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The sales pitch for financial-reform legislation pending in the House claims it would put a stop to "too big to fail" bailouts for the leading banks. The reality is the opposite. The federal government would instead be granted unlimited authority to spend whatever it takes to prop up the big boys when they get in trouble. Only in the next crisis, Congress won't have to be asked for the money. ... And the emergency lending could be pumped into any financial institution in trouble - not just behemoth commercial banks but investment houses like Goldman Sachs, insurance companies, hedge funds or any other pools of private capital whose failure regulators believe would threaten the system.
October 31, 1936:
A final point that many of the President's defenders keep ignoring. You don't praise your kid for getting a C+, or even a B-, on an exam, when they could have had an A, but simply didn't try. If anything, praising your child for blowing off the exam and getting a B- sends exactly the wrong signal. This administration is far too consumed with whether it is liked, far too afraid of being criticized, and far too obsessed with about avoiding conflict at all costs.
Ezra Klein, on the other hand, says:
The first year of the Obama presidency has been a long tutorial on the difference between liberal ends and liberal means. If I told you America has a president determined to pass large amounts of Keynesian stimulus spending (that's particularly concentrated in impoverished areas), a near-universal health-care plan, and a bill addressing climate change, you'd say liberals had recaptured the White House. Ambitious liberals, even. But though Obama's program is quite liberal, he doesn't seem to care much how it's achieved. ... You could imagine a lot of presidents more dogmatically liberal than Obama, but I wonder whether there are a lot of plausible hypotheticals in which they amass more liberal achievements than Obama. At the executive level, it might be the case that being too liberal is a liability to, well, liberalism.
The first year of the Obama presidency has been a long tutorial on the difference between liberal ends and liberal means. If I told you America has a president determined to pass large amounts of Keynesian stimulus spending (that's particularly concentrated in impoverished areas), a near-universal health-care plan, and a bill addressing climate change, you'd say liberals had recaptured the White House. Ambitious liberals, even.
But though Obama's program is quite liberal, he doesn't seem to care much how it's achieved. ... You could imagine a lot of presidents more dogmatically liberal than Obama, but I wonder whether there are a lot of plausible hypotheticals in which they amass more liberal achievements than Obama. At the executive level, it might be the case that being too liberal is a liability to, well, liberalism.