On MSNBC, Ed Schultz scoffed at Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s, R-Minn., claim that the reform pushed by Dodd and Democrats would be a permanent TARP:
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Well, fine, if you don’t want to hear it from an attendee of the tea parties, or a Minnesota congresswoman, listen to the American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison, who had veritably predicted the bursting of the housing bubble by almost ten years:
Does the bill, as McConnell has said, provide for permanent bailouts? Yes, again without question. The administration and the Democrats, especially Dodd, seem wounded by this suggestion. To them it seems obvious that this can’t be true. Why, they protest, the bill says that these firms have to be wound down, not bailed out. But why then is there a $50 billion fund set up to assist this wind down? In his statement yesterday on the Senate floor, in which he said the opposition had used “falsehoods” to oppose his bill, Dodd said: “And middle class families on Main Street won’t have to pay a penny: the largest Wall Street firms will have to put up money for a $50 billion fund to cover the costs of liquidating the failed financial firm.” The costs of liquidating the failed financial firm? What might those costs be?
