All Posts Tagged With: "proposal"

Mike at Okiedoke has a bailout proposal that I can really get behind:

If we leave it to Congress, CEO’s and lobbyists, we will just get evermore bits of amended gobblity-goop that results in endless taxpayer debt to bolster bad business practices.

So here’s my one-size-fits-all, nationwide socialist, U.S. corporate bailout proposal:

1. Remove government subsidies, tax breaks and loopholes for business.
2. Institute basic national single-payer health insurance for workers and families.

The country is going deeper in debt anyway, so wouldn’t it be better to use it to help U.S. companies and give health care to Americans, than just give it to the same people who created the mess?
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Yes we can!

Economist Brad Delong sums up the plan:

The McCain plan is:

• Take $300 billion.
• Pay double current market value to banks that have troubled mortgages on their books, thus:
  • Give a present of $100 billion to the bankers who made the loans.
  • Acquire and regularize the mortgages of only two-thirds as many homeowners as could have been accomplished if the $300 billion were invested wisely.

There’s a big difference here: Democrats want to prevent depression and support the financial markets by investing taxpayer money in banks with troubled assets. Republicans want to give taxpayers money away to the shareholders and managers of banks with troubled assets.

I would say that this is unbelievable, but I do believe it.

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin lamblasts the plan:

He spent the entire debate assailing massive government spending — while his featured proposal of the night was to heap on more massive government spending to pursue home ownership/retention at all costs. If Obama had proposed this, the Right would be screaming bloody murder about this socialist grab to have the Treasury Department renegotiate individual home loans and become chief principal write-down agents for the nation.

Political writer Matt Cooper summed it up this way:

Since maybe as many as 40 percent of the homes in America may be under water–that is, the mortgage is worth more than the home–that’s quite a tall order, one that makes the $700 billion bailout/rescue plan look like bubkes. It’s a stunning nationalization of mortgages, wild in its cost and implications and somewhat bizarre coming from someone who had tried to pare back Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I suspect in the coming days McCain will dial back the plan because it was so outlandishly expensive and such a federal intrusion into the market–not that we’re still worrying about that.

What it shows is that McCain isn’t too old to be president; he’s offering a lot of evidence that he’s too adolescent. He’s impetuous, imprudent. This latest proposal is as wild as the debate-canceling threat from a couple of weeks ago. I think we’re getting a vision of the McCain presidency that’s akin to Elvis firing up the Lisa Marie and taking his posse cross country for peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Every week would be an adventure.

I think we’ve had enough “adolescent,” “impetuous,” “imprudent” adventures for awhile. Given the fact that everything is tanking, we need some grown-up, well-reasoned, steady leadership. Based off the way he has run his campaign and some of the things he has said and done in the last couple of months, there can be little doubt that John McCain is not what we need.

OETA’s Oklahoma Horizon television show featured an Oklahoma lawmaker who “has a tourism-generating dream of turning the Oklahoma oil boom into an iconic landmark rivaling the Eiffel Tower.”

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I think it’s a pretty interesting idea. It would certainly be a distinctive landmark and it very well could prove to be a tourist attraction. But I wonder how that thing would handle an Oklahoma severe storm, including one of the state’s other trademarks — tornadoes!

What do you think about the idea?