For obamacare, I think yes Cruz articulated what was the issue, which was business owners having a gun to their heads to provide insurance when they hit 50 employees. They hold at 49 and stop growing. Sometimes profit margins are too small to afford it. Speaking of affording it, premiums have shot up. The problem is that since healthcare is so heavily regulated it makes it expensive vs laser eye surgery which keeps coming down yet has more doctors entering that field among other cosmetic surgery. The USA is slowly running out of money to fund entitlements which includes healthcare. And then government funded healthcare isn't much better as taxes increase and rationing occurs. Pick your poison. Perhaps people will need to start becoming more and more healthy.
Why is the richest nation on earth having such trouble funding healthcare for so many of its citizens when other western nations seem able to handle the issue without leaving millions without healthcare?
As for Dodd frank, a knee jerk reaction which has yielded the USA not achieving 3% growth for more than 8 yrs. how has Dodd frank helped, it just let a lot of people sit on a lot of bailout money as the corporate community is going to sit on their money when the government unpredictably passes regulations that stifle growth. Another example of government over regulating which means they will bailout companies for making bad decisions when said companies should fail. Fear checks greed and if government is trying to keep fear in check, greed runs rampant.
Alan Greenspan's theory was that danger of financial losses would keep financial institutions from taking excessive risks.
Dick Fuld pocketed in the neighborhood of $400 million in salary and bonuses in the years leading up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the 150 year old investment bank he was CEO of. Do you think he gives a
**** that he ran Lehman Brothers into the ground? Why would he? He made $400 million in salary and bonuses by putting Lehman Brothers on the risky path that sent it slamming face-first into the ground. He didn't have to give that money back. Did Dick Fuld act the way he did based on the belief that the government would bail out Lehman Brothers? No. Dick Fuld acted the way he did based on the belief that Dick Fuld would walk away with $400 million in his bank account.
The insurance writers at American International Group didn't get paid based on the long-term health of AIG. They got paid based on how many policies they sold. Did the policy writers at AIG issue so many insurance policies for credit default swaps and other shady "derivative" products based on the belief that the government would bail out AIG if the insurance payouts killed the company? No. They wrote all those risky insurance policies based on the premised that they would pocket a bunch of money.
Angelo Mozilo made Countrywide the most aggressive issuer of subprime mortgages in America. Do you think Angelo feels bad that Countrywide corkscrewed into the ground just as hard as Lehman brothers? Angelo Mozilo made $470 million dollars by slamming Countrywide into the ground. Do you think he cares whether the government bailed them out afterward?
These guys invented a system-- derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-based securities-- that let them issue as many bogus mortgages as possible (google the phrase "anybody who can fog a mirror" for details) and pass the risk along to suckers. Simple process.:
1) Issue mortgages to literally anybody who applies.
2) Bundle shitty mortgages into securities called "mortgage based securities".
3) Strong-arm bond rating agencies like Standard & Poors and Moody's into giving A+ ratings to your shitty MBSs.
4) Sell MBSs to suckers, so that when the mortgages tank, somebody else is on the hook.
Easy.
So they had invented a machine that turns straw into gold, and they needed a whole lot of straw to feed the machine. So they knowingly issued mortgages to people they knew full well were deadbeats, put them in pools, bundled them into securities that they could sell, and sold them to suckers.
(Suckers-- anybody who bought mortgage-based securities as an investment-- suckers like me and probably you as well, who had RRSPs that included mortgage-based securities as a component.)
The system worked great... up until 2007 when investment fund managers started noticing that mortgage-based securities were tanking (which is what happens when you issue mortgages to "anybody who can fog a mirror".) Suddenly people weren't buying Mortgage Based Securities anymore. Suddenly companies like Countrywide and Lehman Brothers had a problem. Mortgage originators (like Countrywide) had all these mortgages they couldn't sell to mortgage securitizers (like Lehman Brothers.) Mortgage securitizers (like Lehman Brothers) had all these mortgage-based securities that they couldn't sell to suckers anymore. Countrywide and Lehman Brothers and all the other companies in the industry had spent all this money buying straw to turn into gold, and then found themselves in serious trouble when the machine wouldn't turn straw into gold anymore.
You say that fear is supposed to keep greed in check. Ok. But what caused these financial institutions to lose their fear and let greed run while wasn't the idea that the government would bail them out if they messed up. What caused them to lose their fear was their belief that they had invented a scheme that let them gamble as much as possible and pass the risk along to suckers. And that should never have been allowed to happen. That's why there needs to be regulation.
-k