The loss to the taxpayer for the auto bailouts is now up to twenty three billion.
[Update a few minutes later]
And the head of the CBO says that the “stimulus” will be a drag on the economy for years.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Thoughts on the health-care mess:
If the Supreme Court decision goes against the individual mandate, the progressive imagination will be haunted for decades by what historians will consider one of the great legislative and political blunders of all time. A rare perfect storm of political forces brought liberals the most power they have had since 1934 and 1964. If history records that this generation’s progressive leaders threw that moment of power away by an easily correctable mistake in legislative draftmanship, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will be forever remembered as the greatest legislative bunglers in American history. College students in generations yet unborn will rub their eyes in disbelief when they get to this part of the story.
(Indeed, when we consider what future students will think about an era that includes the Lewinsky affair, the Y2K and bird flu panics, the WMD mistake in Iraq, and then, if the Court rules against it, the healthcare fiasco, it is easy to see why the Baby Boom is looking more and more like a generation of clowns.)
I am less worried about the bitter mockery of future generations, however, than I am about what is in the rest of the bill. Even if the Court upholds it, it is clear that sheer arrogance and legislative incompetence led the architects of this massive reform to endanger their own handiwork by clumsy design.
An inescapable question unavoidably follows. If the authors of this historic reform were that careless and clueless about the central pillar of their plan, what else did they get wrong? What other incompetencies and tomfooleries lie hidden in the depths of this bill? How many perverse and unintended consequences will emerge as the consequences of this law unfold? What clever lobbyists managed to get provisions embedded in the text that will make healthcare more expensive and less effective than it could and should have been?
Writing a bill that passes constitutional muster should be easy in a Congress so rich in lawyers and legislation writers. Writing a bill that successfully improves American healthcare delivery while controlling costs, on the other hand, is hard. Very, very hard.
If they did so poorly at the easy part of their task, the part where we can actually measure and monitor their success, what kind of mess have they made of the hard and murky parts that nobody, including the authors of the bill, really understands?
This may be the worst political class in the nation’s history, or at least since the 1850s.
But Gerrib told us we’d get a profit! I guess you can’t trust bankers. It’s a shame nobody will protest these people.
Gerrib drinks deeply of the Obama Kool Aid and believes whatever he’s told by the Democrats. In other words, he’s an idiot.
Good lord, that picture of Geithner in the oval office is priceless. Is there somewhere that can be posted where a caption contest can be done? In our current post-Cain world I would think he’d be guilty of sexual harassment if nothing else.
LOL, when I hold my cursor over it I get a tool-tip-text that says “Caption contest.” I’m no good at that stuff. Titus? Someone??
“And then Maverick rolls the F-14 upside down and flies over the Mig while Goose takes a picture and flips the Mig pilot a bird…”
“Heeeeeyyy, MACARENA!“
“This is where we’d be without the stimulus, and This is how tall you need to be to officially not be considered a gnome.”
Although tangential, this jumped out at me: “the Y2K and bird flu panics”
Pandemic flu denialism? That’s a bad bet, I think.
Additionally, if someone thinks pandemic flu prevention and preparation aren’t a good idea, I’m not going to bother talking to them about detecting and deflecting incoming asteroids.
I’m reminded of Gov. Jindal criticizing volcano monitoring.
Sorry Bob, “Bird-flu” was exactly like Y2K: real (though comparatively minor) events blown completely out of proportion by media hype, scaremongering, and good old fashioned hucksterism.
The “pan” in Panic and Pandemic are not referring to the same thing Bob.
I take your point. I just think that preparation and prevention should not be dismissed as panic. Y2K problems were averted because of lots people’s hard work, and the same might be true of bird flu — certainly vast numbers of birds were slaughtered in an effort to quench the outbreak, and that might have averted a bigger problem. Moreover, pandemic flu continues to be a real threat which we should strive to prevent but prepare for nonetheless.
Replying to your comment literally, that’s probably true, but it isn’t entirely clear. Look up the etymology of the Greek god Pan — some people think the name is related to the Greek word pan.
Rand, you’re cherry picking. This generation didn’t screw up any worse than most previous generations. Look at the generations that brought us the Fed and the Income tax and the War To End Wars; the generation that partied away on outlawed booze and created the mob, then bungled a recession into a world wide depression and kept it there; the FDR generation that destroyed the small business all over the nation via the War Materials Board of whatever it was called. It is just life. Wake me up when we get a generation that does make a hash of things.
But did those administration from the past tout themselves as the “Most ethical and transparent EVAH!” Not to mention hold “transparency” council meetings that, *facepalm*, are closed to the public.
typo: does => doesn’t
We were told that the $85 billion given to the automakers was a complete loss, and GM would collapse anyway. Now, we MAY take a loss if we sell stock when it’s low. Considering GM has traded in the last year between $19.05 and $39.48, maybe we ought to sell on the upswing.
Regarding stimulus, you left out the statement ” if no other actions were taken.”
What do you mean “would collapse”? It DID collapse. And “MAY take a loss” should read, ‘WILL take a loss’ either way. When your looking at losing 14 billion here, or maybe 23 billion there; well eventually your talking about some real money.
We wouldn’t be having this discussion if GM wasn’t a going business.
What’s a “going” business? Do you mean a solvent business? Are we certain that GM is more solvent today, when it is still subsisting on money from the federal government? After all, isn’t that what is meant by the US still holding those stocks? Besides the loss to the US government, what would happen to GM if the US decided to cut its losses as they exists on the books today?
Some people were fooled by GM’s propaganda that they repaid their debt. Most of us saw right through it.
The accounting definition of “going concern” is making a profit. GM is making a profit. Who owns the company is irrelevant to whether a firm is “going” or not.
What would happen if the government sold all GM stock today is that GM stock would be cheaper, and we the taxpayer would lock in a loss. The company would still be in business.
So lets get this straight, supposedly the only reason GM didn’t go Chapter 7 is because the government stepped in with a lot of money to become the “debtor in possession”. Otherwise, why did the Uncle Sam get involved at all? GM still went bankrupt but emerged and supposedly is making a profit.
We taxpayers, who were told GM was an investment that would turn us a profit, are out $20 to $30 billion. And Gerrib’s argument is, “that’s ok, because GM is making a profit off of us”.
GM’s stock dropped 7% after it announced 3rd quarter profits, which were lower than 2nd quarter. That was November 9th. Less than 10 days later, and another 7% has been lost in stock value. The IPO one year ago was 33, but now its trading at under 22. But hey, it’s ok because “at least GM is making a profit off of us.”
GM isn’t making a profit on European sales, but more European companies are entering the US market. GM is breaking even outside the US and Europe. So the only profits are on US sales, that is sales made to taxpayers who are out $20 to $30 billion. But its ok, because “GM is making a profit off of us”.
Oh wait! GM staying open means jobs! GM employs 209,000 people according to there website. Guess how much money the taxpayers would be out had we just given each of those employees a $100,000 severence package?
You do realize the GM went through bankruptcy right?
Unions got bailed out bond holders got sold out.
My point of contention isn’t over the definition of “going concern”. I didn’t like how he said that the bailout money was supposed to stave off a bankruptcy but then — it ends up happening anyways. And then the bankruptcy itself handled in such a heavy handed fashion so as to, I believe, greatly overstep the limitations placed on the powers of the executive branch and usurp that which was gained from the judicial. The final verdict came out so favorably for that of the unions that everyone knew the whole thing was about buying votes for the next election.
Good point.
Bob keeps trying to claim that GM was saved from going out of business by the bailouts but in reality they went bankrupt and could have done it sooner without us dumping money nearly equal to four years of NASA’s budget.
The US Government played the role of “debtor in possession” in the GM bankruptcy. This means that they persuaded a judge to keep the company open and stiff the bondholders.
The UAW took a haircut too – under the labor contract, they were supposed to get cash so they could cover retirees healthcare benefits. They got stock instead because there was no cash to give them.
Sorry for calling you Bob.
Giving unions shares of company stock was an effort to give them greater control over the company. This is sometimes called democratizing the workplace.
I have news for you:
Newt Gingrich informs us, with a recent article on the separation of powers, that even if the SC declares the mandate unconstitutional, that Obama needn’t pay the slightest attention to it. This is part of the check and balance, according to Newt: The US SC is not the uber-decider of the nation.
I quote from Newt:
“It can’t possibly be true that the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution a very elaborate, complex process of amending the Constitution and said, however, that if the Supreme Court is split 4-to-4 between liberals and conservatives, and Justice Kennedy gets up in the morning, he becomes a one-person Constitutional Convention. If he gets up and he feels conservative that day, it must be a conservative Constitution. If he gets up and he feels liberal that day, it must be a — this is an absurdity foisted on us in 1958 by a historic lie. There is no judicial supremacy. It does not exist in the American Constitution.
Let me be clear. Judicial supremacy is factually wrong, it is morally wrong, and it is an affront to the American system of self-government. One of the major reasons that I am running for president of the United States is the 9th Circuit Court decision in 2002 that one nation under God, in the Pledge of Allegiance, was unconstitutional. That decision to me had the same effect that the Dred Scott decision extending slavery to the whole country had on Abraham Lincoln, because I thought, if an American appeals court could be so radically out of touch with America that it could seek to block children from saying one nation under God as part of their description of America, that we had come to a point when we needed a constitutional crisis to reassert the legislative and executive branches’ legitimate prerogatives to teach the judiciary that they cannot be anti-American and expect us to tolerate them radically changing our society by judicial dictate. “
How’s Newt wrong here? SCOTUS is NOT the uber-decider of the nation. Congress is at all times free to pass a law that has the effect of reversing SCOTUS or mooting the decision. Congress has always had the power to pass laws taking certain legal areas out of the hands of the court. For that matter, an Amendment can effectively do the same thing, by explicitly making Constitutional something that the court had ruled was otherwise.
Rick C:
I didn’t say Newt was wrong.
I’m saying Newt is right and Obama is going to ignore whatever the SC says.
So Is Reid. After all – the Dem controlled congress never passed a budget and that was plainly against the law.