Money Money Money Money

Welcome to Depression 2.0. If you disagree, that's fantastic for you, but I'm a pessimist by nature and that's just how I see it.

Yesterday the House voted to kill the $700 billion-with-a-B bailout plan, and while I'll admit up front to neither knowing nor frankly understanding the particulars, I have to say I'm glad. This is something that I would have been paying for until my retirement, my children would be paying for until their retirement, and likely my grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be paying for until THEIR retirement, and probably a generation or two after that. While I am aware and I agree that something needs to be done, I don't necessarily support the government whisking in with flags waving, fanfares blaring, and my forthcoming taxes at the ready to save the crooks who put all their eggs in one basket called Shady Mortgages. Furthermore, I don't support patchwork plans that cost more money than most of us can fathom and offer no assurance whatsoever of success.

Something that bothers me in the aftermath is all the finger pointing going on in the wake of the bill's demise. The facts are that the bill was voted down in the House 228 to 205; of the 205 Ayes (to approve the bill), 140 were Democrats and 65 were Republicans; of the 228 Noes (to decline the bill), 95 were Democrats and 133 were Republicans; one Republican abstained.

The Republicans are laying the blame squarely on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) speech just prior to the vote. It was rumored that the Ayes had it on both sides of the aisle prior to the vote, so what happened? Some said she scared and upset the Republicans into voting against the bill, thereby giving the majority to the Noes; that because Pelosi's speech took so many digs at Republicans, the Republicans took their proverbial ball and went home. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said that the speech "poisoned" the Republicans against the bill and, "I do believe that we could have gotten there today, had it not been for the partisan speech that the Speaker gave on the floor of the House." I'll agree that she was unnecessarily ideological and bitter in her speech (transcript here, for your reading pleasure.), but to that reasoning, I say, pbbbbbbbbbbt! Two weeks ago, two days ago, two minutes ago, you could have heard, up and down the halls of the House, Republicans taking any opportunity for another potshot at Pelosi et al. (To be fair, you could have heard the Democrats doing the same thing regarding the Republicans, but that's beside the point.) So since when are Republicans so moved and/or scared by anything Pelosi says or does that they would instantaneously change their vote? If the bill was such a shining example of bipartisan legislation, since when do personal feelings come into play? Congresspeople are figureheads, meant to represent the beliefs and opinions of their constituents. I know, my naivete is showing. But if the bill is bad, cop to it and say so. Don't whine and say, "She was mean to me!" You're big boys and girls now. Use your words. Furthermore, when people are this scared and the future is this foggy and/or bleak, how dare you even suggest that Republicans would vote against an ostensible economic - oh let's use McCain's semantics for it - "rescue" solely because of hurt feelings and insult?

Democrats by and large seem to be throwing up their hands, blaming the Republicans for killing the bill. Pelosi's reaction included statements such as, "Today, when the legislation came to the floor, the Democratic side more than lived up to its side of the bargain." There were various iterations to similar effect. Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said, "...we came to the floor today with a piece of legislation that the members of our caucus decided was in the best interest of the country. And 60 percent of [the Democrats] put aside all of their individual feelings, emotions, experiences, and voted for this bill. Sixty-seven percent of the Republican Conference decided to put political ideology ahead of the best interests of our great nation." But let's not get too comfortable on that there high horse, Clyburn. If the bill was such a good plan, why didn't every Democrat in the room join hands in support of it? Democrats could have carried the bill without participation of a single Republican, but 95 Democrats voted against the bill. As Representative Pete Viscloskey (D-IN) said, "We are now in the golden age of thieves. And where I come from we put thieves in jail, we don't bail them out."

I've heard the media - several different outlets - painting the Republicans who voted against the bill in response to a flood of calls and emails from their constituents as weak and easily swayed because they by and large happened to also be up for re-election. The up-for-re-election business aside (because it would [okay, does] dismay me that voting one's constituency is an activity that is only seen during one's election year), I have this to say: um, that's their job, to vote the way their constituents tell them to. As I said earlier, they are Representatives, as in, representing the opinions and beliefs of the people who voted them into office. Under no circumstances should they vote their own beliefs when those beliefs go against the grain of their represented public, and don't you dare give me a line like, "Well the people voted the Rep in because s/he embodied the people's beliefs, so any way the Rep votes will thus be the way the people would have voted." That's crap logic. When your constituents tell you overwhelmingly to vote one way, you vote that way. Don't paint Representatives as villains because they voted their constituency. The people said no, so the answer is no. In fact, the real villains are the ones that pretend their constituency doesn't exist, that vote only their own opinions, as if they alone were in charge of how the vote should go.

Oh, but John Q. American Public, don't think you get to slide by unscathed. Today, Steven Pearlstein points the finger at you. It's YOUR fault that no solution is in hand. "The basic problem here is that too many people don't understand the seriousness of the situation. Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system." Really, Stevie? For two solid weeks, we're told that the sky is falling, that history is repeating itself 78 years and 11 months later, that we're all completely screwed, and we'd better go get in line early for the soup kitchen. We get that the problem is serious, that something BIG is going down. But I'll agree with you that we don't fully grasp the matter at hand. Why is that, do you think, Mr. Pearlstein? I posit to you that the people who get all this, who were at the root of the problem, who govern the subject, and who study it in depth, are collectively a very, very rare bird. Those of us who know finance only so far as to pay what the bill tells us to every month are collectively a much more common animal. So where do you get off taking me to task because I do not thrill at the sight of an Economics text? I pay people to be on top of that for me, just like people pay me to make sure they don't sound like blithering idiots to the client. However, those people, like yourself, who smugly sneer at silly little ignorant me, have yet to provide any comprehensive explanation of the problem in real-person words. How am I expected to "come to understand how deep the hole really is and how we're all in it together" without someone explaining to me that there is a hole, that it is this wide and this deep, and its walls are coated with this many slimy things and full of this many loose rocks? Jim Jubak, bless his heart, at least makes an attempt. And finally, thanks Steven, for closing with your holier-than-thou lament for what might have been: "In better times, the public might have put aside its reluctance in response to the strong and unified recommendation of political and business leaders. But it is a measure of how little trust remains in both Washington and Wall Street that voters are willing to risk a serious hit to their wealth and income rather than follow their lead." You're right that Washington and Wall Street have been stripping away every reason we have to trust that they know what they're doing. But just because someone takes the lead doesn't make them a good or knowledgeable leader.

I've said before that I honestly don't know how this all happened, what it all means, what's going to happen next, how it affects me and mine, or how we're going to get out of it. I don't know the details of the bill, I don't know how finance and markets and notes and bonds and all that crap works. That's for Sister, the finance major, to understand. Ha!

But here's what I think and here's what I know.

You don't put a band-aid on a gushing artery. The catastrophic failure and shaky prop-ups came to a head only last week. How in the hell did anyone think that a bill originated and concluded between then and Monday would be solid enough to win confidence from anyone? It was simply put together too fast and we all know that hasty, reactionary moves lead to nothing but more disaster down the line. Time was not taken to explore the alternatives, to consider other paths. It was as though the drafters got this idea into their heads and touted it as the only way to go, and since they're supposed to be the big experts, no one asked for anything else before putting it to the House floor. No one asked whether it was a good plan, or just A plan. This was a shell of a bill, a wad of gum in the hole in the dam, a strip of duct tape over the crack in the foundation. Rather than simply reacting, I think they need to take a step back and consider what's really happening, what's at the root, and how to prevent it from happening again. Deferral of the problem to coming generations, and faith that the future will turn it all around and make it all better, is foolish.