Lawrence Kramer, on Jennifer Rubin:
I absolutely cringe when I see BO ask for a show of hands: “Who here makes less than $250k? Looks like most of you!” I guess he doesn’t ask who makes more than $250k because he doesn’t want the poor jerks who fess up to be stoned to death before he leaves the podium. (After he leaves would be all right, except that he needs to “ask” them to “contribute” a bit more to his programs.)
The appeal to class warfare, to the mob voting itself largesse, is stomach-turning. I’ve heard some pretty respectable people say some pretty nice things about Obama, but I cannot for the life of me get past the idea that tax policy should be based on who is easiest to demonize. The man clearly does not want to be the President of people making more than $250k. And yet. like lemmings. a bunch of them will vote for him. Fools and their money…
I am waiting for the obligatory post about Obama’s high approval rating and therefore all criticism is unwanted.
At the beginning of new administration in the midst of a steep economic downturn, where are people going to go? Unfortunately we have all hitched our wagon to Obama’s star. For the good of the country, I hope his policies work. But I am concerned that contrary to his outward appearance to be open to different ideas, he, his administration, and the democrats are so tied to ideology that they can never make a course correction even if they deem it necessary. I do not see a surge moment in Obama’s future.
agreed with jr & #1…
…santelli’s ‘rant’ would be laughable and generate nothing except condescending dismissal were it not for the (obvious) fact that it resonates with people who are now beginning to recognize that THEY will be the ones paying for the profligacy of their ‘neighbors’….if the economic situation continues to be turbulent, they’re going to be even less happy to have more money taken away from them…
…as for obama’s ‘high ratings’ – fantastic…good for the president and good for america…
let’s see what he does with his ‘political capital’…does he double down on redistributionist pelosian policies, reidian ripoffs, doddlike dealings and frankian financial finessing? or does he expend that capital on things that make the santellis of the world shut up?
based on current trends, obama appears to be attempting the full carter….we’ll see if that ends up with comparable results (then again, obama looks much better in a cardigan than james earl ever did)
He was the most liberal member of the Senate and the most liberal candidate ever nominated for the presidency. The MSM was comfortable with this before and will remain so until something worse than a Wall Street panic happens. Meanwhile, Obama is getting good reviews from Hugo and Fidel.
No matter how you spin it, this is Bush’s depression. Obama’s been in office for a month. America overwhelmingly approves of the job he’s doing to stop the plunge, which reflects a decline in the global economy. No one expects this to be an easy fix, yet 77% are optimistic that Obama will succeed. Meanwhile, America blames Republicans for not working with Obama — and for acting based on politics rather than principle. The only thing declining faster than the DOW is Republicans’ electoral prospects for 2010.
With respect to Rubin and all others -
I have a slightly different take on this issue. I was offended by Santelli’s rant and found it to be child-like and unsympathetic to many Americans that are suffering at this time. I totally understand the desire to not want to reward bad behavior (i.e. those purchasing homes beyond their economic means). But these folks are only part of the story. There are many others that are losing their jobs at this moment and will also be facing foreclosure. Up until now, many of these people have been spending appropriately and living within their means – but now with job losses, etc…, the well is drying up. As a person who is still fortunate enough to have a decent job, I don’t mind using federal aid to assist my fellow citizens. I’m even willing to pay more taxes (for an indefinate & extended period of time) for the benefit of the nation and our people if the effort will eventually pull us through this crisis.
I’m not bound to an ideology of either right or left. But I’m devoted to the USA and our best interests. Several years ago, the Mississippi river was flooding its banks in a horrific manner and was destroying countless communities. People from all over the nation flocked to these communities and began sand-bagging levies, dikes, etc… giving everything they had to help people that they did not know, but helped out they did simply to lend a helping hand to a fellow American. That’s kind of the mind-set that I have now. I’m ready to begin sand-bagging (metaphorically speaking) to put this nation back together. If this means using more of my tax money, then I’m all for it. That’s my choice and I realize that this will be offensive to many conservatives who disagree. I’m sorry for that, since I don’t mean to be offensive. From my perspective, it’s people like Santelli who aren’t ready to extend these efforts to help out our own. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ll review some of his other work and hopefully he’ll prove me wrong.
#4
LOL…. yes, superobama is helpless and hopeless facing the kryptonite of the bushian legacy…
…who can save our hero from the moustache-twirling rethuglicans who have tied him to the railroad tracks of financial collapse…?
umm, dude – look at what happened between 1992 and 1994 and ask yourself…’will a majority of voting americans be happier with the ruling party in 2010 than they were in 2008?’
…if the answer is, ‘yes’ you don’t need to be a troll; it the answer is ‘no’ – see you soon…
Santelli ALWAYS goes on rants and has done so for ten years. If you have ever watched CNBC you know he is Cramer-like in his unorthodox and lively rants. It’s only news because it offended Hussein Odumbo.
This administration doesn’t have a clue. They don’t understand that markets respond to what they say and what they don’t say. They are clueless about the effect of their actions and inactions. And Obama personally is too naive to know his language of doom and gloom is depressing the markets and crushing consumer confidence.
Or is their redistribution plan accomplished by wiping out wealth?
Obama has overseen an enormous drop in the markets and the loss of enough wealth to pay for his stimulus. His core distrust in private enterprise as the primary economic driver of this country doesn’t bode well for our future. He comes from a background that demonized corporations as greedy and harmful to the little guy without ever recognizing the investment the little guy has in the markets.
Then Santelli had the nerve, the chutzpah, to criticize The One, and the White House responds by personal attacks. This is wrong on several fronts, one being that it should be beneath the White House to respond personally to criticisms. This is not becoming of a President. And yet he’s done it twice in his first month. Second, it’s an indication of just how much of an echo chamber liberals live in, and how thin-skinned they are when someone steps inside to question their message.
Translation of Pat #4:
No matter what facts you may present to the contrary, this is all Bush’s fault. Obama’s been in office for a month. The MSM, calling itself “America”, overwhelmingly approves of the job he’s doing to stop the plunge, which reflects housing policy developed by Congressional Democrats starting in 2006. No liberal who originally voted for an easy fix, now expects this to be an easy fix, yet 77% of those same kool-aid liberals are optimistic that Obama will succeed at turning America into a socialist nation during this time of crisis. Meanwhile, the MSM, calling itself “America” blames Republicans for not working with Obama — and for acting based on politics rather than principle. The only thing declining faster than the Tim Geithner’s roll out is the DOW.
Anthony, I have a suggestion for you. You said you are sympathetic to those that are struggling and I respect that. Find someone, and give them $200/month towards their mortgage. This isn’t something the federal government has to do. It’s called charity, and millions of Americans every day contribute to helping their fellow citizen. But when the federal government does it, only $25 of that $200 you gave will actually help anyone. Cut out the middle man, and do it yourself.
If Santelli’s out of touch with Main Street, what does that make the Obama administration? From another world?
This administration is quickly growing into a parody of itself. Simply because most of the media reports its every utterance as if having passed across the lips of Moses does not make it the gospel truth.
Furthermore, how the policy (or Obama) polls doesn’t refute the underlying truth of rewarding bad behavior. The Obama administration has been critical of Wall St., yet the mortgage and housing losses suffered are the result of the non-performance (default and foreclosure) by Main St. homeowners that Obama plans to bailout.
How many times does the taxpayer have to pay for the bad behavior of others? In fact, the more pertinent question is, why should the taxpayer reward the bad behavior of others?
speaking of CNBC
House of Cards, their documentary on the subprime disaster is on again tomorrow night. Definately check it out if you haven’t seen it already. It’s 2 hours long and is thusfar the most definitive chronicling of the whole thing in my opinon.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=11li6Iw4TeY
Santelli is not out of touch with Main Street. He’s leading the mob with its pitchforks and torches. Why that’s a good thing is beyond me.
Santelli’s rant appealed to the worst in all of us. No, this isn’t about charity for our neighbors; it’s about saving our neighborhoods even if it means bailing out some fools who have been parted from their money. An overhang of foreclosed housing inventory hurts everyone who may want or need to sell a house – a new widow, a laid-off worker who gets an offer 1,000 miles away, the guy who had a baby and needs more room and can afford it. The Main Street that Santelli is “in touch with” is populated by morons who think that the only thing that matters in life is righteous indignation. It’s small. It’s embarrassing. And it’s stupid.
13- so why not give EVERYONE a break on their mortgage?
re#13…
gosh, isn’t it odd that people who disagree with mr kramer’s caricature of ‘compassion’ are ‘morons’?
why is thinking that ‘moral hazard’ matters ‘small’ or ‘embarrassing’ or ‘stupid’?
of you accept kramer’s answer you invite lester’s question – why not give everyone a break?
#13 — I agree with most of what you say. For those of us who played by the rules, the rescue plans are a hard pill to swallow but one, as you nicely put it, we need to swallow for our own and everyone else’s good. There is indeed a cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face kind of thing going on with Santarelli’s rant.
But — Santarelli’s rant does give voice, however crudely and self-indulgently, to people’s basic sense of fairness and fairplay. Yes, sometimes those sensibilies fire the mob, but they’re good things and we’d be much worse if people were just resigned to life’s inequities.
The reason why these sort of sensibilities might be leading the mob lies at Obama’s doorstep. Obama is failing to sufficiently explain what he’s doing and why, despite its unsavory aspects, we really have to take our medicine; he needs to speak to people’s guts as well as their brains. Questioning and deprecating people’s sense of fairness and fair play is absolutely not the way to go. To the contrary, that sort of attitude is what leads to such outbursts.
Sori -
I am not deprecating people’s sense of fair play. But when it fires the mob, the mob needs to be cooled, and it’s the job of people like Santelli to cool them.
I accept the criticism that to call the people who are outraged “morons” is unfair. They are just ordinary folks with ordinary reactions. But our civilization deals with the ordinariness of ordinary people by the ascenision of (hopelfully) less ordinary people to positions of opinion leadership.
So what I am deprecating is not the outrage of the masses, but the demagoguery of a specific opinion leader who amplifies that outrage when he, in his role as a business journalist, should be explaining why it should NOT be a basis for policy.
This is a time when the people who know how things work have a special obligation to explain them to those who do not. Santelli has abdicated that responsibility to “give voice” to rage that, while it may need to be felt, also needs not to be indulged. Santelli’s attitude, in the head and mouth of someone who should know better and say better, qualifies for all of the adjectives I used.
The “rewarding bad behavior” aspect of this hasn’t been explored at all. And that’s a major problem with government “fits all” policies. Individuals aren’t equally responsible. Without a doubt, there were home buyers that gave up many things that others take for granted and still lost their home. But there were also those that took cruises, drove around in expensive automobiles, smoked $3800 worth of cigarettes a year, bought lottery tickets, drank scotch, indulged in expensive cell phone and cable TV plans and on and on. That’s why government aid, socialization of risk and reward is so wrong. The wastrels are in the same pool as the simply unfortunate. In a free society, which, I assume, most of the country still favors in some way, we have the freedom to make the choice of options, assume the risk of that choice, and reap the reward or the failure. If those who make wise decisions are forced to subsidize those who do not, what’s the point? We’ll all be tropical fish in the government aquarium.
So, according to Lawrence Kramer, if you would choose to oppose Obama, you are part of a mob full of rage, without intelligence, and that is the true Achilles Heel of America. Never mind the intrusion of the government into free markets, sending them into a windfall, or Geithner’s non-plan eroding confidence in the plans altogether.
No, it all comes back to the business journalist voicing his opinion on TV. Can you say symbolism over substance. Yes, you can.
From the article:
“Like Braley, Alyssa Katz, author of “Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us,” a book due out in June about the making of the mortgage crisis, says she does not believe the message has come through clearly enough yet — and that the administration needs to do more to make sure it does.
“Ultimately, yes, it’s about homeowners, but it’s about the stability of the financial markets,” she says. “We have to give up this illusion that it’s about you and me. We have to accept, sort of blindly, the notion that we have to do this for the sake of the nation. Whether you’re lucky and get aid or you already lost your home and you’re screwed, we’re all in this together.””
People like Alyssa Katz and #4 don’t realize that by trying to act in the interest as a collective as opposed to acting in our own self-interest is what caused this mess. We had to make sure that everyone could get a home, as if home ownership was the definition of success and mobility in the country. However, homeownership means exactly the opposite if you cannot afford the home you bought. On top of this, we are one of the few countries that actually subsidize home ownership through generous interest rates and deductions in the tax code. These create serious disincentives for home ownership. Now we’re muddying up the waters even more by keeping people in their homes that have no business being in them. The only way for this problem to resolve itself is to get squatters out of homes and markets clear. If this is prevented we are only prolonging the problem.
Just wondering. If I paid $400k for a house that’s now worth $250k, assuming I could sell it at all, how is the government going to help me? Even if I could refinance (lower rate? longer amortization?) so that I could afford the monthly payments, if I live in a non-recourse state (I understand most are), wouldn’t I just walk away from the house and let it be the bank’s problem? Then someone who could afford the $250k (the bank might even take less) could buy my house, and maybe I could find a house I could afford, too. Or I could just rent, which I probably should have been doing in the first place. Maybe the bank would like to “foreclose,” but allow me to continue to live in the house and pay rent. Anyway, how are we going to prop up “values” that actually exceed what people are willing to pay? Even if a bankruptcy judge could lower the principal amount for homeowners in trouble, that doesn’t make the house worth more than its current market value. Consequently, it doesn’t preserve any value in the neighboring homes, either. More to the point, why should folks who made a bad investment (because they bought in an artificially inflated market) be treated preferentially as compared to those who were prudent (and at the latter’s expense ultimately)? Is it smart to tie down people who’ve lost their jobs to a particular geographic location (by keeping them in a house they really can’t afford) when their greatest opportunities may lie elsewhere? And as long as we’re talking about people who’ve lost money because of the mortgage mess, would the government like to repay me for the loss in my retirement account from investments such as WAMU? I’m a victim of this Ponzi scheme, too, but I’m not asking to be relieved of the consequences of my own bad judgment.
I’m sure there are many variants of the problem, some of which deserve government help, and many that do not. How are we going to sort out the mess? I think Rick Santelli was on to something. We won’t have a painless recovery, and trying to make it painless teaches folks the wrong lessons. Let’s temporarily enlarge the safety net for families in trouble, but like #21 said, the only way to eventual recovery is to let the system bleed out the excess “value” of homes. The more we try to resist that process, the longer and deeper our economic difficulties will be.
Ki’hoalu Kid -
Market values do not exist in a vacuum. The number of houses in a neighborhood now or soon to be up for auction affects what people are willing to pay to live there. So reducing that supply by whatever means necessary will exert an upward pressure on prices. That doesn’t mean that any given cure won’t be worse than any given strain of the disease, but it does mean that the effort to raise values by slowing foreclosures should not be rejected on the grounds that it cannot ever work.
There’s a very simple refrain that covers this situation: it’s their fault but it’s our problem. Before deciding that not helping “them” is the most important consideration in setting public policy, it’s well to consider just what helping ourselves requires. The moral hazards created and the lost opportunity to strut our own moral superiority – in my view, the real subtext of Santelli’s rant – are just costs of obtaining the benefits. I don’t have to ignore them to judge them outweighed.
All this effort seems predicated on the belief that house prices should always be “higher”. What is the basis to believe that houses “should” be worth more than they were 3-5 years ago? Perhaps if the prices are allowed to look for equilibrium we will determine just how much housing is worth. At some lower price, people who could not afford to buy will sense a bargain and move into the market.
If we’re not prepared to let home prices decline as well as inflate, then why not prop up every person who invested in the stock market? After all, the stock market is now worth 50% of it’s value 18 months ago. Where is the outrage? Where is the relief for those investors who made bets at least as bad as people who bought homes they could not afford?
#22 & 24 are pointing out the very things that should have been discussed before the “stimulus” and “bailout” were adopted. In reality, a house is just like a car, it begins to depreciate as soon as its construction is finished. Theoretically, the value of a house should always be less than the cost of construction of similar house. If the price of a house increased from $200K to $300K in ten years, does that mean the cost of materials and labor increased 50% in the same period of time? I don’t think carpenter’s wages have gone from say $20/hr to $30/hr in that time frame, but someone could check that out. It’s my personal opinion that Americans have been house-poor for some time, with monthly payments that seriously crippled discretionary spending. They were able to live with this as long the mortgage interest deduction made the house a savings account and there were credit cards to use for daily expenses. Secondary mortgages were unwisely used to take cruises and buy cars. We’re now in a situation where the explosion of the housing bubble is followed by the soon to appear credit card catastrophe and then the automobile repossession fiasco.
I live in a place with historical high home ownership. The big difference as I see it is that one can NEVER EVER walk away from a mortgage.
If you default the bank takes the house -sells it -& bills you with the deficit.
Such is life in a centre leftish country with heavily regulated banks.