Ahhh.. Just another artificial waste of taxpayer money then --- Right?
I'm not in a position to evaluate that, but I doubt their intent was to bring down the economy, so the fact that something else was really at fault doesn't indicate that they were a waste.
OF COURSE those credits had a LARGE effect. Created a FRENZY in fact everytime they threatened to end them.
They may have had a lot of support, hence the frenzy, but nonetheless they were of minimal impact on the economy. Most of the mortgages that failed were not part of that program; in fact, most of them were loans on commercial property. Those are the ones that were bundled into the derivatives that failed along with them, and it was the failure of the derivatives, not of the mortgages themselves, that caused the financial meltdown.
Actually, the fact that a lot of people support domestic drilling is itself a result of corporate cash, which is spent on public relations activities as well as on lobbying Congress.
Yes, actually, it does, because the insurance companies do the same thing. Oh, and by the way:
Another Poll Shows Majority Support for Single-Payer
While opposition to universal health care is not nonexistent, a majority of the people support a single-payer system. Yet single payer was taken off the table at the beginning of negotiations about health-care reform in 2009, at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Why do you suppose that happened?
Because most Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, and the health-insurance industry is one of their biggest donor groups. No other reason at all.
Let's put it this way. Anything that has the support of a majority of the people is something that business isn't going to spend a lot of money lobbying for, because it's likely to pass anyway. If they want it to happen, business will simply let it happen. If they don't, they'll lobby against it. What they put real effort into lobbying for, is something the people don't necessarily want. And yes, I would definitely include farm subsidies and ethanol subsidies into that category: pure corporate giveaways.
More general than that, but basically yes. The banks might not have foreseen the need for a bailout specifically before the meltdown, but they could certainly see the value in having bought-and-paid-for elected officials. As it happened, they did need a bailout, so they got their bribed pols to provide it for them. If they had not needed a bailout, they would still have found good uses for them. If nothing else, they could have continued to forestall re-regulation of the financial industry, as indeed they are doing now.
Even when the banks didn't WANT the money -- they were intimidated into taking it.
Oh, please. You expect me to believe that there were banks that didn't want the money? Do you have any solid evidence of this? Or of pigs with wings, which is just about as likely?
Why would corporations want to continue to waste time lobbying and donating if the power spigot got turned off?
To turn it back on, of course. That's why it was turned on in the first place.