Word: bailouts
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...politics, to finish the circle, might end up being more important for future jobs than one would think. A little-noticed provision added to the bailout bill over the weekend would, in five years time, remove the burden of today’s bank woes from the backs of taxpayers and dump them right back from where they came. If the troubled-securities bought by the Treasury Department aren’t worth what the Treasury paid for them, the president must submit a plan to use new taxes to recover the government’s losses from the finance...
...over the past few days about putting aside their partisan differences for the good of the country to pass a financial markets rescue plan. But they mostly appeared to agree on one thing: that even if they were going to support it, no one much liked the $700 billion bailout bill they had negotiated with the Bush Administration, and certainly no one much wanted to take any credit...
...most obvious culprits in a legislative meltdown that many warn could take the economy down with it were House Republicans, who had gotten an earful from their constituents disapproving of the bailout and had been strongly against it from the start. After scuttling the first proposed deal last week at a contentious White House meeting, saying they simply didn't have the votes, House Republican leaders forced a renegotiation of the bill, moving it further to the right to make it more palatable to their members. Then, after marathon talks over the weekend, an agreement was struck...
...heard them get so excited about so much for so long, who can possibly know? The vacuum has also been filled by political columnists and pundits, some of whom (like Paul Krugman) actually know a lot about the subject. But again, when the most specific predictions about the bailout bill - that it's unnecessary, or that its failure would be a disaster - come from partisans, it's impossible for an audience not to take their motivations into account...
...long record of taking hard positions and ignoring party orthodoxy in the hunt for common ground. Obama, meanwhile, has claimed that he can expand the concept of citizenship to include more than casting a ballot every so often. But neither one dug in this time to explain why this bailout was necessary and why people needed to swallow hard and accept it, most notably when they were given the opportunity during last Friday's debate. It's natural that they didn't want to be too closely tied to a bill whose importance is matched only by its unpopularity...