Bernanke on the Hot Seat

I was disappointed to see the House grilling Fed chief Bernanke about the BofA/Merrill Lynch deal. BofA CEO Lewis is worried about his job, because the BofA/Merrill merger is looking worse than it did earlier. So, he's saying he agreed to it only under the threats from Bernanke and Treasury Sec. Paulson to remove him if he didn't go through with it.

First, it's not fair for Bernanke to face this grilling without Paulson, who is more likely to have been the villain, if there was one, than Bernanke.

Second, the deal probably did avoid more carnage on Wall Street, which was a serious threat at the time. At least a few Congressional questioners congratulated Bernanke for avoiding a bigger banking crisis.

What I found particularly odd was that Bernanke's accusers were mainly Republicans and his defenders Democrats, although Bernanke was named to the Fed by George Bush and took the actions in question under the Bush administration. The Republican congressmen are condemning a Republican administration. Granted, a lof of these congressmen did not favor the bailout and wanted America to go down in flames. They only relented when the stock market went down hundreds or thousands of points, and the man in the street became (rightly) alarmed that something terrible was going to happen if Congress didn't act. The Republicans are still mad at America for not conforming to their ideas of how the world should operate. Fortunately, more reasonable people, like Bernanke, prevailed. Congressmen Darrell Issa and Dan Burton, please stop living in the 17th century!

Something for Nothing

In today's NYT, David Brooks has an op-ed on health care called "Something for Nothing." While he's complaining about Obama's trying to get more health care without paying for it, it reminded me that Reagan did the same thing, but from a different perspective. Obama wants to provide more government services without increasing taxes, while Reagan continued to provide services, but reduced the taxes needed to pay for them. Reagan was to some extent victimized by his staff and Republican colleagues, who wanted less government and thus reduced taxes in an effort to starve it. But Reagan was too kind hearted to starve actual people or to turn them out in the cold; so, he didn't reduce services much, thus plunging the US into the huge budget deficits which continue until today, with a brief pause during the Clinton administration. While criticizing the Obama administration, David Brooks conveniently overlooks the fact that the Republicans are the fathers of the deficits. Obama may yet be more responsible than Reagan was. He still has time to bring revenues more in line with expenditures. Given the terrible state of the economy, it's a hard time to do it; he probably shouldn't be expected to try for a year or more.

Hello

I'm not really sure what I'm going to put on this blog, although my idea is to look at philosophy, math, science and other things that interested the Greek Athenians. Google maps did not turn up a city in Colorado named Athens, although there are lots of cities named Athens around the country. I lived in one for a while when I attended the University of Georgia.

Maybe I'll blog about politics here, since it was a big issue with the Greek Athenians, but I have blogged a lot about politics on Colorado FSO. Maybe I'll make FSO more about foreign policy, and move some of my political thoughts here.

Or maybe I'll end up blogging less. We'll see.