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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (47347)	9/17/2008 4:49:42 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 224705

September 17, 2008 Editorial Mr. McCain and the Economy John McCain spent Monday claiming as he had countless times before — that the economy was fundamentally sound. Had he missed the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the sale of Merrill Lynch, which were announced the day before? Did he not notice the agonies of the American International Group? Was he unaware of the impending layoffs of tens of thousands of Wall Street employees on top of the growing numbers of unemployed workers throughout the United States? On Tuesday, he clarified his remarks. The clarification was far more worrisome than his initial comments. He said that by calling the economy fundamentally sound, what he really meant was that American workers are the best in the world. In the best Karl Rovian fashion, he implied that if you dispute his statement about the economy’s firm foundation, you are, in effect, insulting American workers. “I believe in American workers, and someone who disagrees with that — it’s fine,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer. Let’s get a few things straight. First, no one who is currently running for president does not “believe in American workers.” More to the point, the economy is stressed to the breaking point by fundamental problems — in housing, finance, credit, employment, health care and the federal budget — that have been at best neglected, at worst exacerbated during the Bush years. And as a result, American workers have taken a beating. In clarifying his comments, Mr. McCain lavished praise on workers, but ignored their problems. That is the real insult. For decades, typical Americans have not been rewarded for their increasing productivity with comparably higher pay or better benefits. The disconnect between work and reward has been especially acute during the Bush years, as workers’ incomes fell while corporate profits, which flow to investors and company executives, ballooned. For workers, that is a fundamental flaw in today’s economy. It is grounded in policies like a chronically inadequate minimum wage and an increasingly unprogressive tax system, for which Mr. McCain offers no alternatives. As for Wall Street, Mr. McCain blamed the meltdown on “unbridled corruption and greed.” He called for a commission to find out what happened and propose solutions. His diagnosis and his cure are misguided. The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices. The regulatory failure is rooted in a markets-are-good-government-is-bad ideology that has been ascendant as long as Mr. McCain has been in Washington and championed by his own party. If Mr. McCain adheres to some other belief system, we would like to hear about it.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (47347)	9/17/2008 4:50:44 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224705

September 17, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Keep It in Vegas By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Watching some financial stocks just get wiped out in recent months, I often hear a voice in the back of my head, and it is the same voice as one of those dealers in Las Vegas who coolly tells you as he sweeps up your chips after you’ve busted in blackjack: “Thank you for playing, ladies and gentlemen.” That’s what happens when bubbles burst. You feel wiped out, and the coolness with which the dealers — in this case the markets — sweep away all your chips is unnerving. It’s easy to over-react, and it is important that we don’t. Now is the time for coolly sorting out what markets can do best and what governments need to do better. Let’s understand what happened here. Wall Street — the financial industry — became a bubble in recent years thanks to an excess of liquidity and the oldest bubble maker in history: greed. Some of the smartest people forgot one of the oldest rules of investing: There is no such thing as a risk-free return. When you reach too far for yield, sooner or later you get burned. In the ’90s, the no-lose, risk-free, high-yield return was supposed to be dot-com stocks. This decade’s version are subprime mortgages and financial stocks. Just like the dot-comers in the 1990s, the financial stocks got inflated to ridiculous levels and salaries for Wall Street executives reached ridiculous heights. You are now watching live and in color that bubble burst: “Thank you for playing, Lehman Brothers.” That’s really sad for a 158-year-old company. The market is now consolidating this industry, with the strong eating the weak, which will impose its own fiscal discipline. Good. Maybe then more of our next generation of math geniuses will think about going into engineering the next great global industry — energy technology — rather than engineering derivatives. But we also need to understand the uniqueness of this bubble in order to identify where smart government needs to step in. One reason this financial bubble got so big is now well known: you and your neighbor went out and got subprime mortgages, which enabled many more people to become homeowners — a real blessing. Your local finance company or bank, which extended those mortgages, later resold them to an aggregator who put them into big packages with thousands of other subprime mortgages. Then those loan packages were chopped up and sold in small pieces as corporate bonds to all kinds of institutions, who were reaching for extra yield. Your subprime mortgage payments went to pay the interest on those bonds. But as the housing market collapsed, and people couldn’t cover their mortgages or sell their houses, the bonds lost value and, therefore, the banks that held them lost capital, and the whole pyramid started to crumble. This infected the entire housing market, so banks no longer knew the value of their mortgage-backed assets. The result? They stopped lending. Hence, the current credit crunch. This credit crunch is what makes this crisis so lethal. We can’t tolerate a prolonged situation where banks won’t lend to good companies. That’s why Congress needs to create another Resolution Trust Corporation like we used to get out of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. As then, so now, we need a government agency to buy the toxic mortgages off the banks’ balance sheets, hold them and sell them in an orderly way later. That would prevent a fire sale of homes and mortgages now and restore confidence to banks so they start lending again. In the long run, though, regulators need to find ways to limit the amount of leverage investment banks or insurance companies can take on at any one time, because given how intertwined they all are in today’s global economy, one bank blowing up can now take down many. “We are at the end of an era — the end of ‘leave it to the markets’ and of the great cop-out that less government is always better government,” argues David Rothkopf, a former Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration and author of a book about the world’s financial leaders who brought about this crisis: “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.” “I think, however, it is important to stress the difference between smart government and simply more government. “We do not need a regulatory ‘surge’ on Wall Street,” he added. “We need a complete rethinking of how we make global financial markets more transparent and how we ensure that the risks within those markets — .many of which are new and many of which are not well understood even by the experts — are managed and monitored properly.” In sum, government’s job is to police that fine line between the necessary risk-taking that drives an innovation economy and crazy gambling with other people’s savings in ways that threaten us all. We need to make sure that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas — and doesn’t come to Main Street. We need to get back to investing in our future and not just betting on it.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (47347)	9/18/2008 11:02:01 AM
From: Ann Corrigan	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224705

ObamaCare=higher taxes & shoddy healthcare for you and your family. Facts are in on government run healthcare and here are the realistic results: America shouldn't repeat Britain's healthcare atrocities by Peter Pitts, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest Sept 17 2008 Britain’s National Health Service is no longer in the business of saving lives. The British agency tasked with deciding which treatments the government will cover just ruled that if a life-saving drug costs too much, it shouldn’t be prescribed -- even if it’s the only treatment option. For those familiar with the British agency -- disingenuously called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) -- the announcement wasn’t surprising. Since its creation in 1999, NICE has been used as a tool for denying cutting-edge medicines to countless patients. Just a few weeks ago, for example, NICE determined that four breakthrough kidney cancer drugs were too expensive for the British government to cover. And last year, NICE ruled that two treatments for the eye condition macular degeneration were too pricey. While deliberating over the details of that decision, as many as 10,000 patients with the condition may have gone blind. Despite these horror stories, Congress is trying to create a similar agency right here in the United States. In August, Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) introduced the Comparative Effectiveness Research Act of 2008. It would create a new government body to evaluate the relative effectiveness of different medical treatments. While conducting side-by-side comparisons of various treatments sounds like a worthwhile endeavor, it will almost certainly be abused for the purposes of saving the government money. When healthcare is financed with the government’s finite resources, the government has an interest in cutting corners wherever it can. That’s why Britain is willing to sacrifice lives if medical treatment comes with too high a price tag. Considering that the U.S. government foots more than half the nation’s healthcare bill (thanks to Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs), it’s all but certain that any U.S. agency tasked comparing medical treatment would eventually have a similar mandate. Britain’s healthcare injustices are atrocious and unnecessary. A nation that refuses to protect the lives of its citizens is not worthy of emulation by the United States. With any luck, U.S. lawmakers will come to realize this before it’s too late. If they don’t, American patients will be much worse off. Peter J. Pitts is President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA Associate Commissioner. easttexasreview.com blogs.wsj.com