This is an ongoing series where I point out the hypocrisy of saying one thing while doing another as it relates to giving taxpayer money to rich people.
We've been told time and again over the past few years (decades) that some sort of exigent circumstance requires us to give rich folks money. Yet, after the storm passes, after the emergency subsides, we don't bother to recover the loot.
In fact, in the current 'emergency' (which has now lasted over three years!) we are continuing to hand out more moolah.
Bonddad and New Deal Democrat posted a perfectly sensible diary earlier that made the Rec-list. It was also largely irrelevant in the meat of the claim.
Bonddad suggests that
The NBER has now authoritatively settled the acrimonious debate that raged on this blog last year. We were telilng you the truth.
The NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee is a committee of (currently) Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, and Princeton folks who make historical judgments about when things like recessions begin and end. This is valuable from a technical standpoint for various economists and historians and so forth to have a broadly agreed upon dating standard, sort of like how we all mostly agree on time zones, or how the IEEE promulgates engineering standards. The NBER has declared their perspective that the Republican Recession (unfortunately, they're too nonpartisan to call it that) lasted about a year and a half, from the end of 2007 to the middle of 2009.
Bonddad seems to think this matters beyond the technicalities. That's where we disagree. The debate isn't one of econometric notation; it's one of political economy, of how we allocate scarce resources in our society. In short, no substantive debate has been engaged, let alone settled. Government by Dow is both terrible policy and terrible politics.
We are still* using the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to hand out taxpayer money in various ways to various people who, at the end of the day, coincidentally have a not-so-random distribution skewed toward the wealthy end of the spectrum. Huge amounts of preventable suffering have happened, and we seem likely to incur more preventable suffering over the coming years.
If we're in recovery - if we've been in recovery for a year - why can't we end all the backstops and loan guarantees and windows and regulatory exceptions and everything else that we have done in trickle-down, supply-side fashion to put money in rich peoples' pockets in the unicorn-and-ponies hope that these folks will magically disperse these funds throughout the economy? If the worst is over, why can't we prosecute the corporate fraudsters that wrecked the economy in the first place? There's no more worrying about the stability of the system - right?
That's the diary I've been waiting years for from bonddad and the other defenders of corporate bailouts. If we've solved the problems, why can't we get our money back now? With interest commensurate to the risk of the capital we put on the line. If we haven't solved the underlying problems, it's stupid to put technical concepts like recovery into political jargon. That's lots of downside risk with little upside.
*Hey, don't take my word for it. Read up about it [PDF warning]. As the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program summarizes in this short little chart, government handouts to the wealthy financial system have increased by over 20% during the recovery.