The bailout has become an abomination
Posted by Richard on October 2, 2008
The Senate passed a new version of the Wall Street bailout bill designed to attract more House votes. I desperately hope this monstrous, pork-laden abomination fails. I won't expound further because Bob Bidinotto has already explained why better than I could:
The original administration-backed "rescue package" bill was three pages.
The failed House version had ballooned to 110 pages.
Now, the Senate has expanded it to a 450+ page behemoth, laden with new pork — including provisions completely unrelated to the "financial crisis," such as help for rural schools, disaster aid, and a provision "demanding that insurance companies provide coverage for mental health treatment—such as hospitalization—on parity with physical illnesses." This will include treatment for various "addictions" (drugs? alcohol? gambling? sex? the Internet? cell phones? conservative talk radio?).
The initial five-year estimate of costs for just the mental-health provisions is $3.8 billion, but as we know about all government programs, that's just a chump-change opener. Traditional medical care has been tied, however tenuously, to actual, demonstrable physical maladies. But given the politicized and ever-expanding "mental illness" racket — in which the psychiatric industry discovers, concocts, and arbitrarily defines new "mental diseases" almost daily — this provision alone is absolutely destined to fund an explosive government-underwritten growth industry that will gobble up countless more billions of taxpayer dollars every year. But hell, why not? Now that the employees of banks, investment houses, insurance companies, and Detroit automakers are to be collecting their paychecks (directly or indirectly) from the taxpayers, I suppose it's only fitting to include shrinks. Perhaps they can help all the other groveling beggars restore their battered self-images.
Folks, it's time, more than ever, to kill this sucker. Get on the phone and send your emails to the House of Representatives, the only place where there's a prayer of stopping this statist monster.
In typical Bidinotto fashion, multiple updates follow, and you really need to read them all. The mental-health provision is only one small part of the steaming pile of crap that fills this bill: "disaster relief," rum production, mine safety, Indian tribes, railroads, auto race tracks, wool production … it goes on and on and on…
This bill is so vile and disgusting that it makes me wish the original 3-pager had passed. I can only hope that enough members of the House are equally disgusted, and this monstrosity is terminated with extreme prejudice, as it deserves.
Bidinotto concluded:
Now ask yourself: What in hell does all that inserted stuff have to do with a "financial rescue package" for banks and financial institutions during an alleged time of crisis?
This pork-and-special-interest-laden bailout bill is a complete fraud on and rip-off of the taxpayer, and it's high time for us to rise up and demand that the House vote it down.
I have never before used this blog to urge readers to contact their congressmen, but this bill will be a fatal game-changer for the future of America's free-market system. We have to fight this, or, starting next year, we and our kids will live in a very, very different America than the one we grew up in.
If you don't know how to contact your congressman, go here.
Then DO IT. Like, now.
All I can say is I agree. Completely. And angrily. Do like he says — now!
This piece of shit must die!
RedPencil said
I especially liked the quote from Forbes last week:
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Wow, that was pretty much where I THOUGHT they got that number… didn’t expect them to ADMIT it…