MURDOCK: Bipolar bailout disorder

By Deroy Murdock | Monday, December 1, 2008

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COMMENTARY:

This Thanksgiving holiday season, Americans can be grateful for a government huge enough to work against itself.

As cornucopian benefits flow from Washington, Uncle Sam turns out to suffer from Bipolar Bailout Disorder. Like a taxpayer-funded Push Me-Pull You, he goes both ways while consuming enormous resources on the road to nowhere.

Today's gargantuan mess started largely because Washington used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to promote affordable housing. "The more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing," Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, said in 2003. He described Fannie and Freddie as "fundamentally sound" and added: "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing."

Well, it worked. America is awash in affordable housing. Home prices in 20 major cities plunged 16.6 percent last quarter. That's bad news if you're selling, but a bonanza for those seeking affordable housing.

So, rather than declare "mission accomplished," Uncle Sam has cannon-balled into the mortgage markets to jack up housing prices. Which is it?

On Sept. 24, George W. Bush claimed the $700 billion bailout would relieve distressed banks of "troubled assets that are clogging the financial system." But just seconds later, he continued: "the value of many of these assets will likely be higher than their current price, because the vast majority of Americans will ultimately pay off their mortgages." In that case, are these assets really troubled, or just hung over? If the latter, why not calm down, let them sleep it off, and then arise after a decent interval?

The Troubled Assets Relief Program then endeavored to rescue teetering banks. But to do so, Treasury dragooned prosperous banks into accepting bailout money so their needy competitors would not be stigmatized. This is like a supermarket whose affluent shoppers must accept and spend Food Stamps so low-income customers with Food Stamps don't appear poor at the checkout stand.

Bailout season began with George Bush, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - the Moe, Larry and Curly of fiscal policy - insisting America needed a $700 billion bailout as urgently as a rattlesnake-bite victim requires anti-venom.

"Americans' personal savings are threatened," Mr. Paulson panted in September. "The ability of consumers and businesses to borrow and finance spending, investment and job creation has been disrupted."

But then Comrade Bush created the world's biggest starting bonus. He decided to leave half the bailout budget in the Oval Office desk for Barack Obama to allocate.

Assuming Mr. Obama spends that $350 billion on Inauguration Day, three months and 17 days will have passed since the bailout's Oct. 3 enactment. So, at least half the desperately needed bailout proved unnecessary. "Never mind!"

As president, neither Al Gore nor John Kerry could have gotten away with such aggressively socialist policies as the allegedly "conservative Republican" Bush administration's dizzying parade of massive outlays, fiscal injections, equity purchases, mandatory subsidies, and even nationalizations.

These and other new commitments - totaling a mind-blowing $8.347 trillion and counting - assume Washington should pump money into the economy. But it cannot do so without sucking money from the economy. Uncle Sam cannot spend a dollar without first extracting it from taxpayers or lenders, or by printing it to spend today the purchasing power that inflation will demolish tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Mr. Paulson, who, strangely enough, served as White House assistant to Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman, has careened from purchasing "toxic" assets, to nationalizing AIG, to letting Lehman Brothers drown, to swapping cash-for-partial nationalization of banks, to buying corporate paper, to Tuesday's flashes of genius: $600 billion to buy bad mortgages plus $200 billion to encourage credit card companies to help Americans sink even further into debt.

Hank Paulson's next brainstorm surely will surprise every American - starting with Mr. Paulson. Give him credit for this: He has turned the Treasury into America's costliest improvisational theater company.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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