the bailout could end up making money
as the above image points out rather well (seriously, you should check it out in more detail), and as i’m constantly harping on and on about - very few things are black and white issues. in my experience, far too many people are far too eager to define things in one way or another: right/wrong, good/bad, liberal/conservative, etc. but life usually doesn’t just fit into neat little compartments like that and politics is no exception. things are messy - there are a lot of issues to consider, nuances to be explained, sides to hear, opinions to evaluate and so forth. the people i know of that tend toward viewing the world in terms of black-and-white-only tend to make up their minds to the exclusion of all else. once they believe something or someone is bad - or good (and i’m not even going to go into the ways they sometimes draw these conclusions) - that decision is there to stay.
unfortunately, this leaves little room for educated debate or reasonable discussion. in its place, you’re likely to get invalid arguments and various forms of logical fallicies - straw man, red herring and the like - thrown out in an attempt to detract from the subject at hand. one such example is the bailout. now, i should preface by saying that i’m not a fan of the way this legislation was conducted or the monsterous proportions to which it’s grown. but if ever there was an example of something that was incredibly nuanced, complicated and clearly not an issue of black-and-white, this is it.
i’m not professing to be an expert or to understand exactly what’s going on here, but that’s just it. until you’ve really investigated something this in-depth, i don’t think you can draw the conclusion that it’s either right or wrong. and - here’s why i suspect deep down people really don’t WANT to do a lot of searching - following this potential investigation, you may draw a different conclusion than you did originally.
so back to the bailout - did you know that some of the bailout was loans? granted, this isn’t money the country may get back any time soon, but - as my title suggests - it’s a way in which the bailout could end up making money. take, for instance, a receiver of bail-out money, goldman sachs, who posted a profit:
The bank said it will use proceeds from the common stock offering plus “additional resources” to redeem the $10 billion it got from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
“The only toxic thing on their balance sheet is the TARP, and they want to get rid of that as soon as they can,” says Gary Townsend, president of Hill-Townsend Capital. The earnings show “they’re taking enormous market share away from virtually everyone else.”
crazy, right? yesterday’s tea parties proved to me even more that things are often much more complicated than we’d like them to be. by being over-eager to mis-name something as good or bad, we run into the problem of throwing out the good with the bad. and that’s a bad thing - we need all the good we can get.
April 16 2009 10:08 am | finances and politics
April 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I agree with the tendency of both sides to throw out the good with the bad, but I do think there is an interesting comparison to be drawn with the tea party post from yesterday.
In that post, you mentioned that one of your problems was that those participating in the protests didn’t seem to be aware of what they were protesting. I’m sure that’s true to some extent (even in regards to some people I know personally), but to me, this doesn’t negate the protests. If a completely-informed nonpartisan protest of economic policies is an admirable goal, isn’t a somewhat-partisan, somewhat-less-informed protest also admirable, albeit slightly less so? Eliminating all protests with ignorant participants would, after all, eliminate pretty much every protest in history. It seems that a protest might also be a nuanced situation that isn’t black and white. Much like the bailout, maybe it’s a good idea that really just could have used some more refinement.
By the way, I’d describe myself as pretty apolitical, and I enjoyed your entry on the tea parties quite a bit. It was by far the most reasoned analysis I’ve seen. Also, I guess I’m technically, like, your cousin in law.
April 16th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
@brent - thanks for the reply - i do strive in my posts to be, perhaps above all, reasoned and well-thought-out, as i think those are traits sorely lacking in the public sphere today. and i think we are cousins-in-law, which is good because i only have two biological cousins
in my tea party post, i wasn’t trying to make the case that the entire thing should be thrown out (lol, no pun intended) - but rather explaining the flaws i saw and the reason why i wasn’t participating. i think i said in the comments - or maybe in my facebook comments - that i wasn’t making the point that people should ONLY let their voices be heard if they have a perfect, well-thought out plan, but rather that they should a). have an idea of what the alternatives to the thing they’re protesting are and b). it might not be a bad idea of the organizers to have some sort of guiding roadmap as well.
of course, throwing out the validity (in some cases) of the movement’s outrage just because some ignorant, angry, ill-informed and uneducated people got thrown in the mix is bad practice. these people had every right to protest - even the ignorant ones
- as do people who protest for what i would consider horrible reasons (like, say, westboro baptist). the relevance is, in my opinion, what makes a protest (or other show of civil disobedience) more or less worthwhile, more or less able to rise above the noise.
in the tea party protests - overall - i did not see the ability to rise above the noise - but with some refinement and perhaps more education, i do think it could have.