Oh dear, am I becoming right-wing?

[almostwitty]

I've often thought of myself being a left-leaning liberal, in the sense that a government should be there to help those who can't help themselves, regulate systems so they don't go too far too fast, but generally keep out of people's lives on a social level.

But instead, I'm watching left-wing parties voting in ID cards in the UK, and in the US voting for a plan which gives government money to bail out a banking system. Given that I tend to believe in the maxim "You made this mess, you clean it up" (which also means I think the US should stay in Iraq until it sorts the bloody mess out), it seems a tad interesting that right-wing parties (ie the ones who tended to be funded by the money-men) are the ones voting against a plan to bail them out.

Can someone tell me why the bail plan is a good idea?

Oh, and one UK conspiracy plan suggests that in the run-up to the 1992 election, the Conservative government (widely expected to lose) deliberately ran the economy badly, in order to give the next party an economic headache. Unfortunately, the Conservatives won by a slim majority so they had to manage the mess they had created.

Comments

[anivair.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure it IS a good idea.

I think that some democrats are pushing for it because they don't know what else to do. they're afraid of letting the mistakes of the republican deregulation punish the lower and middle classes (the people who really suffer when the stock market crashes).

I'm not sure that it IS a good idea. The bottom line is that it's a way of giving companies who have screwed up really badly and should go under an advantage because the government likes them.

However, I'm not sure that there's a better option either. I don't know what will happen if these companies fail. I know very little about the economy.

[sioneva.livejournal.com]

It doesn't help that much of the American public is wildly against the bail out, seeing it as giving money to the people who got us into this mess in the first place.

I don't know if it's a good idea or not. I do know that there are a lot of provisions that Democrats feel are missing but I think part of the problem is that *no one* seems to know what the right thing to do actually is!

[shove-this-job.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both comments. We are in a very 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation, being made worse that with this afternoon's breakdown of talks, no one is doing a damned thing! >:(

[sioneva.livejournal.com]

Apparently the WaMu chairman, who is *brand new* (two weeks in the job) already received something like 7.5 million as a signing bonus and is now likely to receive something like 11 million MORE as he's now out of a job.

Golden parachutes *absolutely* need to go, that's for sure.

[choirgrrl.livejournal.com]

These days I kind of throw my hands in the air when it comes to anything the government does- UK, US, or otherwise. Especially here in the US, it seems even if we vote something in we really want, we're going to get what they want in the long run, anyway.