It Can't Be A Real Crisis

This is a continuation of trying to have it both ways. The Mark Steyns of the world can't decide whether or not the building is on fire. They want to blame politicians for not putting out the fire fast enough, AND for flooding a building that wasn't necessarily on fire.

Steyn says that it's suspicious for them to hand out candy to get people to leave the building and haul fire hoses. That's not just "non-sophisticated", it's fatuous. Whether the building is on fire is an economic question that has nothing to do with how Congress behaves. Thousands of economist are on hand to tell Steyn whether or not the building is on fire. The vast majority of them, all but the most ideological holdouts, say that it is. If Steyn wants to listen to the contrarian few instead, then okay, but he should make up his mind instead of snarking about earmarks.

Yes, I'm sure that Mark Steyn will certainly hop to, and do immediately and exactly what a malignant hemorrhoid tells him he should do.

I wish a speedy recovery to the man, but this has to be one of the best insult labels in years. You should start calling your trolls "malignant hemorrhoids".

Jim,

The message from Washington (well, the Treasury and the Fed) was that this is a real crisis. Congress was then briefed thoroughly on the matter (more so than Mark Steyn) and responds by making pork requests.

Really, Mark is being kind by saying it's not a crisis. After all, he can only conclude that if he assumes that Congress would know a real crisis when they saw one and respond in a responsible, adult manner. His theory is that "If this were the crisis, they'd do something to fix it, but since they're not, it's a not a crisis."

The only alternative explanation is that Congress wouldn't know a financial crisis from a hole in the wall and that their response to everything it to stuff their pockets with Federal money.

Oh, wait ...

You're right Jim. Mark Steyn is full of shit.

Best of luck to PJ O'Rourke in recovering from his Jim Harris.

You should read the whole thing, Jim, because you've missed Steyn's point entirely. You are, to some degree, actually agreeing with him.

What he is saying is, roughly speaking, that Congress appears to be speaking with a forked tongue. On the one hand, they speak as if the house is on fire and the hoses need to be charged with $700 billion of our money -- the money that you and I might otherwise use to, say, send our kids to college or pay for Mom to get anti-nausea medication to go with her chemotherapy, for which the HMO won't pay because no one has yet died from retching her guts out each morning.

And then on the other, they appear to be functioning in a business as usual way, larding up a OMFG Must Must Pass bill with pork that might well cause it to fail, because someone objects to this or that minor amendment (and indeed the ACORN amendment arguably did cause the first version to fail among Republicans nauseated by this payola for an Obama interest group).

It's pretty much the same as Al Gore telling us the atmosphere will freeze solid next year unless we instantly drastically reduce our CO2 emissions by, say, taking the public bus an hour and a half (each way) to work every day instead of driving 20 minutes, but in the meantime Big Al and his one (1) wife plus zero (0) small children needs a house sufficient to keep a normal family of 15 (or an immigrant family of 75) in the lap of jacuzzi with bubble jets in the master bedroom luxury.

When people cry fire while strolling calmly towards the exits, stopping by the refreshment stand to buy a box of M&Ms and haggle over the price, the rational observer can be forgiven for smelling something rotten, something duplicitous about their speech.

Just goes to show that Congress will not overlook any possibility for graft and corruption (AKA earmarks).

The Senate bill has even more earmarks in it, including one about mental health parity for medical insurance.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14161.html

The bill is over 400 pages. How anyone could even read a 400 page bill in less than, say, 2 weeks or a month is incomprehensible to me.

These guys are way over the top.

I'm not surprised. Keep in mind that Congress would pork up a bill saving us from the end of the world. It's the nature of the beast.

The message from Washington (well, the Treasury and the Fed) was that this is a real crisis.

On the one hand, they speak as if the house is on fire

Both of you talk as if the message only comes from Washington and not from anywhere else. But if you think that Washington is the only source of crisis warnings, you have been taking way too many sleeping pills for at least two weeks.

And then on the other, they appear to be functioning in a business as usual way, larding up a OMFG Must Must Pass bill with pork that might well cause it to fail

But that's backwards. Pork makes bills more likely to pass. If it made bills more likely to fail, there wouldn't be any.

Because revenue bills may only originate in the House and the House didn't pass the bill Monday, they had to attach this as an ammendment to a recently passed House bill which had overwhelming Senate approval. Thus they tacked the 'rescue plan' on to a bill that already had these items in it (and was going to pass anyway).

See http://ace.mu.nu/archives/274673.php for more details.

Both of you talk as if the message only comes from Washington and not from anywhere else

Oh nonsense. You talk as if even one teenager in his high-school economics paper issued a warning, then it's just as important as when the Secretary of the Treasury does. Hardly. The most important messages have indeed come from Washington, including the first big warning, the first alarmism about the 700 gigadollar price tag, and about the urgent necessity of government action (from the President, the Speaker, and various Senators, including, shamefully, those such as Dodd and Obama who are most guilty of the government misconduct that brought the crisis on).

That others have, afterward, chimed in is relatively meaningless. First and foremost because they're all talking heads, with no real responsibility for actually taking action. When it's the CFO of the company that says We're about to go bankrupt! it means a lot more than when one of the part-time secretaries does. You'd be crazy to equate the importance of those two messengers, and it's likewise crazy to equate the Treasury Secretary's alarmism with that of Paul Krugman.

Pork makes bills more likely to pass. If it made bills more likely to fail, there wouldn't be any.

Wrong again. "Pork" is by definition amendments attached to a bill that have nothing to do with the main purpose of the bill. For example, a bill paying for body armor for soldiers in Iraq may have a "pork" amendment paying for a bridge to nowhere, ha ha. Why do it this way? Why not just write two separate bills, one for the body armor, one for the bridge? Because the bridge bill won't pass on its own.

So you attach the unpopular pork to a piece of popular legislation, and it goes along for the ride, because no one wants to vote against the big bill.

It's a little more complicated because of logrolling, where Congressman X agrees not to contest Congressman Y's pork, in exchange for the same consideration elsewhere. So that means technically pork may help bills to pass -- but not the bills to which it's attached.

Because the bridge bill won't pass on its own.

More usually because both bills are more likely to pass together than separately. Attaching earmarks is symbiotic. It's a way to bribe Congressmen who don't want to vote for something. In this case, Congressmen who oppose the bailout are taking pork in order change their mind and vote for it.

The most important messages have indeed come from Washington, including the first big warning

No, the first big warnings were a wave of Wall Street bankruptcies. In fact Washington shrugged off these bankruptcies until that was no longer tenable.