Bailouts, Stimulus, Etc. – What Has The Rush Gotten Us?

Drudge Report has been trying mightily since Saturday to “sell” this story: If there was such a hot rush to pass the stimulus bill, why was President Barack Obama taking the weekend off in Chicago?

What Drudge does is show he’s in the tank for the Republicans when he runs a picture like the one to the left “above the fold” all weekend with the following headline: What’s the rush? ‘Urgent’ stimulus on hold for Obama’s weekend off …

First of all, no president of the U.S. has a “weekend off.” Not even George W. Bush, although some may say he took years off.

This is a potshot – Drudge urging the producers over at Fox News to beat up on the president.

But, despite Drudge’s partisanship, he points out a real problem with Republican and now Democrat management of the U.S. economic crisis.  Our politicians are scaring us silly and ramming TARPs, assorted bailouts and stimulii through the government machine with very little transparency and even less accountability.

Back in the Fall when the Troubled Asset Relief Program, aka $700 billion bailout, was rammed through Congress there was lots of scary talk about meltdowns and companies so big and far-reaching that we couldn’t possibly let them fail.  $350 billion of that bailout went out to the banks and Wall Street.  We still have barely working credit markets.  They’ve loosened up a bit, but nothing much has changed in the past several months.  We also know that a lot of our tax dollars were wasted on bonuses, exorbitant compensation for failing management teams, mergers and acquisitions.

No one really took the time to adequately explain what the risk is in letting AIG or Bank of America fail.  Pols in both parties – who receive lots of wonderful campaign cash from the financial services industry – used words like cataclysmic on Wednesday, hastily wrote a bill over a weekend and passed it the following week.  American workers and the middle class, 0; Wall Street and the investment class, 1.

When there was a bailout needed for GM and Chrysler, Congress and the Bush Administration waited until the last possible moment and then carved out a paltry $18 billion to keep blue collar guys and gals working.  (Actually many of those guys and gals are on temporary layoffs.)

Next came the biggest single government spending bill in history.  About three weeks was spent on the $789 billion economic stimulus bill.  I worked on Capitol Hill during President Clinton’s first term in office.  He came into office on the heels of a recession and proposed a $19 billion stimulus bill.  If memory serves, we spent weeks if not months sweating that thing through both houses of Congress.  Sixteen years later, mere days spent on nearly a trillion dollar baby.

Democrats also left themselves wide open to criticism in their approach to stimulus.  Rather than do it the way I think Obama would have done it – a clean, targeted bill aimed at job creation, that hot mess of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought Hollywood and family planning to the table.  If today’s Republican Party were not so bereft of ideas and such a menace to society, I would say they were right to object.  Instead, I’ll just admit that they’ve got more material for their 2010 campaign commercials.

Here again, what could have been a rational government response to a difficult societal problem became a food fight.  It’s because we rushed it.