Wanted: Public reassurance on Wall Street cure
By MARIANNE MEANS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON – In the early Bush administration years, still riding high with a complacent Republican Congress and a demoralized Democratic opposition, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill warned Vice President Dick Cheney that uncontrolled spending was producing dangerously high federal deficits, wiping out the huge surplus inherited from President Clinton.
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O’Neill later disclosed that Cheney had cut him off, saying coldly that “deficits don’t matter.” The quote seemed odd for a fiscal conservative at the time, but now looks astoundingly stupid.[/i]
This is, of course, similar to that other bone-headed Cheney argument that invading Iraq was wonderful because the country had links to the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks and harbored vast weapons of mass destruction.
None of that proved to be true. Mercifully, Cheney, long thought to be the real power behind the Bush throne, is nowhere to be seen in the current financial meltdown. We do hope Cheney is now on an around-the-world cruise with little communication, basking in the sunlight of the political wreckage he has left behind. We also hope that he’s forgotten that silly legal argument that he’s really a part of the congressional branch of government, rather than the White House, a ploy to help him evade federal requirements that his records be made public.
Because if he’s part of Congress, why isn’t he trying to amend the power-grab of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and make the bailout more friendly to consumers whose money is at stake? Oh, well, that’s not his nature, is it?
So why do federal deficits matter when there’s a financial crisis that is basically due to bad loans and bad judgment on Wall Street? Why is it causing turmoil across both U.S. and world markets?
In that mysterious world where money (or its paper equivalent) passes around like peanuts, there is suddenly no money to pass.
The savviest congressional leaders of both parties profess not to know how this financial disaster came upon us, but they have dark suspicions – and should have.
Their questions of Paulson and his economic buddies during the hearings Tuesday were knowledgeable and elicited mostly financial double-talk. Even Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the brightest of the lot, didn’t seem to grasp it fully.
Wall Street’s grip on the U.S. financial system has been exposed as a fraud, conceived by a bunch of elite folks who figured out how to mystify the rest of us and enrich themselves.
Public trust never entered their minds. Their credo is confuse the suckers and take their money.
Even before the bailout plan was announced, the Congressional Budget Office estimated this month that the deficit for fiscal 2009 would reach $438 billion, a record. Under the bailout plan, the U.S. treasury would be authorized to spend money that could take the deficit to $900 billion.
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That would rival the highest deficits in history, recorded in the Reagan administration. But Reagan tried to back down a little, quietly agreeing to some tax hikes despite his anti-tax rhetoric. And the wars he waged were against small countries and didn’t last very long.[/b]
Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain support the bailout plan, in principle, and object to its most offensive feature, the protection of huge golden parachutes for chief executives who have ruined their companies.
The congressional proposal that all such salaries should be capped at the same level as that of the president, which is $400,000, sounds sensible.
They each have some legal twists they would like to see, and no doubt the package can be improved. But it’s a start, and nobody can risk stopping to look around. Not now.
We will examine how we got here later, but for the moment we need some public reassurance.
And – conservatives, listen up – that can only come from the federal government. Among other things, that means an end to the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, guys. Like it or not.