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No, sometimes in order to save the economy, which we all live in, the government needs to intervene. That doesn't mean that other steps don't need to be taken, like assuring that banks aren't too big to fail, shouldn't be passed. But to get stuck on an ideological principle that the government should never intervene, even if means bringing on a depression, is foolish.
Save the economy? If you believe the economy has been saved you need some better news sources.
NO business should ever be bailed out by the government!! If you have a poor business plan and fail someone will come along and take your place, possibly being able to run a profitable business.
I have failed in business in the past and learned from my mistakes. I started over and have been successful for over 15 years. That is how True Capitalism works. But this country has not seen that in over 100 years.
Yeah, because saving the American auto industry wasn't important. That was millions of jobs plus the supply chain. And even today, the govt's ahead.
It wasn't about "saving the American auto industry". The reality is that GM's problems were virtually all of GM's doing. 27 years of lousy products (1973-2000) and poor leadership is what truly caused the GM decline. They were poorly run, and poorly run companies do not succeed. When you cannot make cars profitably -- and you are in the business of making cars -- you are doomed to failure.
There are a host of reasons why GM was not able to make cars profitably, but the SINGLE LARGEST was that their labor costs soared. GM STILL has the highest labor costs in the industry ($56/hr.) Couple that with weaker demand for their products, and you have a company that was destined to fail.
But you would be remiss -- and you are -- if you want to point out the government's largesse in "saving the American auto industry" without mentioning the screwing that the GM bondholders received.
The government IS NOT ahead where GM is concerned. The government was still billions of dollars short of recovering their investment as of the end of April, and effectively would have needed a stock price of $72 to do that. This morning, GM is expected to open at $36.25
The issue is that nothing has been done since the meltdown in 2008 with banks, AIG, F&F. Banks if anything are larger now than before and still making risky investments, I don't take issue with the bailout for the most part but we really need to change regulations so we aren't constantly rewarding risky behavior. Five years later they are still working to rewrite regulations. Banking should be restricted from gambling.
Finding an alternative to Summers is a step in the right direction, we don't need to reward wall street by putting them in regulatory agencies.
Save the economy? If you believe the economy has been saved you need some better news sources.
The argument was that doing nothing would create a much worse situation. Remember Paulson fire-speech in Congress about food riots if nothing was done? Whether or not those arguments were true or false is another issue, but those were the arguments which were used to sell the TARP. Personally I do not think we have had a president in the last 100 years who would not have done it.
We entered WW-I basically for the same reason. Back then we also had the bankers and the politicians in Congress arguing that if England did not win the war, it would cause our banks to fail, which would cause US economy as whole to fail. It was the same "too big to fail" argument. Wall Street was heavily invested in England winning the war, so basically they asked the Congress to send US troops to battle to save their money. It worked.
If anything, it should only **** every single one of us off even more.
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