Allen October 2nd, 2008
Laura Hollis writes about Thomas Sowell’s eternal question: “And then what?” Thomas asks this question over and over in his book, Applied Economics
Laura stresses that many of the same people who got us into this mess with sub-prime mortgage crisis never asked the question “And then what?”.
Quoting from Laura’s essay:
As Thomas Sowell points out so elegantly, politicians tend to think only of the short term – what will get them through the next election. But the rest of us MUST think about the long term, because we’re the ones who are going to be stuck with it. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by yesterday’s problem and deluded by today’s promises, we will be blindsided by tomorrow’s crisis. And tomorrow’s crisis will be catastrophic.
With all due respect to the Underpants Gnomes, perhaps we need to formalize the Politician Gnomes’ plan for everything:
- Propose a program that will get us elected.
- Get Elected.
- ???
Allen October 2nd, 2008
BatesLine has a great extended quote from probably one of the best Senators in Congress today, Tom Coburn:
As a practicing physician, I compare where we are today to a physician who commits malpractice. We have a patient with cancer. They have a secondary pneumonia because of the cancer. We are going to treat the pneumonia. We are going to give the antibiotics, we are going to give something to lower the temperature, we are going to give something to suppress the cough, we are going to give something to thin the mucous, but we are not going to fix the cancer. We are going to ignore the cancer.
Let me tell you what the cancer is. The cancer is Congresses that, for years upon years, have totally ignored the Constitution of the United States and taken us to areas where we have no business being. There is no way you can justify, in the U.S. Constitution, that the country ought to be the source of mortgages for homeowners in this country. Yet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control 70 percent of the mortgages in this country.
I plan on voting for this bill. I support that we have to do something now. But how we got here is very important if we are going to fix things in the future….
If anybody in America is mad about this situation, there is only one place they need to direct their anger and it is right in the Congress of the United States.
I’m slightly in favor of the bail-out. However, I could also see this becoming a political boondoggle that will haunt our nation for a long, long time. That ’sense of needing to do something’ can quickly lead to poor legislation. Witness the ‘Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act’, socialized medicine schemes and other intrusions of government into areas where it doesn’t belong.
Perhaps we are giving the nation something to ‘thin the mucous’.
Or perhaps…