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Sorry, the U.S. government is way too busy spending trillions on banker bailouts and restarting the market for granite countertops and subprime auto loans. Med
by ckinnan 17y ago
Sorry, the U.S. government is way too busy spending trillions on banker bailouts and restarting the market for granite countertops and subprime auto loans. Medical research is simply not a priority in the United States. Congress spent nearly 30 times more on AIG than the entire federal cancer research budget.
- tc 17y agoYou've hit indirectly on why it's so important that people be able to keep their own money. The brutal reality of the world is that, outside of yourself and some close companions, no one really cares about you or your ability to survive a disease in 40 years. Certainly not politicians in Washington DC. I very much doubt political aristocrats in Beijing care either. Unsurprisingly, resources get best allocated to what most people actually care about when people get to individually allocate their own resources.
- lsd5you 17y agoIts hard to disagree with the premise - people don't care - but don't you think there is a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation here ... i mean its not like there are any options for the non-super wealthy to support research of grand projects (space travel, anti-death creams...)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- philwelch 17y agoOne of these things is not like the other. The AIG bailout was emergency spending to prevent economic collapse. It wasn't an ongoing policy initiative. You can argue over whether it's effective or efficient but it's not anything like the cancer budget. That's like saying that, because of the aid after Katrina, building housing and infrastructure on the Gulf Coast is a policy priority. Yes, there are ways the government could have mitigated or prevented both of these disasters (funding upgrades to the New Orleans levee system, doing a better job at regulating the finance industry, not encouraging homeownership), but you can't compare priorities by comparing emergency spending to ordinary spending. Remember, Congress is incompetent, not evil. They probably didn't anticipate that trillion dollar bailouts would be part of the cost of their policies.
- tokenadult 17y agoThe neglect of what AIG was doing before the crash was an intentional policy priority. The recent bail-out cost was just the deferred cost of that policy.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tc 17y agoAIG bet against a complete bust of the system. They were otherwise reasonably hedged. Governments have placed much larger and more harmful bets on continued economic growth in the form of spending commitments that outpace even rosy growth estimates, but I don't hear the populists crying over that. Bailing out AIG (and their contract partners) was the problem. Creating an environment where bailout was even perceived as possible was the problem. Turning the US into a debtor nation via enormous government spending was the problem (in that it kicked off a number of other distortions).
- tc 17y agoEvery year there seem to be new emergencies. So it seems fair to say that curating emergencies and applying expensive political band-aids is a higher policy priority than long-term projects that might actually improve the standard of living.
- philwelch 17y agoAre you trying to spin a conspiracy theory that the government intentionally created the recession? I think it's far more reasonable to assume that the government is incompetent. There are plenty of government policies (I count agriculture, defense, and healthcare) that seem designed to funnel taxpayer money to crony corporations. But engineering the collapse of AIG, GM, and the investment banks simply to nationalize them seems outside the competence of the federal government.
- tc 17y ago