EJ Dionne: The Street on Welfare

[tpsbmam]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/17/AR2008031702154_pf.html

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them.

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?

more at link

[Hydra]

1. Pukeworthy

As all of this situation is.

Lets just say it: Capitalism fails in the long term, and in the short term, it sucks too except for the people at the top.

It's time to put a stake in the old vampire and burn the body.

[stubtoe]

2. Recommended nt

[BigDogDistrict44]

3. People need job's to invest, and companies invest in

other countries. Hell America does to when they gave the 30 billion contract to France for planes that could have helped the American economy.

[bemildred]

4. US corporations are the biggest "welfare queens" on the planet.

And they have been for a long time.