Is the Resolution Fund the Public Option of Financial Reform?

Of course part of the reason the Republicans can boil the issue down to two scary words, is because reporters insist on noting how interesting it is that they are doing so, instead of pointing out that what they are doing, (lying) in any other business context would be grounds for immediate dismissal.

It has been widely reported that th Republicans are lying but as long as the reporting is polite and ‘balanced’ it doesn’t matter a whit.
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Thanks for the example……..

The funny part is that this is far more “government takeover” than it is “permanent bailout”… especially since there is no “bailout” element to this bailout

Kate: Everyone’s feet should be held to the fire on this one. We need reporters willing to dig in and look for any loopholes in the bill and financial connections between legislators and lobbiests. The Chamber of Commerce is doing everything it can to stop the bill as they did with HIR. Millions of lobbiest money is going into this effort to weaken or end financial reform.
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If we don’t stop the usurpation of our government by wall street, we will end up like Russia, a country run by the oligarchs. This should be a common cause with the Tea Partiers. Wall Street is not on their side.

Why do these GOP guys keep creating meaningless wedge issues (i.e., MSU) to try to kill legislation? First the PO, now loaning a few bucks (figuratively speaking) to LIQUIDATE A BAD COMPANY is a “permanent bailout”. If killing it for now will get the bill passed, so be it.

Kate Pickert:
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Wait just a second…

[the public option] was stripped from health reform legislation after it became political kryptonite.

How do you know that?
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Here’s a CBS News report on the Dole-Daschle-Baker plan, from June 17, 2009 (link to CBS news story):

The Democratic-led Congress maintains it is working to create a health care reform package that can win Republican support, but if the bill is to be truly bipartisan, it should get in the range of 20 Republican votes, former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle (a Democrat) and Bob Dole (a Republican) said Wednesday.
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Along with former Republican Sen. Howard Baker, another former Senate Majority Leader, Daschle and Dole have created a set of recommendations for achieving bipartisan health care solutions. Speaking to CBS News political consultant John Dickerson on CBSNews.com’s politics Web show “Washington Unplugged,” the two men shared their idea of “bipartisanship.”
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“I’d like to have 20 Republicans” in the Senate vote on the health care reform package, Dole said.
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Daschle concurred. “It has to be something where you have a double-digit number of Republicans and Democrats,” he said.
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The two men explained how they compromised on hot-button issues like a mandate for all Americans to have insurance and a government-sponsored, plan (or “public option”), to produce their report for the Bipartisan Policy Center.
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“On the mandate, it was not an easy thing for me to give on,” Dole said. “When we started, we decided we weren’t going to let two or three things kill our effort.”
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Daschle and Dole are two founders of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has made health care its signature issue. The center’s report, which the founders intend to discuss with Congress, takes a broad approach to addressing health care challenges like delivery, cost, coverage and financing — in a manner that is politically palatable for both the left and the right. The policy center spent a year and a half conducting research, analysis, public policy forums and targeted meetings and workshops with health care experts to come up with their approach.
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“We’ve offered some solutions that may offer ways in which to compromise on some of the tough issues,” Daschle said.
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The report does not recommend a public plan, a sticking point for many Democrats.
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“We compromised on that substantially,” said Daschle, President Obama’s first nominee for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. Daschle withdrew his nomination in February amid tax problems.
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The report does recommend creating state or regional health insurance exchanges, and implementing a federal fallback if the exchanges are not set up in a timely manner. It also suggests an individual mandate and other solutions like limiting out-of-pocket premiums and investments in comparative effectiveness research.

Here’s President Obama speaking to those fundamentals of the legislation that ultimately passed at the Republican conference in January, 2010 (link to the President’s extemporaneous remarks):

“…at its core, if you look at the basic proposal that we’ve put forward: it has an exchange so that businesses and the self-employed can buy into a pool and can get bargaining power the same way big companies do; the insurance reforms that I’ve already discussed, making sure that there’s choice and competition for those who don’t have health insurance. The component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year.
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Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that’s not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that’s how you guys — (applause) — that’s how you guys presented it.
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And so I’m thinking to myself, well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist — no, look, I mean, I’m just saying, I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans — is similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care…”

So, Kate Pickert, I ask you again: how do you know that the public option was dropped from consideration only after it became the focus of negative rightist (Mitch McConnell) and centrist (Joe Lieberman) political rhetoric?
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What knowledge do you have that informs you with such certainty that the legislative strategy, at least from June, 2009 on, was not to obtain “in the range of 20 Republican votes” through the “compromise” of Dole and Daschle, and the Bipartisan Policy Center plan (admittedly) adopted by the Administration –a plan that specifically did not include a public option?
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Isn’t it relatively clear that, Administration “preferences” (and ’08 campaign rhetoric) aside, a public option was simply never in real consideration by the Senate/Administration, as per the heeded recommendations of Sens. Dole and Daschle?

Meanwhile, Kate seemed more than willing to boil Fox’s rhetoric down to one simple word: lie. When our media is ready to take the next, far more significant step, calling b-s on equally dishonest pols, we’ll start to get somewhere.
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Wanna read something extremely depressing about further “reform” by our esteemed dem leadership? See Nomi Prins. Again, we have a nihilistic party totally divorced from the facts. In relief, we have our beloved dems, seemingly incapable of challenging the vested interests plaguing American society.

SZ, good to see you, but remember, “look FWD, not back”

Yes, according to polls the public option was more popular in the country than the rest of the legislation, garnering majority support most of the time. You should qualify your hyperbole because inside the Beltway is not where most of us live.

I think it is because if Republicans can not succeed in passing legislation or having a platform popular enough to get them elected, they want to run home to constituents and say that they saved them from the evil monster.
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So, they pick something totally random and call it the evil monster and may get reelected for it in November.

Yep. This. If people can lie with impunity and muddy the debate, they will do so.
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Reporters generally seem to prefer passing along lies to reporting the news.

Stuart,
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Good to see you’re back.
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For a little while there I was writing the longest entries. (but you do cover everything, I am not complaining).

HCR shouldn’t have taken as long as it did were it not for sludgers slinging fear any which-way. MSM need to start calling these guys out over this baloney. If something is, was and never will be true, you can’t simply repeat the lie often enough and it becomes universally accepted by all. It’s still a LIE.

It’s not tax-payer funded and it’s not a bailout fund. Otherwise, “tax-payer bailout fund” is completely accurate.

And it’s a good thing they took the public option off the table, otherwise they might have lost crucial Republican votes.

Is the press treating it like like the Public Option?

Credulous acceptance of opponents’ claims. Check. Check.

Assumption that opponents are arguing in good faith. Check. Check.

Cynical dismissal of proposed legislation because of limited scope (PO “doesn’t matter” b/c only 5% of Americans could enroll. Resolution fund “Relatively insignificant” b/c only $50B.) Check. Check.

Unsupported claims that Democratic compromises are due to polls and politics rather than ideology and bribery. (h/t SZ) Check. Check.

Yep, I’d say that it is like the PO.

Art Pepper, FTW!

Now there’s some equivalency we can believe in.

Dear Friends,

This is simple, 50B from the banks, where do banks get money from, they get it from people. So you have 50B more money from the people given to the government to be used as a fund to bail out banks. Now the government has 50B more money, so they have more power, and with power they become more corrupt

You want a better government take away the money, why do people hold on the their offices so long, because they have so much power. If we had a government that had limits on it money, they would have a lot less power. Less power means less corruption, and with less gain by winning, maybe they would get back to running the government for the people, instead of the party out of power doing everything they can to make it worst so they can get back in power.

Dear Paul,

Not a one republican voted for the health care bill, the reason the public option was taken out was the democrats in the senate did not want it. Remember the democrats had 60 votes, they could have pass a law that required all republicans to give all their money to all the democrats, nothing the republicans could have done to stop them. To say that the law was bad because of the Republicans, is like saying that reason Iraq went bad was due to Mrs Clinton voting for the war.

Dear stuartzechman,

Mr Obama making the point that the law passed was bipartision, is beyond stupid. He did not get a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate, and he lost a lot of Democratic votes in both. This law that was passed is the summation of stupid that is what we call government. Nobody wanted it, nobody needs it, and nobody will get any advantage from it. The taxes hit us now, and the by the time the advantage cut in, we will have no money to fund it. This is just a ponzi scheme to increase government taxes while creating more government jobs that create no wealth.

So, that means, according to you, that the most corrupt time was World War II and government was completely clean prior to the Civil War.
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It would, also, mean that the administration of George W. Bush had far, far less scandals than the Carter Administration.
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Obviously I disagree with you completely.
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Corruption is inversely related to transparency. That is, the more transparent government is, the less they can get away with.
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The amount of money they handle is not related to that as far as I am concerned since there is no correlation unless you include times in history when the government paid it’s employees so poorly that the only people who would take the job would be somebody interested graft and the only way the job would be worth it’s while if it is subsidized by graft. However, that would be exactly the opposite of what you are saying.

Oregon JC:

remember, “look FWD, not back”

…unless you’re Thomas Drake.

Senators like Blanche Lincoln and other DINOs were the people who killed the PO. In Ms. Lincoln’s case, she claimed she couldn’t back it because her constitutients didn’t want it; all the while polls showed just the opposite. When elected are that disconnected from the people the represent, they need to be replaced.

patricksartor:
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For a little while there I was writing the longest entries

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Thanks for picking up the Proust-summarizing slack around here for a few days.

patricksartor:
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For a little while there I was writing the longest entries
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Thanks for picking up the Proust-summarizing slack around here for a few days.

And meanwhile, that idiot Corbett is leading in PA even after he wasted tax dollars PA doesn’t have to join the law suit against the health insurance mandate. Hello, Corbett, most of PA wanted the reform!!

This is just a ponzi scheme to increase government taxes while creating more government jobs that create no wealth.
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No, it’s a scheme to enrich private industry so as to ease the assumption of nominal regulatory oversight by state technocrats.
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It’s not adversarial, it’s cooperative.
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They’re not socialists. They have no interest in recreating the US Post Office.

The proposed fund is to wind down financial institutions that are ‘too big to fail.” The funding mechanisim is in the form of mandatory allocations to a specific fund – much like the FDIC already insures consumer deposits. The money in the fund would be used to attempt some kind of orderly bankruptcy of the failed institution.

Indeed, the bill establishes a “Systemic Dissolution Fund” that would “facilitate and provide for the orderly and complete dissolution of any failed financial company or companies that pose a systemic threat to the financial markets or economy,” and “ensure that any taxpayer funds utilized to facilitate such liquidations are fully repaid from assessments levied on financial companies that have assets of $50,000,000,000, adjusted for inflation, or more.” (Page 397) http://factcheck.org/2010/02/the-big-bank-bailout-bill/

To suggest this fund is somehow a moral hazard for Wall St. to now act rashly is bizarre. To assume the hazard based upon this bill is to say that because there is a ‘bail-out fund’ we should expect that the directors of those firms:

1 – Care that their creditors would be paid.

and

2 – They would somehow not care about their own, now worthless (or greatly diminished) stock in the failed institution.

Somehow I think not.

Where’s the real news and reporting in this ‘article’?

Present the facts, back them up with good sources, and
let people decide which side they care to be on.

Both liberal and conservative writers (you’re hardly journalists) seem so keen to smack down the other side that you have gotten away from decent writing and reporting.

Some people don’t care what YOU think, and it has really become more difficult to find an objective writer.