I hear that John McCain has “suspended” his campaign so that he could swoop back to Washington to save our financial industry.
Only he hasn’t actually read the details of the plan the administration want the Congress to pass.
Asked by the NBC affiliate in Cleveland about whether he was prepared to support Paulson’s plan, McCain said, “I have not had a chance to see it in writing. I have to examine it.”
I’m not campaigning, but I do have a pretty busy schedule. But my lab students have just started plotting their data for the freezing of acetic acid. That gives me a few moments where I don’t have much else to do. Here’s Paulson’s plan.
Now that I’ve read the plan (and my students are still plotting), I have some qualms with it.
Sec. 6. Maximum Amount of Authorized Purchases.
The Secretary’s authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time
Aren’t conservatives generally against “throwing money at a problem”? That’s always the line wen someone wants to use a little more money to improve education. 7×1011 dollars is a lot of money. It’s about $2300 from each person living in the USA.
How will this sum of money help address the root causes of the meltdown? At least with education spending, you can generally point at a few things that can be fixed with the money (class sizes, worn facilities, etc.). Does buying bad debt off of financial institutions discourage them from taking on more bad debt in the future?
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Anyone else have problems with this? Lack of oversight of the financial markets is part of the reason we’re in this mess. How will giving someone a bunch of our money and agreeing to not hold him accountable in any way for it fix the problem?
Tags: bailout, blank check, financial crisis, mccain, Politics