Bailout Watch 134: McCain Takes "Wait And See" Approach To Bailout 2.0
Reuters reports that Republican presidential candidate John McCain is taking a cautious tack on a Michigan economist’s suggestion that Detroit should get an additional $15b in government support. “Let’s get the $25 billion to them to start with and see how that goes,” McCain told NBC’s Meet The Press. McCain had initially opposed that bailout before bowing to political pressure and blessing the deal. Top McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin echoed the Senator from Arizona’s position on CBS’s Face The Nation, saying “The top priority should be get (the $25b) out quickly, not take 18 months, which seems to be the current plan.” The Department of Energy is currently writing regulations governing the disbursment of that money, a process expected to take longer than GM and Chrysler can probably stay in business. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s advisors refuse to rule out further auto industry suport. “The auto industry clearly is extremely important to the economy and now has enormous difficulties,” Obama advisor and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said on Face the Nation. “We do need to face those difficulties and see if there are ways that public policy can be helpful that make sense … without having a whole raft of unintended consequences.”
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I nominate McCain's Campaign for SUICIDE WATCH.
I think McCain is ok, but I cannot support him with his current VP choice. She's way too far out there, and also appears to support Socialism as witnessed by this statement she made while out on the road drumming up support (From a New Yorker Article that covered one of her speeches recently): "The best part of Hendrik Hertzberg's excellent New Yorker commentary about McCain and Palin's failed attempt to convince people that Obama is a socialist is the final paragraph containing this boast from Gov. Sarah Palin The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. " So it seems that while she wants to paint Obama as a Socialist, she in fact is one and supports it. Who knew?