9 Responses

1. I as a middle income tax payer don’t want my tax money should go to the rich. They didn’t invite me to the party they had the last 40-50 years. Now after the party they want me to clean up the mess no way.

2. “All the King’s horses, and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”

   This is the end of the last AvoDah ZorAh before MoShiach–the Egel HaZoHov.”

   “Koloh PRuTah Min HaKis.”

3. It’s the rich who pay 95 percent of the taxes,
   and they do deserve the break.

4. Deep, I hear in Israel many Autistic children are saying same thing; take it for what it’s worth!

5. When be taken to the gallows, one should drag one’s feet. The bailout is one the most expensive dumb ideas in history.

6. rabosi, there is soooooo much pork in this bill it is chazer TREIF!!!! if you don’t believe me, read it for yourself.

7. mayerfreund, deepthinker, akuperma, mark levin, and bacci40 – All of you remind me of Conservative Jews mouthing off about the Torah they never studied.

   True, the “bailout” will “reward” the “greedy idiots” who invented the debt instruments secured by dubious mortgages – it is also true that Bush’s SEC is largely at fault because of a 2004 rule that let the banks assume huge amounts of risky debt – BUT . . a continiung crisis in the credit markets if left unchecked WILL in a very short time hit all of us. We need to hold our noses and support the “bailout.”

   Already small businesses are having lines of credit reestricted – car loans are so hard to get now that auto sales fell by over 20% last month – credit card rates have begun to inch up – and not too far down this road credit limits would be lowered and eventually cards themselves would likely be cancelled. Today’s news is thgat 159,000 jobs were lost last month, a serious and unanticipated verification of a serious downturn.

   Our economy, everything from big finace to paying for a car, a chasenah, inventory in small businesses, and personal buying power depends on credit – and when that dries up – closings and layoffs come soon after . . we get into a spiral that cannot be reversed.

   The so called “bailout” is an attempt to rejuvinate the credit markets by having the Fed buy $700 billion of bad or questionable debt, giving the banks capital to begin lending again.

   That IS the lesson of the Depression – the stock market may have crashed in 1929, but it was only after a year of the government deciding to step back and do nothing (Hoover’s advisors believed the markets would correct themselves) that the total collapse of the credit markets occurred in the winter of 1930/1931 . . and it was that government failure to intervene that is seen today as the major cause of the disaster that followed the ’29 crash.

   So again, hold your noses and support the “bailout.”

8. We should worry less about the Crash of 1929, and the depression that followed, and more about Germany in the early 1920s (and Eretz Yisrael’s similar experiences in the 1980s).

   On the bright side, maybe we could use tefillin bags to carry bills in once wallets are two small. And remember that many shuls have a minhag of auctioning aliyos in “cents” to get a more impressive number, so with a bit of inflation they can switch to dollars. We’ll all be millionaires, just like the Israelis (if you stick to Lira).

9. akuperma, that is simply abd starkly false –

   The closest analogy in recent times is Sweden in the 90s – and their Finace Minister was called to Washington last week for consultations . . . all concerned seem to agree that Sweden’s financial system is too small to be a model for us now.

   Germany’s situation was caused to an overwhelming degree by reparations from WWI – The Allies declared Germany responsible for WWI, and made them sign on to a treaty under which they had to pay the Allioes for their war costs – German industry was literally packed up on trains and railed west to the victors . . and $ Billions in annual payments were to be paid by Germany to the Allies. Germany literally went broke (My father of Blessed Memory was a teenager in 1923 when French and Enlish troops reoccupied the Ruhr in 1923 after the Weimar Republic defaulted on reparations – I have listened to personal witness to the Germany of those days – as well as to the horrors that followed)

   The lesson learned from Weimar was what motivated the the post-WWII Marshall Plan . . . to build up a destroyed Europe so that extremism born in desparation might not once again prevail.

   And Israel has never experienced a loss of its credit markets.

   The late Fall of 1929 and early months of 1930 remain starkly similar to what is begining to unfold now.