September 22, 2008
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Big Shitpile
‘Big Shitpile’ is the name Atrios gave to the mortgage/financial/bailout crisis we’re looking at in the news right now.
And, I want to point out the one thing that really, really, really chaps my hide about this. The rest is eminently hide-chappable, but this one thing really gets my goat.
Republicans, whose party has been the party of deregulation, and who basically caused this problem, will still be too stupid to realize the irony when they say that Democrats are ‘tax-and-spend.’ Because no matter how bad things get, the stupid will always find a clever way to pretend reality fits their schedule.
Did you vote Republican in the last, oh, say, 30 years? Then you are to blame for this bullshit. And that’s all there is to it. You voted for laissez-faire economics that always relied upon the ability of the US government, which is to say taxpayers, to bail asshole capitalists out of their financial woes.
Put it in your mouth. Chew it up real good. And swallow. Learn the lesson: MARKETS NEED LIMITS.
Now go get drunk or something, while you can still afford to buy beer.
Comments (9)
here here.
You mean the market won’t regulate itself? I feel so betrayed…
ahem. Markets are only self-regulating if the government can keep their grubby hands off them. It’s not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem, it is a government problem. It is not a good business decision to loan a lot of money at a super-low interest rate to somebody with bad credit. Actual business people know this. Government people don’t seem to.
Financial shitstorm=
1977 Community Reinvestment Act (Jimmy Carter, Democrat), which basically forced banks– all banks– to make loans to people with poor credit or face significant financial penalties. This is bad for banks. “I’ve never made a credit card payment on time! I can’t buy a house… That’s discrimination against the poor!” “No worries, we’ll make them give you a loan anyway.”
+
Current monetary policy (George W. Bush, Republican), which has been holding the national interest rate at unnaturally low levels practically since GWB took office, while simultaneously inflating the currency as fast as it can go. For a while, this made real estate a better investment than savings bonds, and made a 3% mortgage possible. Nobody makes money on a 3% loan. Thus the Adjustable Rate Mortgage. If you flip the house in 6 months, the bank makes money off the fees. If you stick around forever, the rate goes up and they make money on the interest. So… unnaturally low interest rates + skyrocketing inflation= real estate feeding frenzy. Did banks make bad decisions? Yes. Would it have happened without Greenspan sitting on the interest rate? No.
Either one of those phenomena, by itself, is a problem. Together they are a disaster.
And now the *&%$# government is again interfering with market processes by bailing out financial institutions that made the worst decisions, lied on their balance sheets, and collapsed as a result. In a free market, businesses that make poor financial decisions are supposed to fail. We are not supposed to nationalize them.
Markets are self-regulating. The problem is that we don’t have free markets, and neither party wants them (for all that the Republicans talk about them a lot).
@cordelia_naismith - “Markets are only self-regulating if the government can keep their grubby hands off them. It’s not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem, it is a government problem. It is not a good business decision to loan a lot of money at a super-low interest rate to somebody with bad credit. Actual business people know this. Government people don’t seem to.”
Except that ‘government people’ weren’t the ones doing the lending. ‘Government people’ were the ones *deregulating* the lending, so that ‘actual business people’ could make exactly the unwise decision you decry.
And the Republican party is the one that promoted this policy of deregulation.
The Big Shitpile is a complete repudiation of so-called fiscal conservatism.
You seem a little testy. Are you okay? I mean, this isn’t the only time in history a bureaucracy has run amok and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last. I’ve seen the trailer and the coming attractions are unbelievable.
You are confusing fiscal conservatism with Republicanism. The only time those two things overlapped even marginally was with Reagan. Republicans claim to be fiscally conservative, but aren’t in practice. Democrats aren’t fiscally conservative, and don’t claim to be. The end result is that you can’t really claim fiscal conservatism over the last thirty years is responsible for the current financial crisis, because we haven’t had any fiscal conservatism in the last thirty years. Feel free to blame Republicans (I prefer to blame everybody in office)– but it has nothing to do with fiscal conservatism.
You said what I wouldn’t, and I am proud of you.
Who the fuck are these people voting in the Republicans? Are they so scared of a same-sex marriage, or find abortion so abominable that they are willing to scrap our whole country and future? It makes me really, really sick inside–and these same people don’t even realize we’re NOT the greatest country on Earth anymore, in large part, because of them.
@cordelia_naismith - you wrote: “You are confusing fiscal conservatism with Republicanism.”
Nope. Not confused in the slightest.
Republicans talk about ‘fiscal conservatism’ and then go and nearly destroy the global economy by being the opposite of that. Starting in the late ’90s, the financial stability of this nation was leveraged against the idea that the housing market would never stop growing, ever. That was a huge mistake, made possible by the same mofos who are now asking for their losses to be socialized.
In short: The difference between fiscal conservatism and Republicanism is that they appeal to different sets of people who end up voting the same way. And those people who voted that way (both fiscal conservatives and Republicans) were just tools.
You wrote: “Democrats aren’t fiscally conservative, and don’t claim to be.”
BULLSHIT.
You wrote: “The end result is that you can’t really claim fiscal conservatism over the last thirty years is responsible for the current financial crisis, because we haven’t had any fiscal conservatism in the last thirty years. “
You miss my point entirely. If you voted Republican because you are a fiscal conservative, YOU GOT PWND.
@HomerTheBrave - ah, no. I was a Republican once (though I have also voted for Independent, Green, and Libertarian candidates, because they seemed marginally more honest). It hardly seems relevant anymore, as I have not voted since 2000. I loathe everybody who runs for office– it is not an activity that honest people engage in. I rather think that unless you are enthusiastically pro-profligate-government-spending and pro-inflation, you got PWND no matter who you voted for, voted against, or refused to vote for.
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