The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has only increased our financial peril, according to the Inspector General’s recently-released report. The final sentence in the executive summary says it all:
Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.
And the principal reason for our widening peril is the moral hazard in the government bailout: if there are no consequences to bad behavior then we’ll get more bad behavior. In fact, TARP has positively incentivized bad behavior. The following is an extended quotation worth reading in its entirety because we’re all in deep trouble. [click to continue…]
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inspector general,
TARP,
Troubled Asset Relief Program
Here’s another Mensa candidate. From The Hill:
The U.S. government must spend its way out of the recession, the Democrats’ third-ranking House leader stressed Monday.
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, said that trying to find greater savings in the budget, which was released by President Barack Obama this morning, wouldn’t help alleviate the recession.
“We’ve got to make some decisions here as to what’s in the best interests of our country going forward,” Clyburn said during an appearance on Fox News. “And I think the best interest is to invest in education, control these deficits, while at the same time trying to get people back to work.”
“We’re not going to save our way out of this recession,” the majority whip added. “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that.”
Most economists?
More from Fox News and Gateway Pundit.
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deficit,
James Clyburn,
recession
As Instapundit observes, if this thing pans out, there may be a scandal brewing. Apparently, Nancy Pelosi (aka Marie Antoinette) likes to send her kids and grandkids cross country on the same military transport she uses. For more, jump to Doug Ross.
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Nancy Pelosi
Or, in Hope ‘n Change’s case, never believe your own crap. Which is what Fouad Ajami says in today’s Wall Street Journal – only in nicer language.
There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune. . . .
Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.
Mr. Obama’s self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.
Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.
And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.
Americans don’t deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.
As Ajami observes, we’ve had “stylish” presidents before – like JFK. “But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama’s self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the “remoteness and detachment” of his governing style. We don’t have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.”
Read it all. Like I said, never fall for your own crap.
Hat tip to Ace.
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Barack Obama,
cult of personality