Hypocrite: the man who murdered both his parents... pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. ~Abraham Lincoln
When Rick Santelli made his CNBC rant about bailing out homeowners who were upside down on their mortgages and couldn't make their monthly payments, I found myself, just for a moment, in agreement. I wonder how much of my tax money is going to be expended to help the irresponsible get out of messes they created. Frankly, it ain't right. Why do I and millions of others who are working our butts off to pay our own mortgages have to bail out people that had eyes and dreams bigger than their wallet and managed to find irresponsible bankers to enable their premature ambitions for a home? We shouldn't have to give them this assistance.
But that's not the point.
Santelli and others are guilty of extreme hypocrisy, the type that only raises its moral head when it serves a particular constituency. Nowhere was this more evident than in the US Senate and House of Representatives when the stimulus bill was being debated. Oh the horror, the outrage, the ignominy that we were about to spend billions on homeowners and small businesses and infrastructure projects. My gawd, what good can this possibly accomplish? Are we creating a socialist state? Tax cuts for middle-class wage earners? Surely, this cannot trickle down. Tax cuts are for rich people and big corporations, aren't they?
Where were these screaming opponents of irrationality when the Bush administration was writing blank checks to Wall Street and the auto giants with no strings attached? That was something that simply had to be done or our economy might plummet into chaos. And once they got the resources, the banks could then start issuing loans to get businesses going again. Except they didn't. The home mortgage refinance game seems to be doing quite well just now but new business loans and new home loans, the precise types of financing the banks were supposed to facilitate, just aren't happening. But all of our tax money is in those institutions.
Aren't they already nationalized?
All of the financial services firms and banks are fretting about President Obama executing a plan to nationalize but that appears to have already happened through the nature of the investments made by taxpayers. The US government spent $45 billion of your tax dollars to buy 6 percent of Bank of America, a company that is only valued at about $195 billion. Even I can do that math; it ain't exactly a deal for those of us who look at our paychecks and see big chunks going to Washington.
So back to those people who we are bailing out of their mortgages. I'd much prefer my tax money be used to help them than those idjits on Wall Street that have rolled up "perceived collateral" into "tranches" and sold it to even bigger idjits to get our economy into a pyramid scheme where even the schemers didn't quite know what the hell they were doing. But when it all went to pieces, the free market capitalists cried for help; they needed the government to keep them from total collapse. The only time they really like free markets is when they are getting ridiculously rich. They hate capitalism when it all falls down. Privatize the profits. Socialize the debt.
Which means Rick Santelli and the politicians complaining about helping out the little guy need to shut the hell up. If they'd been truly against government bailouts, they might have spoken up when Wall Street put out its elegant hand. Now that the little guy is asking for an assist, they're all wailing. Be quiet. Keep your hypocrisy to yourself.
The bailout boat has left the harbor with full sails and it's on a beat to the coast of an even bigger crisis.
Also at www.moorethink.com