The Auto Bailout and TARP, another perspective.
The auto bailout, which had its own vote (and was supported by both Clinton and Sanders), was $14 billion. Later, it was rolled into the $700 billion TARP expenditure that Sanders objected to. Now think about this:
There were some very legitimate issues with TARP. Bernie put out a statement about it at the time, which you can read at http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2008/10/01/wall-street-bailout
Basically, he was not against TARP in its entirety, but...
* he was against how it was being paid for (where, if it went south, it was the middle class tax payers who were most on the hook); and the fact that benefits were one-sided (i.e. those taxpayers took the hit if it failed, but did not comparably benefit if it succeeded).
* He was against what he saw as insufficient oversight.
* He was against the fact that the bill did nothing to address the underlying problems (he wanted the bill to include an un-doing of some of the deregulation, and to address "too big to fail"
. We were rewarding failure and not correcting the problems.
* He was against the fact that nothing was included to help homeowners facing foreclosures.
Okay, but as has been discussed many time, no complex bill is perfect, and you have to take the good with the bad. So even if you agree with Bernie about TARP being very significantly flawed, maybe you think it was simply the bitter pill you had to swallow to get the auto bailout.
But look again at those numbers. $14 billion vs $700 billion. Only 2% of the TARP funds went to the auto bailout. To approve of that, one would have to vote for 98% of the expenditure that you disagreed with! This is not about being "unwilling to compromise" as some have said about Bernie's position here... he has compromised many times, on many bills. But compromising on the 98% you disagree with to get the 2% you agree with isn't compromise, it's capitulation.
Maybe you feel even that was worth it, because if the vote had gone Sanders' way, the auto industry would have collapsed. Not true! What would actually have happened if those funds had been voted down? As I spoke about elsewhere, Congress was not just going to throw its hands up and walk away. There were two possibilities. Possibility one, which happened, was that the bill passed despite his vote. Possibility 2, if Sanders had gotten his way and prevented it, is that he would have had the opportunity to try to make it better, in the ways he had proposed. Either way, the auto industry gets bailed out. It's not like if the TARP vote had failed, Congress would have given up. There were enough votes, enough urgency, and enough consensus to be assured that nobody was going to simply walk away on this, negotiation would have contiued. There had also been discussions of other ways to address the Wall Street bailout, as discussed here. But there was going to be a bailout, one way or another.
= new reply since forum marked as read
it appears that the particular vote in question was for a $350 billion TARP disbursement that included a whopping $4 billion for the auto industry. That math is even worse than what I said! Only a bit more than 1% was for the auto industry.
This was not the total provided to the auto companies, but it is the amount that was contingent on the particular vote that everyone has been talking about.
(hat tip to DUer "Coincidence"
