Skip to main content

Public Opposition to Bailout Mania Grows

For whatever polls may be worth, here is the latest on the public mood against borrow-and-spend profligacy of government interventionism that forces taxpayers to foot the bill for financial institutions' avoiding real consequences for their lousy judgments and greedy risk-taking.

Poll: Most not happy with bailout, oppose spending more

"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The government's financial bailout has not worked so far, a majority of respondents to a national poll say, and six in 10 don't want Washington to spend more money on the rescue.

Sixty-one percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Friday oppose providing more government money in the financial bailout.

There are some supporters, however. Thirty-eight percent say the government should provide more assistance to ailing banks and other financial institutions.

Most of the 1,245 adult Americans questioned for the poll were surveyed before Thursday's Senate vote to release the remaining $350 billion in the financial bailout program.

"One reason for the opposition to more money being spent may be that more than eight in 10 said that the first $350 billion of taxpayer money for the bailout didn't work," said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director. "Only 14 percent say that the money accomplished what it was supposed to do."

Regardless of the apparent public opposition to the bailout, the Senate voted 52-42 Thursday to release the remaining funds.

The 61 percent who oppose providing more taxpayer money for the financial bailout is up from 56 percent who opposed the initial bailout in mid-October."

Comments

Anonymous said…
The first $350B disappeared with no accountability into the hands of corporatists who no doubt provided enormous amounts of lobbying money to Congress in exchange for it. As such, I'm among the 14% who think the money did exactly what it was intended to do. And for that reason also part of the 61% and the 56%.
Brian Miller said…
Yeah, now let's wait for the OUTRAGED campaign by FreedomWorks and the Republicans against the release of the second half of TARP.

Considering their hilariously over-the-top campaign of fury against some loans for GM and Chrysler, I'm sure that we can expect an onslaught several orders of magnitude larger for the upcoming $350 billion, right?

Right?

Hello?

*crickets*

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?