Less than a week after the inauguration, John Kerry and Kent Conrad choose fear over hope. Their article in Monday’s WSJ is not unlike the fear-mongering that sent us to war in Iraq and which established the USA Patriot Acts that gave us the Homeland Security department.
An extra nice touch is the way they blame the Bush administration for the TARP program which Congressional Democrats passed only after they bribed Republicans with extra pork to go along. They blame the TARP program for a list of items that will be bad about the new stimulus program, too, plus suggest a few new items that will make their new stimulus program even worse than TARP.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration failed to fix the problems in our financial system, refused to help homeowners, and didn’t pass stimulus measures to create jobs in order to lay the foundation for stronger economic growth in the future. Instead, it handed out large sums to struggling financial institutions under TARP in order to prevent a complete financial collapse. But it did so without consistency, without adequate transparency and accountability, and without restoring the credit availability that our economy desperately needs.