The WSJ's dislike for Senator Obama is overflowing from its editorial page. A front page piece complained that: "Sen. Obama cited new economic forces to explain what appears like a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces." Obama then went on to talk about the need for a stronger role for government to prevent the extremes of inequality that we have witnessed over the last three decades. Perhaps Senator Obama was thinking of a stronger role for government to prevent Wall Street executives from booking enormous profits on what subsequently turned out to be bad loans. As the NYT reported, half of the profits of the Wall Street banks over the years 2004 through 2007 have already disappeared in write-downs of bad debt. Of course, the executives who got bonuses based on these bogus profits (some of the richest people in the country) get to keep the bonuses. If Senator Obama thinks that the government should try to regulate the financial industry so that executives are not able to enrich themselves by mass marketing bad loans that leave homeowners homeless and stockholders out of luck, is this "a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces?"
--Dean Baker [Thanks to a BTP reader for this tip.]
