Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Senate's Version of the Bailout

The Senate's Version of the Bailout

I was watching CNN a few minutes ago, and one of their reporters was saying that the Senate is going to pass a bailout bill--but with "sweeteners" added to encourage the House to go along--individual items that are very popular, and therefore will allow House members to run ads emphasizing all the good things that were in the bill.

Some of the "sweeteners" are at least marginally related to financial institutions--such as increasing the FDIC insurance limit from $100,000 to $250,000. Oh yes, lots of ordinary Americans have more than $100,000 in the bank--you can see why this is so important!

Other "sweeteners," whatever their merits, simply have nothing to do with the bailout--such as requiring mental health parity on insurance coverage.

No bailout. As some members of the House pointed out yesterday, there's no point in a bailout until the core problem--the government forcing lenders to make subprime mortgages--gets fixed.

No comments:

Post a Comment