When Greed Isn’t Good
January 27th, 2008 | by Omnipotent Poobah |I’m not sure whether to be worried or not, but I found myself agreeing with Mike Huckabee this week. For a man who thinks the planet was created last week, he’s remarkably astute about the stimulus package both parties are currently flogging.
The Huckster hit the nail on the head when he said that we’ll go hat-in-hand to China and borrow the money to fund the tax rebates. The folks who qualify for the rebates will then spend it on something frivolous, like food or clothing. They’ll run down to the local Walmart and buy Chinese-made underwear or toxin-laced tomatoes.
Simply Stimulating
The plan has other “stimulating ” facets too. While the bipartisan boneheads are throwing a sop to the lower income segment, they’re also making sure corporations get a big chunk of the pie. These would be the same corporations that loaned money to people using oxygen for collateral, or that have moved all their production to China, or both.
The mortgage meltdown was obvious to anyone who ever balanced a checkbook long before the astronomical ly paid investment bankers and their equally greased clientele woke up to it. Somehow they missed the Economics 101 lecture about the inadvisabili ty of loaning money to people who can’t pay it back. And while the saga unfolded, the C-student from Yale stood by not only insisting that things were just fine, but refusing to regulate a market completely unwilling to regulate itself. At least Alan Greenspan, had the good manners to call the equally unregulated Clinton markets “irrationall y exuberant”.
In their bipartisan zeal to buy votes with $600 rebates and corporate welfare, our economic establishmen t is continuing to miss the boat. We continue to sell everything that isn’t nailed down to other countries and continue to lose high-paying jobs to those same countries or their outsourcing subsidiaries . Then, we crow about all the burger-flipp ing careers we’ve created. And now, we’re borrowing their money to give back to them with a hefty markup. It’s no wonder the rest of the world looks at us like a gaggle of drunken sailors loading up on cheap hookers and grog before the next cruise. ATTENTION SAILORS! NO PAYMENTS UNTIL 2009!
Greed is Good…Sometim es
By and large capitalism is a good thing, but it’s guiding principle is greed. As Gordon Gecko said, “greed is good“, but only to a point. I firmly believe in as little regulation as possible and I have nothing against companies making money - it is, after all, what they do. But when an industry fails to regulate itself and their poor judgment threatens to suck the rest of us down the hole with them, it’s time to be the adult and slap the little shits silly in order to gain control of their “irrationall y exuberant” behavior.
Clearly our current Daddy-in-Chi ef isn’t going to do it. He’s the most irrational and exuberant of the bunch. The pusillanimou s Congress sure isn’t doing it, or anything else for the matter. The gaggle of candidates aren’t showing any sign they’ll do it either. Hell, even the countries who own everything except our crap-stained skivvies aren’t doing it. Everyone just keeps borrowing money from each other even though they know there’s no way anyone can pay it back.
Hey, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?
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Tags: Contributors , BIO, President Bush, Economics, capitalism, Ben Bernanke, Taxes, bring it on, economics, omnipotent poobah, politics, stimulus package, subprime lending
