in light of recent *cough* national events surrounding wall street, i just wanted to point out that the word “ussr” is used more often in common language than the word “innovation”.
do your part and send your favorite hedge fund manager or ibanker exec a singing telegram: *you don’t know how lucky you are, boy*
But have you heard anyone in authority asking about the $700 billion bailout: How do you propose to pay for it?
There seems to be a center-based consensus that some form of bailout is of vital importance to the nation’s economy, to its image, and to the global financial system. I agree. But important national projects are worth paying for. Especially when the projects in question are a sop to an industry that has asked for—and received—so much from Washington in the past decade. Think about everything Wall Street has been given since the late 1990s: cuts in the capital-gains tax, dividend tax, and estate tax; cuts in marginal income tax rates; free-trade agreements; low interest rates; light regulation. The promise was that doing the bidding of the financial-services industry would deliver solid growth and boost incomes for everyone. It didn’t. This business cycle, in which job growth was generally anemic, ended with median incomes about where they were at the end of the last business cycle. The S&P 500 is basically where it was 10 years ago. Sure, we got cheap mortgages, all the credit we could eat, and some higher corporate income-tax payments for a few years. But now Wall Street wants it all back in the form of bailouts.
It may seem silly to ask about the long-term budgetary implications of bailouts in the time of an emergency. When a fire engine is racing toward a four-alarm blaze, nobody stops to worry that speeding will put wear and tear on the engine. And what’s another few hundred billion dollars of debt on top of a national debt that already reaches $9.7 trillion? But to not ask this question would be acting recklessly with other people’s money. Which is how we got into this mess in the first place.
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