Mar 10 2009
We Can “Change” Course
 
Words of wisdom from the very liberal Jim Cramer:
It’s time to get serious. It’s time to take the issue from the pundits and from the left and right, and put it where it belongs: serious non-ideological debate to put out the real firestorm, the collapse of the economy from Wall Street to Main Street and the ensuing Great Wealth Destruction for all.
But if it stays ad hominem, we will all be betrayed and the train wreck will become inevitable.
No more wishing we continue down the path to ruin. Now is the time to not hope for failure, but a time to  hope a sufficient number of people realize we need another ‘change’ from the liberal/Obama policies. An we need to hope that a sufficient number of people can pull together to oppose Obama and the liberals. Which means ending the demagoguery and starting to make compromises and alliances.
And the potential to avoid the train wreck is there:
Democratic leaders in Congress did not expect much Republican support as they pressed President Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda. But the pushback they are receiving from some of their own has come as an unwelcome surprise.
As the Senate inches closer to approving a $410 billion spending bill, the internal revolt has served as a warning to party leaders pursuing Obama’s far-reaching plans for health-care, energy and education reform.
This not the time for “I told you so“, it is time for “Let’s work together and fix this mess” before even more damage is done. Â Too many responsible and innocent Americans have suffered already. Leadership is different from sniping from the sidelines.
Update: According to the Washington Post we are now supposed to pity the fools who are bungling the recovery?
Pity Barack Obama’s economic advisers. The blogs are now demanding their scalps, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and his colleagues face a nasty dilemma: There are no solutions to the banking crisis without extraordinary political and financial risks. Thus, they have adopted a three-pronged approach, delay, delay, delay, in the hope that somebody comes up with a breakthrough.
Here’s the problem: Today’s true market value of the U.S. banks’ toxic assets (that ugly stuff that needs to be removed from bank balance sheets before the economy can recover) amounts to between 5 and 30 cents on the dollar. To remain solvent, however, the banks say they need a valuation of 50 to 60 cents on the dollar. Translation: as much as another $2 trillion taxpayer bailout.
That kind of expensive solution could send the president’s approval rating into a nose dive. Consider: $2 trillion is about two-thirds of the tax revenue the federal government collects each year.
Emphasis mine. Maybe the klutzes should have thought of that before they rushed through the pork laden Spendulus bill, which would have covered about half of this problem. Now we have $1 trillion of wasted money going to useless projects that won’t create jobs for another year at least, and we have no more money in the treasury to deal with the core problems. The chart below is the massively insane deficit spending without the banking bailout:
Why should we pity such gross incompetence?
For this administration the recover is secondary. They need and desire the crisis to exploit and distract while they pass their massive systematic changes.
If they worked the recovery it would result in less pressure to accept their ‘fixes’.
The only possible justification for waiting to address this is the hope that some of these assets will become more valuable with time, and thus less expensive to fix.
Unfortunately for Obama, the opposite is happening, and the assets are becoming less valuable. This means that what is a $2 trillion problem today will be $3 trillion problem in 6 months and a $4 trillion problem in a year, if nothing is done.
This is why a solution now is so critical, no matter the negative consequences. The long term consequences of doing nothing are far, far worse.
Well, this guy at Bloomberg seems to have come to the same conclusions I did a couple of weeks ago. It feels so validating to see someone else independently reach the same conclusions as ones own.
So we should pity the fools eh….I guess the blame rests with the real nitwits who elected obvious incompetents and forced them into these cush government jobs. At this point the only role government has is to protect me from my fellow nitwit Americans. Those who voted for this change are now forced to realize that not only does the vision of the future that was painted was pure BS for which there was never a realistic plan…how can such idiots be expected to fix real short term problems. I can hear it now…”Ooops my bad”. Others refer to these moanings as opinion polls. When will responsible adults take charge in our government and stop even referring to opinion polls as a way to govern….the result is unqualified government by real criminals. I prefer Mr T’s method of pitying the fools….
Another Obama appointment evaporates.
Nominee for National Intelligence Crackpot Charles W. Freeman Jr. has asked that his nomination be withdrawn.
At least the market went up today, with a report of actual profits from Citigroup.
Maybe the economy will recover in spite of these guys.
Pelosi is already talking about a second stimulus bill. I don’t think this is going to go over very well with the people.
Oh, man … this is getting bad. There is a G20 summit coming up. Important global economic stuff. Nobody at Treasury is even answering the phone when other governments are calling to coordinate things ahead of the summit.
Wasn’t Obama talking about how much he would work in concert with our allies? It appears that he wants to be the conductor and not so much an consensus player. If nobody can reach us ahead of time, it looks like someone is expecting them all just to take whatever we decide should be when the time for the summit arrives.
This isn’t good.
The rumblings of consternation from the global elites *and* the American political elites, left and right, are becoming a steady drumbeat. This is not good at all.
The great irony is that a stimulus bill focused on jobs is desperately needed right now. That’s what the first bill was SUPPOSED to be, but Pelosi and Reid turned it into a pork laden farce that will do absolutely nothing for jobs instead. Only $200 billion will actually be spent this year, when ALL of it should have been spend within 6 months – if your real goal was to stimulate the economy, that is.
But because they poisoned the well, this government is not going to be able to stimulate jobs at precisely the time they are supposed to, because the support isn’t there any more and the coward-in-chief won’t have the nerve to take a truly unpopular decision.
Even knowing all about history, this administration is still going to make the same mistakes that Hoover did in ’30 and ’31.
AJ:
“Only $200 billion will actually be spent this year, when ALL of it should have been spend within 6 months”
I’ve seen variations of this kind of comment before. Wasn’t one of your criticisms of the stimulus bill the fact that the US gov’t could not possibly spend that much money in a short amount of time, because of bureaucratic constraints?
If so, are you comfortable with these two complaints being made at the same time:
1) The stimulus bill is bad because the money isn’t being spent fast enough.
2) The stimulus bill is bad because it’s impossible for the gov’t to spend the money fast enough.
Shouldn’t you at least pick one line of criticism, and stick with it?