 2ndd PT job with no benefits to keep their total income at FT level, the grocery store hired more PT employees. So no I do not see that there is a fair balance or better outcome for my neighbors in these times we live in. Lots of fear like I have ever witnessed. Fear of circumstances out of their control.
.… (it’s) my perception, too, that the bankers, perhaps focused on financial intermediaries on Wall Street, made out like the proverbial banditti .…
Small wonder.
Given that as the primary “drug” crime, Prohibition, has for decades already, put all of the world’s wealth in the hands of corrupting politicians, of corrupted bureaucrats and of the rest of the world’s most evil men and that those most evil men have parlayed their ill-gotten gains into their ownership, operation and control, effectively, of every branch of government (or in the case of Singapore’s Harry Lee & Co — of the whole damned “country”) — and, actually, of every one of the major institutions — small wonder that they dipped into the United States Treasury to bail out their cohorts, cronies and co-conspirators, first along its length and then from one end of Wall Street — and — via AIG et al — all the way around the world — to the other!
The Wall Street Gang made out like banditti ’cause that’s what banditti, do!
Brian Richard Allen
“Although Americans were worried about the economic system, they remain starkly divided over federal regulations to control it.”
Asking average Americans’ opinions about economics and government policy is equivalent to asking them whether the biochemical processes in mitochondria would do better with external regulation: they don’t know enough to form an opinion.
.… Asking “average Americans’” opinions about economics and government policy is equivalent to asking them whether the biochemical processes in mitochondria would do better with external regulation: they don’t know enough to form an opinion .…
Seems you may be confusing “average Americans” with the Economics illiterates who pose as government “economists” and as Treasury employees, more generally.
Average Americans are much cleverer than those and know damned well that we don’t want and that we are Constitutionally protected from the imposition of “external regulation” of our economy by ignoramus-politician-empowered self-anointing and appointing stumblebum bureaucrats, whose helter-skelter imposition of burdens makes clear that as “economists” they may as well be budding biochemists.