Instead of celebrating Bush's success with TARP, the GOP allows itself to be sucked into the completely misinformed, populist, angry Tea Party driven claptrap and join them in railing against TARP.
The party that supposedly is the best friend for big business can't acknowledge that Bush used that Harvard MBA to make a very wise investment in American business. This defies logic in more ways than I can possibly count.
All this despite the mounting evidence that the program was a runaway success that arguably avoided a repeat of the downward spiral known as the Great Depression. Instead of setting the record straight, the GOP is all too happy to feed into populist anger.
From Reuters:
In April last year, U.S. congressional budget analysts had estimated the net cost to taxpayers for the government's financial rescue program to be $356 billion.
The $89 billion estimate is also 42 percent less than the savings-and-loan crisis...
Cheney and Bush championed both TARP and the auto bailout, telling GOP Senators that it was "Herbert Hoover" time. Warren Buffett warned us that the economic crisis was akin to Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Buffett, a multibillionaire, said that the entire banking sector had been hours from collapse in September, and would have imploded without the $700 billion Wall Street emergency bailout.
As bad as things are today, imagine how much worse they would be if not for TARP and President Bush's swift action to prevent the financial sector from truly imploding the entire economy. Instead of touting this as a moment when government did something right, the GOP wants to run away from what should be one of its greatest moments. Bush made an extremely wise and well timed investment that the GOP now wants to spin as a huge waste. The facts are plain as day if people would simply take off their populist blinders!
For the record, I supported TARP in 2008 and John McCain's efforts to get it passed. It was not the politically popular position, but history will prove that it was the right thing to do.
UPDATE: Dave Weigel at WaPo has a great article about TARP supporter Congressman J. Gresham Barrett (R-SC). Barrett is running for South Carolina governor against cheatenous slut Nikki Haley.
Says Barrett:
I honestly believe with all my heart that we were at a point where men and women were going to reach into their back pocket and pull out a credit card or ATM card and stick it into a machine and nothing was going to come out. I listened to my president, George W. Bush. I listened to businessman and leaders in South Carolina. As a leader, I made a decision. Did we stop something that could have happened? Yeah, I believe we did. Has it been implemented like it should have been? No, absolutely not. You can always be a Monday morning quarterback. But leaders make decisions based on the best information that they have, and they go with it. That's what I did.
UPDATE: Dick Cheney's had enough of people dumping on TARP. The State Column reports today that Cheney has endorsed Gresham Barrett for governor of South Carolina. Remember now, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney have endorsed Nikki Haley, Barrett's cheatenous slut opponent. South Carolina's had one cheatenous slut too many in the governor's mansion, don't you think? Irony of all ironies, Jenny Sanford also endorsed Nikki Haley. So Jenny endorsed a cheating slut to replace her cheating slut ex-husband. Nice....
Here's what Dick Cheney had to say:
“[T]here’s a lot of revisionist history going on in South Carolina these days. I expect that from MSNBC, but not from fellow Republicans. So let me set the record straight.... I’m certain Gresham knew his vote in support of President Bush and our plan wouldn’t be popular, but he did something far too novel in American politics today: He put the interests of his country ahead of his own...That’s why voters should not believe the false attacks from his opponents.”
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