Quotable Liberals
Timothy Burke on Timothy Geithner:
Geithner is so far little different in his approach to [transparency] than Hank Paulson. I do not buy that secrecy about the flow of resources into the financial system is a necessary precondition of the success of Administration policy. So far, in fact, every single disclosure about the joint Paulson-Geithner plan is showing that secrecy actually retards the effectiveness of government action. Either you understand that sunlight is cleansing as a basic matter of principle or you don't. So far the Obama Administration is giving every sign that they don't understand, and see transparency just as a buzz word.
Joshua Micah Marshall on the proposed bonus tax:
This seems like just another example of perverse outcomes from the 'worst of both worlds' approach we're taking to the whole finance industry bailout—keep the same people in charge of the institutions, keep effectively insolvent institutions afloat, but throw a lot of federal dollars in their direction and put in place fairly draconian tax provisions for money that's spent in ways we find either wasteful or offensive.
And because we're paid by the number of comments our posts generate (note: that is not actually true), here's Matthew Yglesias on looking for Galts in all the wrong places:
Atlas Shrugged is a stupid book, Ayn Rand is a stupid woman, and John Galt's ideas are stupid. That said, none of them are nearly this stupid. Rand's novel isn't about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt's Gulch. That doesn't make any sense at all.