Do you ever get the feeling we’re being regulated by legislators who don’t read the bills and don’t understand “the underlying themes”?
The Hendersonville Times-News has a picture of Congressional wannabe Jeff Miller with the 2300-page finance reform bill. Incumbent Heath Shuler voted for the bill.
“The recession was a direct result of Wall Street’s predatory loans and mortgages, and the unrestrained greed of corporate bigwigs,” Shuler said. “Our employment rates went from the natural rate of roughly 5% to double-digits, and the United States lost 8 million jobs.”
I didn’t follow that, as I know nobody who was laid off for getting too high a mortgage. Shuler also liked the bill because it put limits on credit card fees, limited bank employee salaries, and allowed the government to preemptively wipe out any bank deemed a threat to the economy. Shuler said the bill “modernized” financial regulations for “a 21st century marketplace.”
At least according to the article, Miller didn’t like the bill because it didn’t attack banks hard enough. To my knowledge, all but a couple big banks did not need TARP funds, did not want TARP funds, and paid TARP funds back ASAP with interest. (Organizing for America, in a recent missive, described the bill as “the change we fought the big banks to make.”) Miller did, however, oppose using “stimulus” to pay for the bureaucracy the bill would set up.
