Stimulus Does Have to Mean Pork

Clifford Winston puts a spin on the Obama Stimulus plan. A nice optimistic thought, but given the penchant of Congress to use "stimulus packages" as a pork barrel project, (See the NASCAR provisions in previous bills), do you really think that pork won't be a part of the bill?

President-elect Barack Obama says he will create or protect some three million jobs by spending a massive amount of federal dollars to build roads and other "shovel ready" government projects across the country. The projects in this economic stimulus package, he says, will "not be based on politics and lobbying."

Nice thought. But already Mr. Obama is facing pressure by public officials from coast to coast to run in the other direction. In recent weeks, for example, the U.S. Conference of Mayors forwarded to Congress a list of 11,391 infrastructure projects that, we are to believe, are "ready to go." Several media outlets quickly pointed out that this list is full of pork -- the most flagrant examples are a polar-bear exhibit, an antiprostitution program, and a water-park ride. The nation's governors, transit officials, and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials have sent along their own lists, which are likely to contain their own "bridges to nowhere."

But the deepest problem Mr. Obama faces is not the diversion of funds to pork-barrel projects -- contrary to popular belief, this generally amounts to a modest share of public expenditures. The problem is rather that infrastructure spending itself is productive only when it produces a large social return.(emphasis added)

Considering that Congressmen need Mayors as much as Mayors need Congressmen, do you really believe that at stimulus bill won't be pork laden?

However, in defense of Winston, he does go on to point out the problem with federal transportation spending, i.e. that it misallocates funds and misallocates incentives with respect to how federal dollars in transportation projects.

Of course, a larger problem for me is how does infrastructure spending broadly stimultate the economy? The New Deal was laden with infrastructure spending and much of it didn't really produce long term economic gain, while it did underemploy millions of people.

Treasury to Intervene in Mortgage Market

This is not particularly good news.

The Treasury Department is strongly considering a plan to intervene directly in the mortgage industry to dramatically force down rates and stimulate the moribund housing market, according to sources familiar with the proposal.

Under the initiative, the Treasury would offer to buy securities that finance newly issued loans for home purchases, according to the sources. But to participate in the government's program, mortgage lenders would have to set exceptionally low interest rates, for instance, no more than 4.5 percent for traditional, 30-year fixed-rate loans.

These securities would be purchased primarily from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the financing giants that buy most mortgages from U.S. lenders, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been finalized.

The cost of the plan and source of funding remain unclear. One possibility is for the Treasury to raise money by issuing bonds to the public at 3 percent interest. This could allow the government to turn a profit because it would be buying securities that pay 4.5 percent.

At a meeting attended by the Treasury's Interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability Neel Kashkari and the National Association of Realtors in mid-November, senior Treasury officials said they were optimistic that subsidizing lower mortgage rates with taxpayer dollars would help revive the housing market, sources said.

Forgive me for being dense, but isn't that essentially what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did so poorly that they failed and had to be bailed out. What makes the Treasury think they can do any better.

So yet another intervention into the marketplace by the govnernment, without funding, subsidized and guaranteed by tax payer dollars. How is this going to help home ownership? In addition to the lower interest rates, which is a good thing, what other requirements will Treasury put on mortgage lenders? Will there be stupid rules regarding diversity despite credit risk? Will there be rules regarding any prudent steps that banks should take or will the government overrule good business sense.

Not a good move at all.

Network TV bailout?

Why not, everyone else is lining up for a government bailout.

It's D-Day for the broadcast networks.
They've been living on borrowed time for the better part of two decades, thanks to advertisers willing to toss in more cash each year even as ratings slowly trended ever lower.

But with the economy in a tailspin -- and the Big Three auto manufacturers, some of TV's best advertisers, near ruin -- the biz may finally have to pull the emergency cord.

"This day was going to come," says one conglom bigwig. "I don't think the business can be sustained without real change at this juncture. ... We have a gun to all of our heads."

Already smarting from a writers strike-impacted season, the networks haven't had much more to celebrate this fall. Collectively, the Big Five (including the CW) are down 13% among adults 18-49 vs. last year.

How low can they go? And at what point can the networks no longer monetize ratings that don't look much better than cable?

Well to be fair, they are not really talking about a bailout, but like most old school media, network TV is facing a real hard patch and if the Big Three automakers do tank, that is a lot of revenue out the door.

$7.7 Trillion in Government Give-Aways

That is Bloomberg's tally of government give aways. At that price you can give $22,000 plus to every man, woman, and child in America.

The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”

Unbelievable huh.

Also, add to that the idea being floated by Congressional Democrats for another $700 billion economic stimulus package.

Free money all over the place. Great, just great.

Althouse: Dont'

Ann Althouse links to an NPR stroy of an immigrant real estate speculator saying:

Don't give this man or anyone like him any of our tax money. Why should he be helped to live in a $1.5 million house? Try to picture the collection of characters NPR considered before deciding Njoku was the one to do a big human interest story about.

But here's the thing, Njoku a black, Nigerian Immigrant is just the sort of person who will get help from an Obama administration and the government. And that is the problem.

Making the Crap Sandwich Palatable

Intersting reading:
* Sec. 105. Energy credit for geothermal heat pump systems.
* Sec. 111. Expansion and modification of advanced coal project investment credit.
* Sec. 113. Temporary increase in coal excise tax; funding of Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.
* Sec. 115. Tax credit for carbon dioxide sequestration.
* Sec. 205. Credit for new qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicles.
* Sec. 405. Increase and extension of Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund tax.
* Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
* Sec. 317. Seven-year cost recovery period for motorsports racing track facility.
* Sec. 501. $8,500 income threshold used to calculate refundable portion of child tax credit.
* Sec. 503 Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

I sense a theme a bit here, lots of energy tax credits. Not a bad thing really, but it is apparent that these credits are there to make that crap sandwich a lot more palatable.

The Bailout Plan

The Senate passed bailout plan has "enough "sweeteners" to put free-market devotees into an ideological diabetic coma."

The bailout-stimulus-Christmas-in-October-bill that just passed the Senate should not be confused with thoughtful legislation. It's larded with junk designed to convince Main Street that it too will share in the welfare being doled out to Wall Street Masters of the Universe. The need for the bailout has yet to be demonstrated. The efficacy of the proposed plan has yet to be demonstrated. Here's hoping that the House of Representatives, that great holding pen for would-be senators and future criminals, keeps it spine and still votes no. At the same time, this might be a good time to declare citizenship in another country.

Well, I am not ready to do that, but I am ready to chastize every Member of Congress who has bought into the hysteria, or more specifically, every Republican who has done it. Fearmongering and massive government intervention into the economy is standard Democratic fare, I don't expect them to change their spots.

Yes, the markets have tanked, and yes, IRA and 401(k) plans have taken a hit and not to mention that the notion of a "privatized" market based Social Security is now DOA even if there were a GOP Congress in control.

Have Americans gotten so used to phenomenal growth and nothing but profits that we are so addicted that we will take and approve of such drastic steps like this one? Business comes in cycles (that is why it is called a business cycle). With every upswing comes a downturn. But face it, we are better off now that we were 10, 20, 30 or 80 years ago. People have not lost their lifesavings. People are standing in line not for bare necessities like food, but for luxury items like an iPhone or new computer.

We need to stop looking for the dark cloud and the government handout and fix this mess ourselves.

Change name from ‘bailout’ to ‘rescue’ - Andy Barr - Politico.com

Yeah, John McCain, that will help.

Not the best thing to say.

Hillary Clinton--Hysterical Over Economy

This is simply inexuseable hysteria: "It sounds dire but there is a risk that commerce could grind to a halt," she said.
So much for the calming voice of reason.

How did Wall Street get into this mess?

Michael Flynn of Reason.com writes:

Let's be clear: This is a Wall Street crisis, not a national economic crisis. The overall economy, while a bit weak, is still growing. Some politicians are comparing the current environment to the Great Depression. But in 1932, when the federal government last moved to bail out the banking sector, economic output had fallen 45 percent and unemployment was a staggering 24 percent. Today, economic output is actually up and unemployment is a historically modest 6.1 percent.

The overall economy doesn't even face a liquidity crisis in the current turmoil. Consumer, commercial/industrial, and real estate loans are all up over last year. Main Street is doing fine. The liquidity crisis is confined to Wall Street, between and among investment banks, insurance and securities firms, and hedge funds. There is the possibility that the contagion could spread, but in a global capital market, this is hardly certain.

It is the intersection of several underlying trends that have brought us to this point, not a breakdown in any specific part of the financial sector. The fundamental flaw with the bailout approach is that it ignores these trends and simply seeks to shore up the finances of certain Wall Street institutions.

Then there is this:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were going through a crisis. In 2003 and 2004, an accounting scandal was revealed. The two public-private partnerships were cooking the books to show phantom profits. The Bush administration and its allies on the Hill pushed a strong bill to reform how these institutions operated. The measure came very close to passing, but Fannie and Freddie cut a deal. They would refocus on expanding mortgages for low-income borrowers if the feds kept out of their operations. The bargain worked. Virtually all the Democrats and a few Republicans backed the two companies and the reform effort failed.

Fannie and Freddie then went on a subprime bender. They made it clear that they wanted to buy all the subprime or Alt-A mortgages that they could find, eventually acquiring around $1 trillion of the paper. The market responded. In 2003 subprime mortgages made up less than 8 percent of all mortgages. By 2006, they were over 20 percent. Banks knew they could sell subprime products to Fannie and Freddie. Investments banks realized that if they laced ever increasing amounts of subprime mortgages into the MBSes, they could juice the returns and so earn bigger fees. The rating agencies, thinking they were simply dealing with traditional mortgages, didn't look under the hood.

So really, what have we learned so far.

1. Mortgage Backed Securities are not a sure deal and not a guaranteed return. There never were, mind you, but with the housing bubble, it sure looked that way. The thing is that most of these Wall Street types should have known that they were sitting on a bubble and that all bubbles break. The dot com bubble broke and it seems like everyone forgot that. The housing market was unsustainable and it was obvious to most Americans and should have been a plain as day at Wall Street institutions.

2. Government sponsored entities are not the same as the government. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were incentivized and indeed practically explicitly brokered a deal by which they would become the only real subprime backer. Instead of spreading the risk around, Fannie and Freddie backed some 70 or 80 percent of all subprime mortgages. That is too much risk in one place.

3. A subprime mortgage in and of itself is not a bad thing. However, banks and lenders were again not only incentivized, but basically required by such laws as the Community Reinvestment Act and other legislation to ignore common sense risk measurement and basically give loans away. For decades, most first time homebuyers were in subprime mortgages, but banks and mortgage lenders made sure to limit the number of such mortgages and make efforts to minimize the risk as much as possible. Many of these first time homebuyers then go on to become solid credit risks and get into regular mortgages a few years down the road. This process still happens (it happened to my wife and I--with a little help from the VA) and will continue to happen. But it should happen on a far less frequent basis.

4. Too much emphasis has been placed on the financial sector of our economy. Yes, the financial sector is a big part of teh economy, but it is not the end all be all. As Flynn points out, there are other economic indicators that point in a positive direction.

I do thing a recession is likely, but it is not a foregone conclusion. So-called experts and pundits have been claiming we are in a recession and have been doing so for a couple of years, but it hasn't happened. Will it happen now? Maybe...


But then again...Maybe not.

Propping Up Banks Will Not Rescue A Debauched Financial System

So says the headline at London's Daily Telegraph. In a column written by Jeff Randall,

But the hard-sell of President Bush and the US Treasury Secretary felt too much like the pressure patter of a door-to-door hawker. Their message was crude: “Trust us. You are in a terrible place. Only we can get you out of this mess. No need to check the details. Hurry now, or it will be too late. Here’s a pen. There’s the dotted line. Just sign.”

But with the President’s ratings so low, few would let him leave the House with anything more than small change. Congress asked, not unreasonably: “If you guys know so much about banking, how come we are in such trouble?”

Having spent most of the year telling America, contrary to mounting evidence, that the US economy was just dandy, Mr Bush’s credibility is threadbare. When making statements, he’s beginning to look as if he doesn’t even believe himself. As for Mr Paulson, his long association with the jackpot culture of Goldman Sachs is, in the eyes of many outsiders, a gilded millstone.

Predictably, the refuseniks have been pilloried as ill-informed nihilists. They have been lambasted for failing to understand the consequences of their actions. They are, according to the Big Bail-out Brigade, condemning the rest of us to be buried alive in the rubble of a disintegrating banking system.

Try a different take. Yes, the West’s financial infrastructure is in severe distress. Yes, more banks are going to crumble. Yes, there will be a recession. But allocating $700bn (it would almost certainly turn out to be more) to a clean-up programme for toxic assets, in effect socialising the poison of private greed, has no merit other than to delay the inevitable. No amount of federal cash can rewind the X-rated horror video.

I heard a quote by my Congressman, Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), when commenting on teh bailout plan "it privatizes profits but socializes losses" which is exactly dead on. This bailout takes the risk out of any future risky behavior by banks because a precedent will have been set for the bailout and no one will learn the lesson about taking future risks.

Only when banks fail will the lesson be learned.

Frank's Fingerprints

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe no less, reminds us of House Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank's (D-MA) role in the mess:

'THE PRIVATE SECTOR got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it."

That's Barney Frank's story, and he's sticking to it. As the Massachusetts Democrat has explained it in recent days, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, with the political class guilty only of failing to rein the capitalists in. The Wall Street meltdown was caused by "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector," Frank said; the country is in dire straits today "thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best." And that philosophy goes "back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, 'Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.' "

In fact, that isn't what Reagan said. His actual words were: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Were he president today, he would be saying much the same thing.

The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.

All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.

As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. "What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities?" I asked in this space in 1995. "Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs . . . When the coming wave of foreclosures rolls through the inner city, which of today's self-congratulating bankers, politicians, and regulators plans to take the credit?"

Frank doesn't. But his fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that "these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis." When the White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.

Bad News For The Bailout

Consider these passages from Forbes' coverage of the bailout:

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, says his office has gotten "close to zero" calls in support of the $700 billion plan proposed by the administration. He doubts it'll happen immediately either. "I don't think it has to be a week" he says. "If we do it right, then we need to take as long as it needs."

Sherrod Brown is not what you would call a conservative Democrat and when Ohio residents (a key battleground) are not sold on the idea of a bailout, maybe it is time for Congress to really think long and hard about whether a bailout is needed and on what terms.

This one should rock you back:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Wow. If it wants to see a bailout bill passed soon, the administration's going to have to come up with some hard answers to hard questions. Public support for it already seems to be waning. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released Tuesday, 44% of those surveyed oppose the administration's plan, up from 37% Monday.

What, the number is not based on any data--color me shocked!!!

Wonder why the public support for the bailout is waning? Because of some of the underlying news.

1. The FDIC has stepped in to prevent banks from failing or to minimize the damage from failing banks--see Washington Mutual and Wachovia. People are not worried about the security of their money, which was one of the leading causes of the great depression, that is a run on banks when depositors lost their confidence. Is Wall Street nervous? Clearly, but I don't think Main Street is.

2. The causes of the failures around the country are being viewed by average Americans as a failure of big companies putting too much into risky investments. Whether you think so or not, most Americans understand the concept of risky investments and really don't feel much sympathy for trading houses and banks who fail because of risky investments.

3. We are too close in time to a previous legislative debacle, i.e. the PATRIOT Act for people to forget that when Congress passes something very large, very complex in a very short period of time, it is almost always a disaster early on. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

4. The American public assumes Congress is going to screw it up and thus they would rather Congress not act.

A Few Points on the Bailout Fiasco

From RedState's Erick Erickson

I'm a bit gobsmacked that conservative pundits who supported the bailout are attacking members of Congress for listening to their constituents. Amazing how representative democracy worked well today and that's not good enough for some people. Truth be told, the public could very well be wrong, but members of Congress, like on the immigration bill, listened and voted accordingly.

Does it really hurt Republicans that the media is blaming the GOP for killing something the public did not want anyway?

Those of us who opposed the bill may actually have shot ourselves in the foot. Now Nancy and the Dems could very well pass a bill far to the left of the compromised Paulson plan by rallying some of those Democrats to the plan who refused to vote for today's plan. The President, naturally, will sign it.

But, the side effect of a far left bill will be twofold:

1. Obama, if president, would be able to afford his financial morass of social engineering.
2. If a democratic lead bill actually passes and fails (which it no doubt will), then the blame is easy to assign.

The financial crisis in bullet points

Thanks to Tom Clougherty at adamsmith.org for these. The Brits have something at stake, but can look with a bit more objectivity.

Obama: ‘Stay Calm’

This is just too rich. Obama is urging people to "Stay Calm" after the House vote on the bailout package.

Um, Senator Obama, you have been whipping the nation in to an economic frenzy, running around like an economic Chicken Little screaming "recession, recession" and other doom and gloom.

Obama cannot have it both ways, you can't start a riot and then say calm down.

Pelois Speech to Congress

At least I am not the only one who thought that Speaker Pelosi's speech made no sense, Amy Holmes did too. In one breath Pelosi slams the "8 Years of failed Bush Economic Policy" and in the next is asking Congress to pass the biggest economic plan the Administration has ever put together.

WHAT??????!!!!!!

I don't think anyone would accuse the current administration of being one focused on economics, but really, if the seeds of the crisis were sown 20 years ago, who is really to blame? Congress--as much as I would like to blame the Democratic Congress, this one isn't really their fault, you have to go back to the Congress in Bush I and early Clinton years, when diversity ruled the roost and diversity in home ownership was seen as a good thing, no matter what.

Oh, then there is that failed oversight of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, but we won't talk about that.

REally, the blame has to fall on those commercial entities who seemed to think it was a good idea to lend money to people with bad or no credit and no ability to pay the mortgage back.

"Spasmodic Jerk to the Latest Opinion Poll"

Mark Steyn, as usual, talking about bailouts and representative duties:

I always enjoy hearing Burke's admonition that a member of parliament owes his constituents his judgment rather than a spasmodic jerk to the latest opinion poll. But isn't it the case that we're in this mess because US politicians previously subordinated "the general reason of the whole" to "local interests" and "local prejudices"? That's to say, with their usual casual destructiveness dressed up in the baby talk of "diversity", they chose to turn the mortgage industry into just another branch of the affirmative-action racket. The United States government in effect decreed credit a human right rather than a privilege judiciously granted by one independent contractor to another.

And isn't that what we are really talking about, the idea that credit is something to be given as a divine right of life, rather than something earned through hard work, religious devotion to repayment and wise application of common sense.

Homeownership is a wonderful thing, but like most things in life, it has to be earned rather than simply given away.

"Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, teach him to fish and he will eat for a lifetime" certainly holds true in this case.

While the stock markets panicked yesterday on the news of Congress' inability to pass the bailout plan, I think it should be a time of rejoicing. Whether the cause is cynical politics, the GOP staying true to the roots of free market principles, or some other reason, if the bailout is such a good thing, then I would rather Congress make sure it is done right.

Of course, Democrats don't want to be saddled with the blame if it is done wrong.

Have the House Republicans Grown a Spine in the Past Couple of Months?

I will be honest, my family is facing a financial crisis of our own, one which is of our own making. While I would love a bailout, I simply don't see one coming.

But on the heels of the House GOP successfully killing the Bailout Bill, can it be that free market, free enterprise conservativism is on the verge of carrying the day? On the heels of two recent bank meltdowns or near meltdowns (See WaMu and Wachovia) and the FDIC stepping in to prevent a massive run of failures, are the GOP and a few people like me actually making a difference in reminding people that failure is as much a part of capitalism as success.

But did the GOP kill this bill or did the Democrats simply want to keep painting Bush and therefore McCain with a "failed economic policy" meme? The House vote was 228-205 to reject the bill. Keep in mind that 218 is the magic number in the House and the Democrats have control of the chamber, with 233 Democrats. Thus, in order to force a defeat of the bill, at least 14 Democrats had to cross party lines. And lots more did, although more Republicans voted to kill the bill than Democrats.

I wondered what the rationale would be if the bill failed to get passed. The rationale for many conservative free market, small govnerment Republicans is rather apparent. But why would so many Democrats vote against the bill?

I have been concerned about this bill for a number of reasons. James Joyner eloquently summed up my feelings:

Then again, I’m not at all convinced that anybody truly understands what’s going on here, let alone that there’s an expert consensus on what the impacts of the compromise legislation arrived at some 24 hours ago will have on the economy. That some action needs to be taken and soon seems to be a given. This action? Right now? That’s hardly settled.

It may be true that when forced to eat a crap sandwich, the thing to do is to take big bites. But it’s not unreasonable to first take another look in the pantry to see if there’s a more palatable option.

Some action will be taken, but I think all the hoopla surrounding the potential bailout is creating a false expectation that this particular bill, with these particular specifics (or rather lack thereof) and the complete lack of reasoned analysis of the bill (how can you have reasoned analysis of this monstrosity in less than 48 hours) is reason enough for us to pause and say, hey, maybe we don't know what we are doing here.

Congress is pretty good a long term discussion, maybe not effective but good at the process, and notoriously bad at quick action.

I am sure something will get done, but I pay my leaders to take a deep breath before committing me and my children and potentially my grandchildren to a disasterous step that may not be absolutely necessary.

Likely Bailout Beneficiaries: Lawyers

Nothing quite like stating the obvious: Likely Bailout Beneficiaries: Lawyers sayeth the ABA Journal.

Well, duh!!! And I'm a lawyer.