Category Archives: Stimulus
Pass it Now, Right Away, Don’t Delay
President Obama’s jobs program calls for another $45o billion of the spending that dare not speak its name. That name would be “stimulus“. He wants it passed immediately – “no games, no politics , no delays”. And he wants it paid for by ending charitable deductions for the rich, capital gains tax rates for hedge fund tycoons, oil industry deductions, and of course, breaks for jet owners.
Unless Congress gets with his plan, unlikely, he says it’s up to the “super committee” to come up with other offsets. Right away.
The President’s Speech
It’s settled. The president’s latest big jobs speech will not be ignored in favor of the Republican debate on Wednesday. It will be ignored in favor of the NFL opener between the Packers and the Saints on Thursday.
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Man of the People
The president celebrated his birthday in style while the stock market suffered its worst week since March 2009. Here’s an exchange between ABC’s Jake Tapper and press secretary Jay Carney over the collapsing stock market on Thursday.
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More Sacred Bull
The president is sharing the sacrificial bull till the sacred cows come home. He has the Republicans where he wants em, continue building on his 24% grab of the economy or take the blame for a social security scare.
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Walk the Walk
Wall Street wasn’t an innocent bystander but Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner pin the blame for the financial meltdown on Fannie Mae in their book Reckless Endangerment. They say Fannie head, James Johnson figured out how to monetize the outfit’s government backing.
Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating the homeownership mania, and spread “charitable” contributions to housing advocates across the congressional map.
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