From Pine View Farm

Optimism 4

The Booman points to signs of progress:

No, if there is going to be a cure for bipartisanship, it isn’t going to come from the Republicans in the Senate. Their back is already broken, and they know it. All that remains is for them to get used to it.

(Aside: The Booman seems to have a firmer grasp on political reality than do a lot of the ideologues and naysayers. To paraphrase what a friend emailed to me today over something else, there’s a country to save here. It’s time to stop quibbling over commas and semicolons. The Repubs haven’t yet figured out that the great majority of the country is just tuning them out. They’ve shown what they do, and no one wants them to do more of it.)

Now maybe the country can move forward and fix all the problems that the Repubs created.

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4 comments

  1. Bill

    January 27, 2009 at 6:33 am

    “Now maybe the country can move forward and fix all the problems…”

    Well, the current “stimulus” package will not do that. It is what I have come to expect from our elected leaders – a mix of tax cuts, handouts, and pork. The “housing crisis” got us into this mess and only fixing the housing crisis will get us out. Thus far, there has been no meaningful direct help that will keep folks in their homes. We do not need to help developers or home builders, at least not yet. The country does not need any more new homes to sit on the market. While the inventory of existing homes went down from a 11 month supply to a 9 month supply, that was largely due to the decrease in mortgage rates and the increase in the sale of foreclosures and bank-owned homes. “Stimulating” home builders to build new homes would only increase the number of homes on the market and depress sales (and prices) more.

    I favor an approach that would give first-time homebuyers of existing homes a $10,000 tax credit. They must use the home as their primary residence and live in it for at least three years (no flippers or speculators). Also, go to current home owners who are upside down in their mortgages and attempting to make it and directly help them through a program to restructure their mortgages. If that means the government buys down their interest rate and converts their mortgage to a 30 year fixed rate and/or pays off a portion of their loan balance to do it, then do it. While it would pain me to see my tax money used for that purpose, it would be a better use than what I have seen thus far.

    We have wasted enough taxpayer money through the TARP (which appears to have been used to redecorate offices, allowed bigger banks to buy smaller banks, and paid for bonuses) and are now preparing to waste another $800+ billion on a stimulus package that included several hundred million for contraceptives. I went back to my old college macro and micro economic text books and they appear to have missed that portion of economic theory. I have no problem with the government supplying contraceptives to low income folks, but that funding does not belong in an economic stimulus package. Note to Nancy Pelosi, Americans are not dumb enough to believe contraceptives are an economic stimulus – at least I pray they are not.

     
  2. Frank

    January 27, 2009 at 8:53 am

    Contraceptives are a side issue.

    The fuss over them says more about the Republican Party’s perverted obsession with genitalia than it says about public policy.

    Here’s a whole poltical party dedicated to the proposition of peeking up girls’ skirts and glancing sideways at the urinal. Give me a break.

    And what you propose makes a lot of sense–getting money to persons who need it and will use it, rather than to persons who waste oh hell what’s the right word destroy it.

    Frankly, I don’t know–and nobody I’ve read knows–if there is any economic strategy that can work to make things better.

    But what is undeniable is this. More Republicanism will just make things worse.

     
  3. Karen

    January 27, 2009 at 12:07 pm

    Bill & I agree on parts and disagree on parts.

    For the homeowner that’s behind in their mortgage, through no fault of their own (jobs gone, services down) they should have a means of keeping their homes. The flippers or speculators, they can drown in their own mess. The house builders need to find another trade to work at for a period of time.

    As for birth control we differ. In an economy like it is now, when diversions are out of reach for a lot of people, sex is free. Why increase the birth rate, or demands for abortion, when birth control would help put a lid on it? What does it do for the economy for a girl in her late teens or 20’s to get pregnant? Especially if she’s already living below the poverty level. Why add to that? Social Services can’t help her, they’re strapped too. I say: As long as Viagra and the like are included under Medicare or Medicaid, include birth control. (And because of the class of drug that the E.D. treatments are, they are covered under insurance.) Birth control should be. Not just condoms. All of them.

     
  4. Bill

    January 27, 2009 at 12:19 pm

    “And what you propose makes a lot of sense–getting money to persons who need it and will use it…”

    I call it “trickle-up” economics. Government-funded, make-work jobs will not solve the current mess. We did that back in the ’80s with the Job Bill. Didn’t work then, won’t work now. Things will not truly turn around until the housing market is “fixed.” I’ve yet to hear any politician from either party come up with a reasoned approach to doing that. All they can do is throw taxpayer money around (and away).

    We need our political leaders to show leadership. I’ve been impressed by President Obama and equally unimpressed by our esteemed Congress (that is nothing new).

    Our political “leaders,” be they democrats or republicans, simply can’t work to solve our gigantic economic problem without trying to insert their personal pet projects. The issue isn’t contraceptives. The issues are the TARP, the “Bad Bank” to absorb toxic assets, mortgages and housing, unemployment, and the economy in general.

    I said I didn’t care if they give contraceptives away to poor people. Heck, I don’t care if they pay unwed teenage girls not to get pregnant. But funding of contraceptives has nothing to do with economic stimulus and it does not belong in this bill. Our political leaders cannot craft a bill without loading it up with pork. I don’t care whose pork or what pork, it’s pork. I’m willing to bet the economic stimulus package will total $1 trillion before they’re done. And much of it won’t do anything for the broad economy and that should be the objective.