April 15, 2010--What Will Henry Say?

Let me call him Henry.

At least three times a week, over cups of coffee, we sit side-by-side at the counter at the Green Owl and fight about politics. He is a libertarian Republican who is fiscally and ideologically quite conservative, but about matters such as abortion and gayness he is about as progressive as I am.

Compared to most conservatives I encounter here, who tend to stick to the GOP talking-points that include making things up (such as there were no acts of domestic terrorism during the Bush-Cheney years and the health care bill just passed calls for death panels and will raise taxes for everyone), Henry is smart and well versed in his version of political truth.

He skeptical that humans contribute significantly to global warming and has read selections from the science and semi-science which makes that case. And he has even read the Kaiser Family Foundation's excellent summary of the actual health reform bill and not just the Rush Limbaugh-Michele Bachmann-Sara Palin caricatures.

He makes you crazy but in a good way. Occasionally I surprise him by acknowledging that while listening to him, arguing with him, I have actually learned something. Even changed my mind.

Back from him, on the other hand, I have yet to hear that something, anything I have said or passed along to him to read has caused him to rethink one of his positions. In this, he, like those on the extreme right (and the extreme left), is a True Believer.

So I even hesitate to pass along to him the most recent New York Times column by Andrew Ross Sorkin. (Linked below) What's the point? The title alone should suggest why it would be a waste of my and Henry's time--"Surprise! The Bailouts Are Working."

Because if there is one thing that makes Henry as crazy as he makes me when citing the novelist Michael Crichton as a sound source on the myth of global warming, it is to try to convince him that the bailouts that were actually instituted during the last months of the Republican George W. Bush's presidency were not thinly disguised efforts to nationalize the banks, General Motors, Chrysler, and the rest of the American economy. For Henry, and other fiscal conservatives, though they recognize that TARP was passed by Congress during a Republican administration, he and they claim that Obama, who had not yet been elected, had an undue hand in shaping it and of course was mainly responsible, after he was inaugurated, for implementing it. He seized the power and resources it offered, they ahistorically claim, to take long strides in leaidng American down the path toward socialism. For Henry, letting the blind hand of the free market work its magic was all that was needed to keep us from plummeting into another Great Depression.

But what, as Sorkin suggests, if it the freakin' thing actually worked? The banks and others that were bailed out with taxpayer money have already paid back almost all that was advanced to them. And to boot they paid us substantial amounts of interest. Many billions of dollars. And the U.S. government has either already disposed of its ownership stake in most of the financial institutions or is about to do so for those that remain. GM appears to be not far behind in paying us back, and Obama is looking forward soon to extracting the government from owning a big piece of the auto industry.

So what was so wrong with TARP? And if Obama is a socialist, how come he is selling our stakes in the banks and other financial institutions? Why not retain them as one would expect socialists to do?

Maybe he's not such a Commie after all.

This of course does not mean that our economy has been restored. There is by far too much unemployment and too many hard-working people are still losing their homes. But in the meantime, in regard to the affects of TARP, I am waiting to hear from you Henry.