Political Memes

“The economy” misdirection

This one is far, far more complex than people imagine. It's nearly impossible to overstate how complicated it is. Economy good/economy bad barely even touches on how it affects individual people. Like, sure, the economy is doing really well right now, employment is at near historic lows, real incomes are, on average, much higher than they were just a few years ago, but I'm still feeling economic stress.

To[o] big to fail, is an incomplete sentence.

It is, but mostly because people don't understand what that means. Let's take, for instance, General Motors. There are 167,000 people that work directly for GM. If GM hadn't been bailed out by Obama's administration, that would have been >150,000 out of jobs immediately. But that's not where it would have stopped; it would have been the first in a very large chain of dominoes. For instance, GM spun Delphi off about 20 years ago (and it's gone through numerous restructurings, etc. since); Delphi was one of GM's largest suppliers. No GM means no Delphi, and that's another 20,000 jobs. Look at all the companies the sell products and services to GM; when GM dies, large parts of those companies' business also goes, leading to more job losses. And what about all the businesses that those individual employees patronize? Like, say, the restaurant just outside of the GM plant in Bay City, MI? When GM closes, there goes 95% of their business, and now the 20 employees of that restaurant are out of work and can't make their mortgage payments.

When politicians say, "too big to fail", that's what they mean; failure of certain single companies and banks would have such a disastrous effect on the country as a whole that it's better for everyone if the gov't saves their ass. (And, BTW, I believe that all of the car companies ended up repaying the gov't after they were bailed out.)