September 29, 2008
Washington, DC---Congressman Paul Hodes released the following statement after opposing the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan.
"I have no doubt that it is necessary to act quickly to stabilize our financial markets, protect American taxpayers, and rebuild our economy. I gave careful consideration to the arguments presented for passage of this bill, but I cannot support spending $700 billion of taxpayer money on a plan that was flawed from the start and, even as modified, fails to adequately protect New Hampshire taxpayers.
We got into this financial crisis because of outrageous Wall Street greed and Bush administration regulators asleep at the switch who recklessly failed to act, avoiding oversight and real regulation. They broke it, and now they are asking all of us to buy it. It's not right to ask New Hampshire taxpayers to foot the bill for the mistakes of years of business as usual in Washington and an out-of-control Wall Street.
This proposal would saddle taxpayers with nearly a trillion dollars in bad debt while providing inadequate relief to homeowners struggling to pay their mortgage. In my judgment, we should consider other plans which deal with the foreclosure crisis and the credit crunch in a more direct way. During the great Depression, the Homeowners loan corporation successfully dealt with a mortgage mess. During the savings and loan crisis in the 1980's congress enacted a successful program for "net worth certificates" to provide liquidity to banks, an alternative which required no subsidy and no cash outlay.
We also need bankruptcy reform to help homeowners to stay in their homes and a regulatory overhaul of the banking and financial system to stop the practices that got us into this mess.
We face enormous economic challenges ahead and have critical investment needs for the 21st century. We need health care reform; better education and training for information technology jobs and a new energy policy based on alternative sources of energy like biomass, solar, and wind to fuel our economy. With this bailout plan, it will be much more difficult for the next President and Congress to make the critical investments that our country needs.
Congress should stay in session until we can craft a common sense proposal that protects taxpayer dollars, protects homeowners and reforms the regulatory structure that got us into this mess."
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