openspace4life

Conservatives hate it because it involves the government spending vast amounts of taxpayer money (or at least, money borrowed from other parts of the global financial system on the theory that they can eventually use tax money to pay it back), some of which has been used to essentially nationalize major corporations. Progressives hate it because, on top of all that, most of the money has gone straight to the same kinds of huge financial institutions that got us into this mess in the first place. We would prefer that more of it go to more direct assistance for the American people, whether as a simple stimulus payout or, more likely, just as help with refinancing all those adjustable-rate mortgages and such.

Of course, some conservatives argue that the blame for this whole crisis can be placed at the feet of millions of borrowers who were too dumb to realize that they would be unable to make the payments on those ARMs when the rates went up. Others say that this is nobody's fault, just the natural ebb of the business cycle, and because the market always knows best, we should all just grit our teeth and wait it out. (This kind of rhetoric has been applied to other areas of global finance, and it tends to infuriate us progressives when "greedy irresponsible rich folks screw up again" always gets transformed into "nobody's fault.")

As for the most recent addition to the bailout "package," most conservatives would prefer to let the Big 3 automakers go bankrupt and get bought up by foreign automakers who actually know how to run a business, regardless of the massive layoffs that would likely result. Progressives prefer to somehow force these companies into a new shape, perhaps getting them to work on building more buses and trains to cope with the recent sharp increase in demand, or even gutting the factories and setting them up to stamp out wind turbines, regardless of how difficult and unlikely such a transition would be. (For those who see these as nice ideas but would prefer to keep our tax dollars out of it, Keith Knight has a great idea: use our gas dollars instead!)

All in all, the situation is just too miserable for me to have any clue what path is best, based solely on my dim recollection of a single semester of Global Political Economy. But as shown above, I'm far from alone in thinking that the current raft of "solutions" generally sucks.