- It is "a permanent taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks."
It is "an endless taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks."
It is "a perpetual taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks."
He claimed the legislation "perpetuates the one thing the American people have said they don't want to happen again, which is to have their tax money used to prop up the a large failed institution."
I looked forward to hearing McConnell explain his assertions when he was interviewed on CNN Sunday, but when asked by Candy Crowley of CNN to respond to President Obama's statement that the bill contained no provision for "taxpayer funded bailouts," observe McConnell's obfuscation:MCCONNELL: Well, Candy, he ought to talk to his own treasury secretary, who agrees with me, as well as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, that there is a bailout fund in the bill that was reported out of the Banking Committee, the partisan bill that came out of committee on a party-line vote.
CROWLEY: But that still does not--
MCCONNELL: I don't think that's in dispute.
CROWLEY: But that bailout is funded by the banks themselves, is it not? It is not a taxpayer bailout?
MCCONNELL: Well, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, says it is a bailout fund. I mean, regardless of how the money is produced, it is a bailout fund that sort of guarantees in perpetuity that we will be intervening once again to bail out these big firms.Note how McConnell never did address Ms. Crowley's questions regarding who would actually be funding the bailout fund. Instead he simply calls it a "bailout" and ignores the key word "taxpayer."
Of course close followers of the news know that "taxpayer bailout" is a GOP "talking point" recommended by Republican strategist Frank Luntz to defeat any attempts at financial reform legislation. And the fact that taxpayers aren't involved at all funding the process is apparently irrelevant to the GOP, which continues to mislabel the "bailout fund" even though it would be totally funded by the banks themselves. And the $50 billion fund would be used by the government "to liquidate failing financial companies that pose a significant risk to the financial stability of the United States in a manner that mitigates such risk and minimizes moral hazard," not to rescue them. A failing bank would be broken up, sold off, and its executive management fired. That's sure some "taxpayer bailout of Wall Street" Senator!
