How is this "emergency bailout" different from all other bailouts?

Hang in to the end for my favorite suggestion for how to spend some of your quarantine time... plus a great way to defeat insomnia!

So. How is this "emergency bailout" different from all other bailouts? Answer: during every other urgent economic crisis intervention there were powerful interests in Congress and the Executive who spoke up for the taxpayer. Sure one could argue that industries were "saved" who should have been allowed to suffer the consequences of bad management... and that the CEO caste nearly always got their parachute first... nevertheless, this chart shows that overall, the workers at those companies were helped almost as much. Above all, our children weren't saddled with vast debt in order to line oligarchic pockets. In fact, taxpayers did all right.

This linked research shows that the vast majority of business bailouts passed by Congress over the past half century have either broken even or generated a profit! For example: "the much-derided 2009 Troubled Asset Relief Program, was a $854 billion bailout for financial companies. Ultimately, $382 billion was dispersed to Wall Street firms like Citigroup, JPMorgan and AIG in exchange for preferred stock and other compensation. Taxpayers earned a net $32.5 billion. 

A separate bailout to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was even more lucrative. The U.S. government received preferred stock for the $234 billion invested in the two housing giants. Taxpayers got their money back as well as $123 billion in profits."

The bailout of the auto companies in the same season restored that American industry to health. Republicans shouted: "let Detroit die!" while Obama and the Democratic Congress demanded major equity as collateral... and came within just $14B of breaking even.

The CoronaCrisis Stimulus has been entirely different in all ways. No collateral has been demanded from any of the TBTF (Too Big To Fail) corps, nor WallStreet, nor any moguls represented by K Street. Nor are there any CEO consequences. No equity that taxpayers might later sell to recoup anything. Pelosi had to use all her political capital just to get much of it called "loans" so that someday, something might be clawed back from those of the ungratefully saved who get obscenely profitable. (For now, those "loans" are unrecoverable.)

The systems of accountants who watched TARP carefully and insisted that U.S. funds buy toxic assets at near fair value are almost entirely absent this time, except for a few promises made by Black Rock, which might still contain a few citizens.

The inspectorate who might watch for insider corruption this time was either fired or intimidated by Trump, while he and McConnell have blasted any attempt in the House to create oversight as "delaying dems who are killing Americans and American jobs."

Even the money that's going to workers is being funneled through corporations under "payroll protection" when simpler and more direct means are available.

You may be upset with these traitors for many reasons, e.g. spreading climate denialism, waging open war on all fact-professions, attacking as "deep state" the brave men and women who won the Cold War and the War on Terror, kids in cages, the 20,000 Trump lies, the appointment of unqualified and corrupt monsters to every executive department, the deliberate dismantling of all American sciences and alliances...

In fact, all of you know some residual Republicans who hold their noses at such Trumpian antics calling them 'regretable" but... who then murmur about "spendthrift/wastrel Democrats." 

Demand they make a wager of it! Which party is always more fiscally responsible? Get the twit to ante-up and escrow big stakes in a bet over that cliché, because I promise you that I will (for 10% of your winnings) line up the proof. It is always, always Democrats, not the corrupt cesspool of turpitude that was once the Party of Lincoln.

== The Piketty fence against feudalism ==

Thomas Piketty’s series of books on “Capital” have sold millions worldwide zeroing in on the greatest problem of our time, the concerted campaign to re-impose feudalism through skyrocketing wealth disparities that are fast approaching those of 1789 France, just before the Revolution.

While playing off the concerns that Karl Marx raised (dogmatically and with far more primitive data) in Das Kapital, Piketty, is actually a fan of Adam Smith. He wants to save competitive-creative market enterprise, which truly does foster invention and wealth generation that can ‘lift all boats.’  

Alas, eras of vibrant entrepreneurship almost always failed across the last 6000 years, wrecked not by socialists or bureaucrats but by rich cheaters - by century after century of kings, nobles, priests and the sort of spoiled inheritance brats who were also (ironically) the chief villains in every Ayn Rand novel. (Though no Rand-oid ever seems to notice that fact.)

Piketty systematically shows how the vastly creative and flat social structure of the post WWII Greatest Generation led to hugely successful enterprise… whereupon after 1981 all of that began to decline and then plummet with this era’s return to oligarchy.

“Capital and Ideology builds on Piketty’s long-standing argument that inequality has soared across the world since 1980. It proposes strong remedies. Piketty wants to slap wealth taxes of 90 percent on any assets over $1 billion, and he waxes nostalgic about the postwar decades when British and American top marginal income-tax rates were over 80 percent.”  

Sound radical? Well, it wouldn’t sound at all radical to the Greatest Generation who survived the Depression, crushed Hitler, stymied Stalin and built the most spectacularly effective market economy of all time.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt and European social democratic parties, desperate to dissuade workers from Bolshevism, oversaw a redistribution from rich to poor. From 1932 to 1980, top marginal income tax rates averaged 81 percent in the US and 89 percent in Britain, Piketty calculated. Rich Americans also paid state income taxes, and higher inheritance taxes than wealthy Europeans. But from 1980, Reagan, Thatcher and their acolytes, as well as post-communist regimes in the former USSR and China, restored the trend to inequality….”

(Something I also note, that Piketty missed and that boggles all "Tea Party" types. That the American Founders followed the revolution against British oligarchy by seizing and redistributing up to a third of the land in the former colonies. And act of "leveling" that both built the initial US middle class and makes the New Deal look almost Randian, by comparison.)

Piketty goes into the justifying incantations, like “government is the enemy”… even though Adam Smith extolled civil servants as helpful in counter-balancing feudal monopolists and oligarchy. (One reason today’s oligarchs’ Enemy #1 is the so-called “deep state” of a million men and women who strive honestly on our behalf, daily.) Piketty describes the “sacralization of property” which has become the central faith-word of a libertarian movement that used to focus on the C-Word… competition… till billionaires bought out the movement, top to bottom.

Reading the stats, you have to wonder where the oligarchs think this all can lead? Do they actually think they can establish a permanent inheritance pyramid, with all the fact-using “boffins” - folks who who know genetics, cyber and nuclear science - all meekly accepting their place just above a festering sea of poverty? 

Many zillionaires can now see that’s untenable and they are splitting in two directions. Some are making the choice made by Joe Kennedy in the 1930s"to sacrifice half my wealth so the workers won't get furious and take it all."  Count Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and many of the smartest tech giants there.

Others have decided to double down on the evil. Among some has arisen an even more noxious meme — a fixation on apocalypse that they plan to ride out in Patagonian or Siberian prepper redoubts or in hideaways under the sea, blithely certain those few boffins who survive won’t be able to find them. Riiiight.

In the end, Piketty calls for what I’ve been demanding since The Transparent Society … and even since my novel EARTH… the one thing that Adam Smith and even Friedrich Hayek demanded in order to make markets, justice systems and every other thing work well… and the one thing that oligarchs and inheritance brats have always avoided frantically, until that final tumbrel ride.  Transparency.

== And finally - a good use of time... and maybe save the galaxy?  ==

RECOMMENDATION: there is no better win-win way to pass quarantine time than with a historical atlas. If you have just five minutes at a time, it makes terrific bathroom reading and you come away having learned tons, from just one page. Or get immersed for hours - any page might lead you to go click great web tutorials like the EXTRA CREDIT series! And never again will you be at a loss about this or that era and the names that smug folks drop!

You'll gain perspective on the awful, wretched way that self-deluding kings, lords and theocrats ruled, as humanity crawled agonizingly out of the dismal trap of feudalism that mired nearly all cultures, on nearly all continents, and that has likely mired a majority of alien races, too. (A top candidate to explain the Fermi Paradox... and much of today's politics.)

Oh, and one more great benefit! 
Having trouble falling asleep? 
When you're interested, a historical atlas can be riveting!

But when you're loggy and in need of sleep...

...a historical atlas can be ... utterly... soporific...

...zzzzzzz

A total win-win.