Govt. Intervention
From Marketwatch:
"It feels like we've seen this movie before. It's called "Government Without a Cause," and features a moment where angst-filled protagonists play a game of chicken that goes horribly wrong. You remember the original, the scene in "Rebel Without a Cause" in which James Dean and the other young man try to see who will be the "chicken" and jump out of the car first.
The car, of course, is headed for a cliff and it's only after Dean leaps from the vehicle, laughing at the thrill of it all that he realizes the other guy never made it out. His sleeve got caught on the door handle and he went over the cliff with the car.
In the modern version of this movie, the American taxpayer is the poor guy with his arm stuck on the door handle, frantically trying to get loose. The major difference is that in this case, the Congress and the White House have actually tied him to the car and given an extra push on the gas pedal.
It isn't so much that Congress was wrong to have bailed on the bailout, or that the White House was wrong for advocating its passage, or even that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was wrong to have initially refused to use money from the financial bailout fund for the car companies only to reverse himself later. What's wrong, and might well remain wrong when the new Congress arrives in January, is the dithering and time wasting, the game of chicken that our leaders played for such incredibly high stakes. As we were racing toward the cliff, getting more and more afraid and unable to get out of the speeding car, it would have been nice if someone in the government had said, "don't worry, we have an emergency brake, no one is going to get hurt. At least not tonight."
"It feels like we've seen this movie before. It's called "Government Without a Cause," and features a moment where angst-filled protagonists play a game of chicken that goes horribly wrong. You remember the original, the scene in "Rebel Without a Cause" in which James Dean and the other young man try to see who will be the "chicken" and jump out of the car first.
The car, of course, is headed for a cliff and it's only after Dean leaps from the vehicle, laughing at the thrill of it all that he realizes the other guy never made it out. His sleeve got caught on the door handle and he went over the cliff with the car.
In the modern version of this movie, the American taxpayer is the poor guy with his arm stuck on the door handle, frantically trying to get loose. The major difference is that in this case, the Congress and the White House have actually tied him to the car and given an extra push on the gas pedal.
It isn't so much that Congress was wrong to have bailed on the bailout, or that the White House was wrong for advocating its passage, or even that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was wrong to have initially refused to use money from the financial bailout fund for the car companies only to reverse himself later. What's wrong, and might well remain wrong when the new Congress arrives in January, is the dithering and time wasting, the game of chicken that our leaders played for such incredibly high stakes. As we were racing toward the cliff, getting more and more afraid and unable to get out of the speeding car, it would have been nice if someone in the government had said, "don't worry, we have an emergency brake, no one is going to get hurt. At least not tonight."
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