Tai-Chi Policy

And it’s not the end of the world, despite what the press may be saying. Heck, percentage wise, today’s drop didn’t even enter into the top 10.

Republicans are blaming the failure of the bill on a speech Nancy Pelosi gave, trying to blame the whole situation on the Republicans. No Nancy, this is pretty much the fault of minority rights groups that tend to be entirely aligned with the Democrats, and, I might add, have close ties to certain presidential candidates of your party.

I don’t know why a speech by Pelosi should sway any of the Republican lawmakers one way or the other though.

Forbes is blaming the failure on the Republicans who voted against the bill. Sure, almost 2/3 voted against the bill. But I would point out that so did 40% of the Democrats, and there are a lot more Dems in the House right now. 23 more couldn’t change their vote? I don’t think you can blame one party in particular for this vote not going through.

On the other hand though, you do have to wonder if Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want this vote to succeed for some political reason. Do I think Nancy Pelosi is that politically calculating? Iraq. Barack Obama also seems to be sitting this out, politically.

What do I think about our need for a bailout? Well, bad government got us into this situation. Government might be the most expedient way to get us out, with a bailout. But whether or not that is necessary, I think the main thing that needs to be done in the near future is to stop pressuring the large banks into subprime lending, which virtually everyone agrees is the core fault – we just disagree on what caused the subprime lending. The data, however, is clear: at least a large portion of the pressure for subprime lending came from rights groups who insisted that minorities with bad credit not receiving as many loans was racist, simply because they were minorities. Maybe markets do need greater regulation in some ways, although I’m inclined to think that fear of bankruptcy is probably a pretty large incentive in and of itself. What does need to happen to avoid this situation in the future though is to undo the political pressures, and government backings that encouraged (or strongarmed) so many larger banks into issuing risky loans.