When you have a certain philosophy on government ingrained into your head, it seems no amount of evidence showing you are wrong will change your mind. Or at least this seems to be the case with the Obama administration.
As evidence I give you his new plan to form a small business lending fund. This fund will lend money to smaller banks at favorable rates as long as they comply with new government regulations that will give them incentives to loan money to certain businesses, specifically small business. My initial thought was “you have to be kidding me”. Have we not learned any lessons from the last 40 years? This is the exact same premise that was used with the large banks including the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…the one that caused the housing and thus the economic crisis we now face. For those who have liberal friends who still do not believe government intervention and regulations caused the problem, this is a good read. And not so much what I wrote but the government report it was based upon (linked in the article).
In addition to Obama’s insistence on us repeating past failures, it is interesting where he wants to get this additional $30 billion. Obama is going to push a bank tax to get the TARP money back for the taxpayer. The only problem is that these big banks have already paid back the money. The ones who have not paid back the money are GM, Chrysler, AIG, and the GSEs Fannie and Freddie. But guess who are exempt from the tax…GM, Chrysler, Fannie and Freddie. Amazing how that works. So these banks that responsibly paid back the money get to pay for another government program, which means that the taxpayer gets to pay for it in the form of reduced interest rates on savings vehicles. But watch this spin move.
“We want our money back, and we’re going to get it. And that’s why I’m proposing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee to be imposed on major financial firms until the American people are fully compensated for the extraordinary assistance they provided to Wall Street. If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers.”
So despite the fact that taxpayers will still technically foot the bill, it is back to evil Wall Street and the good guys on Main Street for President Obama. The typical class warfare that liberals use to defend their big government policies. But unfortunately for them, it does not make it a sound policy. It just means they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and their flawed liberal economic philosophy.
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