Vast Sucking Sound

The problem with a “New” New Deal is that it has to contend with the implosion of the Old New Deal. So says Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in the Opinion Journal.

His friends advise Barack Obama to launch a “New” New Deal. Maybe that’s because the old New Deal is sinking fast.

Mr. Obama’s one deeply false note during the campaign was his harping on “deregulation” as if that were the source of current troubles. His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built.

Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR’s successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom.

Then there’s the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto market-share to imports and transplants to keep its aging membership toiling away toward their golden pensions and collecting wages and benefits twice those of their competitors. It worked for a while . . .

This one is a must read. Especially the punchline. Especially that.

We are witnessing Washington scrambling to dole out money to the financial sector. Yet I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Ditech had begun advertising again on television. Change?

We are witnessing CEOs of the big three automakers go begging on Capitol Hill to save their companies. They do so by flying in – individually – on very, very, very expensive corporate jets. Change?

We are witnessing a candidate who promised change cheerfully rolling out a “new” cabinet and appointed power structure that reads like a rap sheet of the last Democratic administration. You can’t see the new faces because they’re blocked by the old ones. Change?

We are witnessing calls for the re-enactment of the exact, same policies that brought us to where we are today.

Change?

Via Memeorandum.

Buddy, Can You Spare A …….. Gulfstream?

Hoo, boy. If this isn’t the most arrogant act of pleading poverty ever, it’s got to be very close. The three CEOs of the big three US automakers all took the same way of getting to Washington to beg for public money.

Private jets.

The each took their own private, company owned jet to come to Washington and plead for taxpayers to save their companies. Apparently, they couldn’t even think this through enough to car Gulfstream pool.

The CEOs of the big three automakers flew to the nation’s capital yesterday in private luxurious jets to make their case to Washington that the auto industry is running out of cash and needs $25 billion in taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy.

The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler may have told Congress that they will likely go out of business without a bailout yet that has not stopped them from traveling in style, not even First Class is good enough.

A first class ticket from Detroit to Washing would set each of these apparently penniless beggars back a staggering $900 each. As opposed to the $20,000 cost of flying the corporate jet there and back.

I’ve been on the fence a bit over the bailout for a number of reasons, but I’m down off it now – so should you be. As a solid union worker told me today – before this news even broke – “Screw ‘em. Let ‘em fail.”

Anyone who is not burning up the phone lines to their Congressional delegation right now demanding this farce of a bailout be killed deserves what they’re going to get.

A wave from the Gulfstream as the executives head back to Detroit with a bucketful of your money.