Today in the economy

[Kirkland Laing]

I'm kind of getting into this late but let me take a shot here.

1. Democrat/Republican is interchangeable for blame here. There is plenty of blame to be spread around. We won't be able to get away from this until we can put a wedge between elected officials and lobbyists. What is your vote compared to hundreds of thousands of dollars for re-election?

2. I was against all of the bailouts from jump street. If you are too big to fail your to big to manage. Nationalize them and sell them off or let them fail. But since we did bail them out and the legislation protected the bonuses then I'm staunchly against the Gov't using a punitive tax. If they are guilty of fraud then prosecute them. But we set a dangerous precedent by canceling contracts and changing the tax code to be punitive. I really don't see what "fair" has to do with it.

Nobody complained about precedent when the government abrogated union contracts for their bailout. Why not do the same for bankers?

And military force is no use against terrorism. Quite the opposite in fact.

I assume you are referring to UAW and the bailout of the auto industry. Now just for the record I was against that one too. Considering that UAW pensions and inflated salaries are part of the problem was it too much to ask them to tighten their belt as well? Anyway the changing of UAW contracts was done in order to get the bailout not punitively changed after the fact. Do you not see the difference in changing a labor agreement in order to get a loan necessary not to go bankrupt and abrograting contracts in a punitive nature? I'm not defending the bonuses but shouldn't Geitner/Dobbs and every senator/congressman that voted for it w/o reading the bill all of said something a long time ago?

In regards to military force our leaders simply have not used it wisely. When given a well defined mission the United States Military can out perform most government agencies. Like I said no nation building and no regime change. Terrorist organizations need funding, training, equipment and safe harbor. Obama should put the world on notice. Any of the above mentioned will earn a punitive military strike. More importantly since most terror orgs originate from radical islam and the middle east lets get off foriegn oil. The more we can insulate ourselves from the region the better.

Detroit car worker wages only add a small amount to the cost of the car versus other car company labour rates, just a few percent, far less than the discount firms like GM have to give on their cars to get people to buy them versus better competition. The problem with Detroit for decades has been the management but they're still flying around in private jets. They can pass an amendment to the AIG bailout legislation or write new legislation -- either way people under investigation for fraudulent deals who've bankrupted their company should not be paid bonuses for doing so. It goes against everything America and capitalism is supposed to stand for. Politicians now claiming "it's in the legislation, there's nothing we can do about it" are full of it. It's not like AIG has any serious negotiating position, they're under investigation in two countries, bankrupt and 80% owned by the government. They can't make the claim that they need to pay those bonuses to keep valuable staff because the staff are the diametric opposite of valuable, qed.

Military force just creates terrorism. If you bomb any country that's helping terrorism you're just going to end up with a more radical government who'll give more support to terrorism. 9/11 was an attempt by Middle Eastern people to use force to change America's behaviour and make them less likely to interfere in their countries. How well did that work out? Bombing let's say Iran would just make the Iranian regime more radical than it currently is. US energy companies don't want us to get off foreign oil and they run US energy policy so no real attempt will ever be made to alter the status quo. America will continue to be involved in the Middle East for decades which will obviously spawn more terrorism.