The Bailout Is a Band-Aid: Housing Crisis Needs to Be Fixed

Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:18 PM

By: Christopher Ruddy

Yesterday Sen. Orrin Hatch was hitting the airwaves.

The subprime crisis, he said, was the fault of the Clinton administration, who he said created the subprime mortgage crisis.

Other Republicans have been laying blame on the financial crisis on minorities and illegal immigrants who got mortgages they simply couldn’t pay. They offer no statistical proof on this point.

Nor does the usually sensible Senator Hatch offer evidence when it comes to pointing the finger at the Clinton administration.

The attempt to deflect blame for the crisis is not simply wrongheaded; I think it will compound Republican political woes and bring us disaster again in November.

Doesn’t Hatch and Co. know that Bill and Hillary Clinton voters in the swing states will decide who becomes the next president? They are wary of Obama, but love the Clintons and remember the good economic times of the’90s.

As a conservative Republican of the Reagan type, I find myself in this odd place cheering on some of the sensible things I hear from Democrats.

Barack Obama said any bailout to Wall Street must not be simply a cash payout or a loan, but be treated like an equity investment in these firms. We want our money back and then some. Yes to that, I say.

And demands by House Democrats that the secretary of the treasury alone not be given a blank check for over a trillion dollars in our money, and that we have complete transparency in the transactions, I say yes to that too.

Fiscal responsibility, transparency and accountability — aren’t these things stuff Republicans believe in?

The Democratic complaints about the Bush plan shows that our government is working. The executive branch tried to put a gun to the head of Congress and told them, “Sign this check or the whole U.S. banking system will collapse.â€