Charles Schumer is an idiot.
You won't often hear me calling people idiots. I tend to not like doing that. I don't call people idiots just for disagreeing with me. You have to have come out with "a real doozy" for that word to apply.
The Democrats killed (by vote) the Republican alternative to Obama's economic plan. They claimed that the package of mostly tax cuts, including cutting the bottom personal tax brackets, was just too expensive. This comes from the same people whose only hesitation on the collection of pork termed a "stimulus package" is that they 'fear' it may not spend enough money.
The real beauty, however, comes from Schumer's objection to the Republican plan to encourage banks to offer fixed-rate mortgage loans at 4-4.5% with 'jumbo loans' being exempt. This would help an awful lot of people, by the way, especially the minorities that the Democrats claim to favor. Think about it... the Democrats encourage minority home ownership by letting banks offer a $300,000 loan at variable interest rates, for a house that was worth less than $200K just a few years ago. The Republicans encourage minority home ownership by floating a suggestion to encourage banks to lend to them at a 4-4.5% fixed rate. But anyways, back to Schumer's objection.
The plan would provide a windfall to banks charging fees to refinance mortgages.
That's right, that's his objection. Those naughty banks might actually make some profit off the mortgage refinancing fee. We're talking roughly in the neighborhood of $3,000 for the privilege of refinancing a loan. What will that do to the poor consumer? Well, I recently refinanced at a lower interest rate and rolled the cost into the loan, and still saved over $300/month in bill payments. But that's besides the point, really.
Banks might make money by refinancing mortgages. That's the objection.
Remember TARP? It was meant to hand banks some capital in hopes of restoring liquidity. Basically, the government handed them money in hopes that they would start lending again. Guess what the banks didn't do with the money. That's right. This plan got through a Democrat-controlled Congress with ease.
So basically, it's A-Ok for the government to give the banks 'free' money in hopes that they'll start lending again, but it's unacceptable for the government to prod banks into earning some money by starting to lend again.
This isn't about the economy! This is about government control of the private sector! The Democrats aren't after an end to the recession. They want to turn this country to socialism. They're just using the recession as an excuse!
This is actually pretty par for the course when you're a liberal thinker. I can pull two examples out of the top of my head, both relating to the environmentalist arm of the liberal genius brigade.
ReplyDeleteThe first is that liberals are all about maintaining the pristine nature of forests which, as time has shown, means that forests must be regularly thinned and the debris cleaned out since the natural processes of small harmless fires doing it naturally was killed off by environmental policy years ago. Environmentalists are fine with this... as long as no one benefits. Logging companies have decades of experience in keeping forests healthy to enhance their own profits because healthy forests means forests that will produce lots and lots of good lumber for them to harvest. But the liberals work themselves into a towering rage whenever someone suggests that logging companies help maintain forests because the companies might PROFIT! Profit is an evil thing, you see, so it's more important that profit be prevented than the forests be pristine.
Another example is related to Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone has this really fascinating and rare kind of microorganism that is called a "thermophile"; essentially, a terestrial single-celled critter that thrives in water hot enough to boil the skin off a person in a second. Biotech companies are really interested in this bug and so, at one point, they offered to pay National Parks Service a whole ton of money in return for the right to harvest some of the rare thermophiles. The idea that a biotech company might make money and, worse, that they might give the National Parks Service money, enraged the liberals who promptly sued to prevent the biotech companies from paying the NPS. Thus, they successfully prevented the NPS from getting extra operating funds to maintain Yellowstone although the biotech companies are still allowed to harvest the thermophiles; they're just not allowed to pay for the privilage.
The above two examples go a long way, in my mind, in explaining why an imbicile like Chuck Schumer is so worked-up about the Republican proposal: it would result in someone making money while achieving what the Democrats want to achieve and that makes it evil.
By the by... if you want to find another candidate for "idiot", Gothe, I suggest getting yourself a transcript of the interview Sean Hannity conducted with Senator Arlan Specter on Feb 10. Actually, perhaps that's too harsh... it's possible that Specter was just being deliberately obtuse so he didn't have to admit that his position on the "stimulus bill" was a crock. By now, there is no serious dispute that government spending and socialistic economic programs dragged a serious recession in 1929 into a massive economic freefall which we call the Great Depression. Still, no matter how often this undisputed fact was brought up to him, Specter mulishly insisted that the government needs to "do something" because it was government action that saved America from worse during the Great Depression. Even when confronted with a quote from FDR's own Secretary of the Treasury admitting that the massive spending was a useless gesture, Specter insisted that massive spending was the answer. I almost felt sorry for the man, forced to defend a clearly absurd position... almost. After all, he chose that absurd position of his own free will and further has chosen to defend it no matter how absurd his defense sounds. Regardless, however, the stunt he and the other two senators pulled means that the Republicans no longer have enough people to fillibuster the bad legislation to death. Thus is demonstrated why the McCain wing of the Republican Party was doomed from the start: everyone knows that the moderates he represents are an obstacle to all the good the party might do.