Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
why forestall the inevitable and make things worse down the road? if we've fucked things up so bad that a global depression is what needs to happen then that's what should happen - essentially starting over and learning from the mistakes that drove this bus off the cliff.
this is like somebody who's having chest pains going to a doctor and the doctor keeps treating the chest pains so the patient feels better - the doctor knows that there are blocked arteries but doesn't do anything about those, just keeps handing out pills, the guy is happy because he doesn't have to undergo a bypass operation and he's got pills for the pain - in a month the guy is dead.
this isn't the 1930's, government was much smaller then, must less infrastructure - people won't starve or be homeless.
the scary thing about a depression is that the way it ended in the 30's was with a World War.
anyway the GM bail out is going to happen - it would be bailed out by Bush and it will surely get a bail out by a Democratic administration and congress.
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The problem with your analogy is that there is no bypass operation for the economy.
What we learned from the Great Depression is that government doing nothing makes the panic even worse, and the recession much worse than it has to be.
The current crisis was triggered when the government let Lehman Bros fail. Letting GM fail would trigger another, far worse crisis.
The biggest problem is confidence. If there's no confidence in the markets or in the future of our economy then investment will stop and spending will slow to a crawl and make a depression happen.
Thankfully we elected someone whom I think will do alot to restore confidence and prove to the world that there is a competent person steering the ship.