Monday, October 6, 2008

I Wish She Was In Touch With Reality

It's great that Cathy McMorris Rodgers has been sending emails and communicating with her constituents so often in the past month. I wish she did that all the time. Normally I get an email about once a month, but sometimes they stretch out over longer time periods. From her latest:

"The $700 billion package that will buy bad debt from Wall Street is now law. In the end, the bill also contained a lot of positive benefits for Eastern Washington families, small businesses, and schools including several I support such as the Alternative Minimum Tax patch, extending the state sales tax deduction and extending the Secure Rural Schools program that provides federal payments to school districts and counties that lost money due to federal lands under their jurisdiction.

But I did not support the overall bill. I am unconvinced the $700 billion Wall Street rescue proposal is the right approach for the market and the best value for taxpayers. When faced with such great economic challenges, we owe it to the taxpayers to actually solve the problem for the long term. I am not convinced this bill addresses the root causes of the problem, one of those being the subprime lending situation."

I'm glad she voted against the bill, but I'm bothered by her thinking on the root causes of the problem. The subprime lending situation, whatever that means, is not a root cause. As President Bush first stated, this was caused by greed. The regulations put in place to prevent this from happening were gradually removed over the years under the so-called "free market" canard that says the market will correct itself and government should take a back seat and not interfere. Well, what is the government doing right now? Had the government had stepped in before the house of cards was built would we still be witnessing its collapse?

What's done is done. We'll be dealing with this for many years.

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