Quote (sort of) of the Day:

The New Ledger:

"But now our govt’s policy is to do by itself all kinds of things that the private sector can do. Building automobiles was last year’s thing. This year, we’re taking over student loans. And then there’s still healthcare, the energy industry, and the least sensical govt monopoly of all, education.

So if we’re paying govt prices for more and more of the things we should be doing ourselves, there’s no way to avoid getting poorer and poorer over time. We’re living like a person without a job who goes to expensive restaurants every night when she should be buying macaroni and cheese, and then compounds the mistake by putting it all on her credit card.

Chris Dodd is proposing standing up a new consumer protection agency to keep “predatory” bankers from lending money to consumers who shouldn’t be borrowing in the first place. Implicitly Dodd is saying that consumers aren’t smart enough to know when they’re living beyond their means. What we really need is a government protection agency, to prevent predatory bond market investors from lending to the US government."