The Mother Of All Bailouts

I cite facts like that more than 150 academic economists signed a letter against the bailout,

and the problems with the honesty of the Bush administration that you are all aware of,

and the fact that the Treasury Secretary who proposed this bailout might as well be in the pocket of wall street,

and the fact that the congressmen that voted for the bailout were getting 150% on average the donations from wall street and the banking industry that those who voted against were.

Then you say that your point is to call me ignorant and assert I do nothing but incite conflict, , ,

That is pretty much all you do.

I wonder . . . how many economic academics are there in America?

A shitton more than in Antarctica, I reckon.

Not the issue. What petepolly posted -- in another thread -- was not a fringe group of extremists, but a cross-section of eminent people expressing concern about the initial bail-out proposal.

I even thanked him for posting it.

There's no doubt that many people who felt some kind of major intervention was needed were unhappy with Paulson's proposals. (The man has come off looking incompetent, not that that's anything new from senior people in the Bush administration.) Some wanted to say that they opposed the proposal on offer. Good for them.

If that's pollypanda's biggest contribution to the discourse, well, that's another matter.

I am not sure, but your pal TheFuckOffKid had this to say about it

Look at the cite, he did say it.

Then he later got mad at me because I am not into credentials (especially not credentials that he claims to have that cannot be verified) and do not agree with some of his positions. Also he seemed pissed off that I know damn well that on those issues no consensus exists among academic economists. As a result he was reduced to sarcastic name calling about the academic economists I cited, and thinks that the whole world should agree that his side of some disputes in academic economics are obviously right. Which my take is that that is a really silly position to take.

You don't like me, fine, so what. That does not prove I am wrong on anything.

And, as was also pointed out in that other thread, the bailout proposal that those 150 economists opposed was the first one. You know, the three-page, "give me the money and trust me" proposal that never even made it out of Bush's invitational conference.

They may still oppose the one that actually passed, but we don't know.

I was commenting more on the number of academics, which seems to be more a part of the panda's argument than what they said.

My take is that unless they explicitly say so, it is safer to assume they had not.

If several doctors tell you not do say lift over 50 pounds or you may have a heart attack, and you think that putting a weight lifting belt on first will make a big difference, I would check with the docs again before trying it.

Yep.

I did. It wasn't a high hurdle for you to jump, of course.

And I note you do not want to discuss any of your failing, like failing to accept that claims of academic credentials online are not worth much, and others may indeed disagree with you without being stupid or ignorant, or trying to pass off your side of an academic dispute between sets of very reputable academics as fully settled in your side's favor.

You have the opinion that a fiat currency is "all that" or the "cat's meow".

Fine, a lot of people, including reputable academic economists, dispute that, and factually it has significant problems, which periodically show up where it is used.

Those opinions are largely held by people who have been rationalized because of their insistence on dogma and repeatedly demonstrating the inability to actually take responsibility for the outcome of something significant and act.

It's easy to be attached to dogma when you are not responsible for the results.

Dear God, you're getting desperate. I don't give a rat's flying arse what you do or don't think about my "credentials". There are people on this site who know what I do for a living. As for you and everyone else, I demonstrate my expertise by posting knowledgeably. End of discussion.

Others may. Of course. You, on the other hand, struggle to.

No, I never said that. I don't think that fiat currency is always and everywhere fine, since it's prone to hyper-inflation if managed (very) badly.

Like, duh.

Clearly, you don't understand my positions, you just jump to conclusions about what you think they are. Which reinforces my reasons for not taking you seriously.

You are, of course, referring to a letter that was written and signed by economists BEFORE Congress looked at and changed the bill. The letter was a response to the first Paulson offer, which was then changed.

So, it was a misleading post and another reason to ignore everything you post.

I don't know that it's "safer to assume that."

Using your analogy, if the doctors say instead, "if you lift fifty pounds without support you may have a hernia, or throw out your back" and then you put on a weight belt first, it may in deed make a big difference.

The letter did not say, "don't intervene, because intervention would be bad." It said, "don't rush an intervention without also taking precautions, because the lack of precautions is bad, and there's currently no need to hurry." It listed specific problems they had with the first, three-page proposal. If those problems were addressed, it is not unreasonable to assume they would no longer have the same objections.

Those were their reasons for objecting. They may still object to the final version that was passed. But we don't know that.

If the final version addressed these points, or if the perceived lack of urgency changed, they may very well have changed their minds.

The fairness issue did not go away at all, the ambiguous terms were addressed a little bit, but from the thread about "discretionary" bonus payouts to CEOs exceeding 1/10 the amount of the bailout, clearly not enough, the long term effects were just not looked at from what I saw.

No extensive hearings were held, no significant numbers of qualified people against the bailout were allowed to speak on capital hill under oath on either version.

I think my analogy holds pretty well.

This scares me.

The plant was once LTV Steel, and was one of the primary employers in the area. The last time they idled all the furnaces, LTV filed bankruptcy and ISG bought them out and cut an immense amount of jobs. ArcelorMittal later took over operations. They employ only 11% of the original LTV workforce.

You can't shut down a furnace, not ones this old. If you just shut them down, you have to re-brick them before bringing them back up, there is a whole bunch of work and emission standards if you actually shut a furnace off and that costs a lot of money. When they were going through the bankruptcy/buyout, they put the C5 Furnace and the C6 Furnace on idle and mothballed the C1 Furnace "to be brought up later". "Brought up later" was translated into torn down and scrapped and the land was turned into "The Steelyard Shopping Center".

What the article fails to mention too, is that all subcontracted work has been cut until the furnaces come out of idle. Which means every subcontracted employee (which is a lot) will be on unemployment until then, or they will leave Cleveland and find other work.

This is a hit Cleveland can't afford to take if the furnaces go cold.....we don't have much left.