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Townhall...
Saving
the Republic from Saving Itself
By Bill Tatro
6/30/11
The
further we get away from those
fateful election of 2008, the more revisionist history takes hold.
Most
recently, I keep hearing how the
choice for the next election is between the guy who saved us from the
Great
Depression Part II and everyone else who wants to take us back to the
policies
that created those problems.
I’m
told by people of all political
persuasions that if the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, and the
President
hadn’t acted, I’d probably be in a bread line right now.
Fortunately,
my memory is not as
clouded as many others.
Hank
Paulson (then Secretary of the
Treasury), on that memorable Thursday evening, went to Congress and met
with a
select group of congressmen and senators, in addition to Ben Bernanke
(Fed
Chairman) and Tim Geithner (President of the New York Fed.)
Paulson
stated that if $700 billion
wasn’t authorized immediately, then the financial world as we knew it
would
end.
There
would be colossal financial and
economic chaos, even martial law, and it would be on the heads of those
in that
room.
He
needed the money to buy the toxic
assets (mortgages) from the banks.
Those
comments terrified everyone.
Heck,
they would have terrified me,
too.
The
gun sounded, and we were off to
the races: TARP, TALF, stimulus, credits, clunkers, etc. Time simply doesn’t allow
me to describe all
the public fleecing machinations that occurred over the past few years
in the
name of saving the Republic.
The
reality was that the Republic was
not in danger of a Depression at that point, though it may be now. Rather, the danger at that
time was the
collapse of large businesses such as banks, automobile manufacturers,
and
insurance companies.
Like
any business cycle, there would
have been winners and losers, with the winners ready, willing, and able
to
replace the losers, no matter how big.
Unfortunately, that pattern was interrupted so
that certain
well-connected entities could be saved.
Think UAW.
That
interruption disturbed the
natural order of the economic cycle, and created “too big to fail.”
Ben
Bernanke recently stated “We don’t
have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting.” Ben’s answer could be
found by looking back
at that fateful Thursday evening in 2008.
If Congress had simply said “no” back then we
would be celebrating
growth and not creating revisionist history.
Read
it at Townhall
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