This is why so many of us are against the bailouts in the first place. In one breath you are berating the companies for seeking public help and praising Obama for giving it to them! Pick one or you are being a hack. Those companies should not have received help in the first place.
just about every economist agreed that the stimulus and bailout was necessary to help stop the skid. even McCain's old campaign manager has publicly stated that McCain would have done something similar to get the economy started and mitigate the losses. This issue that I have when people say they were against the stimulus and bailout, is they fail to take into account what basically all economists believe would have happened and that would have been 12-14% unemployment and a possible depression. So, lets say Obama had rejected the bailouts and stimulus, and unemployment would have risen to 12-14%, would you be on the otherside of the argument calling for a bailout and stimulus? if Gm and Chrysler had failed and as predicted 1 millions jobs were lost between those 2 companies, would you have said they deserved help?
Honestly, I don’t really believe that the stimulus prevented much. There is nothing to show that it did. Thos same economists were predicting less than 8 percent unemployment and a recovery that was supposed to start MUCH sooner but they were wrong on both those accounts. Why are we giving them a free pass on the other account? Also, I would not have minded if the stimulus was geared more toward the people instead of to the financial institution that made bad decisions. Most of the fallout that was predicted was a result of the economists predicting that credit would freeze. It froze anyway and I would have been far more receptive to the government giving temporary loans to companies that deserved (not ones that were insolvent) it if the banks were unable to loan due to availability of cash. On that same note, all those ‘shovel ready’ projects that did not exist were straight lies and the stimulus was chock full of crap projects and extending state jobs that needed to go as we are feeling that crunch now. Those jobs did not get paid for indefinitely and now we are experiencing the exact same problems in a belated manner with a larger deficit. The stimulus and the bailouts were handled very badly and the cash ended up supporting companies that made bad calls, keeping those that should have lost their jobs and companies that should no longer exist to continue their existence.
On that same token, the bailout of GM preventing the mass job losses is bullshit as well. They went into bankruptcy – the exact process that they would have passed through had they not been put on the government dole. The one major result of that was to ensure that the union cronies that elected Obama received their cut of the pirated company. It was a crooked deal from the get go. IF, and that is a big if, the labor markets were going to get hit much harder than they did we could have helper the people directly but not until then.
The big difference with what I would have accepted and what was done was the level it was done at. We gave to the corporations, something the government should NEVER do. We should have helped the people, something that the government should only do when absolutely necessary. We practiced cooperate cronyism with trillions all while the democrats cheering and demanding it. That is supposed to be the republicanÂ’s job as the libs here keep telling me. I guess there really is no difference between the parties.