And while you're explaining it, please explain how the CRA did not contribute.
Actually, I'd like an explanation on this one. Let's say you run a bank. Let's say that the government wants you to make a loan that you don't want to make (let's say... filthy poor people in minority neighborhoods) because you know it won't be profitable. Do you:
a) Do the bare minimum and lobby Congress to stop it?
b) Leverage yourself to death and make as many of those loans as you possibly can?
If you can explain why profit maximizing firms chose B over A, simply because the CRA existed, I'd be interested in hearing it. More to the point, it's worth looking into which financial entities made the majority of the securitized subprime loans. Hint: They weren't subject to the CRA. The CRA links are political chaff.
That being said, the general "deregulation" bugaboo is not something that can be laid neatly at the feet of conservatives. People have been making noise about the potential dangers of allowing an unregulated insurance industry to develop since before Bush was in office. Nobody in charge seemed interested in doing much about it over a couple of administrations and several congresses.
So please, tell me genius, if the economy sucked during Bush's eight years, as you stated, how was there an increase in tax revenue when taxes were cut?
I don't see how it's surprising to see tax revenues increase after a downturn reverses. In fact, that's exactly what I would expect.
If you're seeing a long run trend indicating that tax cuts pay for themselves, you're probably prone to pareidolia.
Instead they claim [aclu.org] that "In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue." One doubts they would make the same claim about the regulation of free speech, hence they are hypocrites.
So what you're saying is that because they believe X is true while you believe that X is false, they're hypocrites because they act as though X is true? I'm pretty sure that two distinct entities can hold contradictory beliefs without being hypocrites.
Hypocrisy would be, "We believe that gun rights are a major civil liberties issue, but we work against them because we're evil liberals!"
The question is, what's the payoff vs the punishment? If the risk is suspension and I'm going to put a murder away, I might do it. If the risk is that the murderer goes free, it does away with the incentive to do it. Instead of increasing the punishment, you simply do away with the reward entirely.
So there is what? An external source of money and debt entering this closed economic system?
Well, yes. That's one of the properties of fiat currency. It's potentially infinite over an infinitely long period of time. We're not going to run out of integers. The question is, what does that debt represent in things that actually are scarce?
This bubble is simply the result of the bank's (forced) reaction to that law.
Sigh. I'm going to present to you my usual list of questions that follow from this assertion:
1) What percentage of the subprime loans were originated by lenders who were not subject to the CRA? Hint: Most of them.
2) Let's say you're a bank and the Bad Old Liberal Government makes you loan to X number of filthy poor people. You know that those loans will not be profitable. Do you:
a) Loan out the bare minimum
or
b) Leverage yourself up to the eyeballs and make as many of those unprofitable loans as you possibly can?
Your assertion seems to be that the correct answer is (b) and that banks are not profit maximizing institutions. This does not pass the laugh test.
It was not "just" a bank that stopped doing it's homework, it was primarily freddie mac and fannie mae, who did so under direct orders from house democrats, supported, first by Jimmy Carter then Bill Clinton (and opposed, ineffectively like most things he did, by George Bush).
I'm not going to suggest that FM and FM didn't purchase bad loans. They did. But there are a couple of points that your analysis is missing:
1) Their portfolios did not underperform the market as a whole, so it strains credulity to pin them down as the cause.
2) Their share of the mortgage market was *declining* through the housing bubble run-up. You'll never guess who was on the rise during that period. Unless you guess, "non-bank entities who securitize loans and who also aren't regulated by the CRA," of course.
What we're dealing with is a system-wide failure to properly analyze risk. The idea that things would have been any better with out the GSEs or without an obscure piece of Carter-era regulation (that didn't seem to cause any problems for decades) is simply political chaff.
No not really. My post might have had a small error, but the key point is not nullified. ----- If Bush's wars cost 600 billion according to the Congressional Budgeting Office, and Obama has spent $1150 so far with another ~800 billion planned with proposed mortgage and bank TARPs, then he will have spent 3 times as much as Bush in just 1 year.
A mere $600B? What a steal! We should have bought three or four at that rate!
I agree, he's an idiot at saying paying someone to dig and fill holes is needed, Smart is spending money carefully. Dumb is making jobs for the sake of making jobs.
No, dumb is criticizing expert opinions without actually... well... actually reading what those opinions actually are.
I think that this debate is a bit on the academic side. We're not actually paying people to dig holes and fill them up. We're paying them to do useful things. The whole "dig holes and fill them up again" argument is simply to illustrate that the primary purpose is not to get cool stuff but rather to employ stagnant resources and re-stimulate demand.
I understand what you're saying, and now that you wrote what you did, I understand what the politicians might be thinking, but if digging and filling holes is so good, then why don't the politicians just blindly dumps billions in public transit or paying off the debt?
The short answer: They aren't paying people to dig and fill holes. They are paying for things like public transit. The point is to stimulate aggregate demand by putting useful productive capacity to work where it might otherwise be wasted.
As for why they don't pay down the debt, that's the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish. Without getting into the economic details, the "right" thing to do would be to take on debt when things are bad and pay it off when things are good. It's often difficult to get the government to get around to the "pay it off because things are good" part of it, but that's not necessarily a crisis either.
If the Social Security Trust Fund (that Mutual Fund you mentioned it being) really meant something, then they'd pull those IOUs out, hand them to Congress, and Congress would immediately borrow more money to pay them, or raise taxes to pay them.
Then what? Hold it in cash? Buy baseball cards and hold them in a vault? It has to be held in one form or another.
I'm not sure why I keep doing this. You're really just making assertion after assertion. When you're contradicted by data or argument, you move on to a different assertion and then eventually start recycling the first assertion. But...
History says Roosevelts New Deal didn't work, it prolonged the depression.
No, that's what a *minority* of scholars claim. Their argument seems to be based on a combination of crowding out and private investors being "confused" by unpredictable government activity. Both arguments hold more water (and are very good policy) when the economy is functioning normally. That is, when resources are being put to their best use, a massive government spending program will slow the economy, but when resources are largely sitting idle, this doesn't hold true.
No other Govt. spending has ever helped stop a recession.
So your position now is that not even World War II, which just a few posts ago was your explanation for the end of the Great Depression, is an example of government activity stopping a recession?
The inflation problem slows the recovery even more, prolonging the problem.
I'm tempted to respond to your making stuff up by making up some nonsense of my own, but I'll just stick with reality: Inflation is simply not a concern at this juncture. There is no "inflation problem" now and there wasn't an "inflation problem" during the recovery from the Great Depression. They're simply non-issues. What you're claiming has no solid basis in economic theory.
And you do realize these folks weren't exactly picked up off the street for jaywalking, right? Most, if not all, were caught on the battlefield, and those who weren't, like Khalid Sheik Mohammad (considered the Forrest Gump of terrorism) were put there for their positions in terror groups such as al-Qaeda. For the most part, the folks in this prison don't have "sob stories".
Ahem. I'm not saying that everybody there is innocent. I will suggest that this is one of those times in our history that we're going to be embarassed about once enough years have passed. There are enough well publicised stories of the insane screw ups associated with Guantanamo that it's time to stop drinking the official Kool Aid about "Most, if not all were caught on the battlefield..." and other such nonsense.
The inflation what they are doing will cause a bigger problem. This country flat out doesn't have the kind of money they are talking about.
We're not anywhere near inflation at the moment, though. I really don't see any indication that it's a likely problem in the near term, with or without stimulus borrowing. We're doing all that we can to avoid deflation right now.
The reality is that nobody is lending to private industry and everybody wants to lend to the government. Barring that, they want to stuff their money into their mattresses. The government can either borrow that money on the cheap and use it to pay private industry to get back to work, or it can let people go to the mattress bank and allow private industry to grind to a halt for lack of investment.
You appear to have abandoned your claims about the Great Depression. Is the new claim that government can stimulate the economy, but it always results in a greater deadweight loss to inflation?
Full employment through the draft.
Women taking many factory jobs so the men could fight. Remember it was very rare for a woman to work outside the home.
I'm still having a hard time turning this into an economic model that justifies the conclusion that government can't spend money to employ people and stimulate a frozen economy.
If your claim is correct, we would expect unemployment to shoot right back up as soon as the war ended and the men returned home. That's not what happened, though. What happened was, the government borrowed a huge amount of money and put a huge segment of the economy to work, and after that, the economy returned to normal employment and output.
I don't see how things like, "The government hires women to go to work in producing things in factories" doesn't qualify as the government spending money and increasing employment.
Except that Govt spending has never ended a recession. The inflation makes it worse. Look at the depression in the 30s, Roosevelt made it worse and WWII ended it.
How does one reconcile the idea that government spending can't end a recession with the idea that World War II ended the Great Depression?
(Un?)fortunately, Congress has to allocate the funds for the presidential war powers ("police actions"), so Congress is equally to blame for the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is quite true.
Now, the bailouts? You can blame Congress for creating the mess in the first place, where they REQUIRED banks to provide guaranteed mortgages to lazy sloths and illegals. I do know some hard-working people who did benefit from no-doc mortgages, who have worked hard to keep up and have not missed a single payment, but I see more realty "for sale" signs than I ever have in my life. In my neighborhood I'd say between 1/3 and 1/2 of of the homes are up for sale. Were they foreclosures, or in danger of entering foreclosure? I have no idea; I'm not going to knock on my neighbors and put more stress on them by canvassing the neighborhood with an informal survey. The point is, Congress (mostly our parents' generation) required banks to make those loans, and now we (our generation) and our children have to clean up the mess --- unless we're a third-world nation by then.
The president can push all he wants, congress has a DUTY to shoot it down if they disagree. If you disagree that they had done their duty or not, then you shouldn't later elect one of those that failed to be the next president. Nor should you reelect them to the same spot where they may later fail you again.
I'm not saying that Congress is not at fault for bad legislation. I'm taking issue with what seemed like a bizarre attempt to hold the President blameless for legislation that he pushed for and then signed into law.
Again, Congress in your eyes failed its duty to shoot down someones agenda. That means they either agreed with this agenda or failed to do their duty and must be replaced, NOT elected to a higher office
You didn't answer my point. The President's staff essentially wrote the PATRIOT Act. Yes, Congress should never have passed it, but the idea that the Bush Administration was some sort of unwilling victim of congressional power run wild doesn't reflect reality.
Going into Iraq is the only thing that people complain about that he was truly 100% responsible for. This was his duty. The rest of peoples gripes and complaints, guess what? Failures of congress, as it takes CONGRESS to propose a bill, Congress must have so many supporters before a vote can take place for this bill, Congress then still has to have a majority vote to have it pass, then the President can veto or pass it.
Failues of Congress and . Or should that blank be left entirely blank? I would fill that blank with the name of the person who signs the legislation and appoints and oversees the people who execute it. "Someone else's responsibility" doesn't cut it. More importantly, it's worth noting that a lot of legislation that would be a good idea if implemented properly is misadministered into failure. We know which branch is responsible for that.
After all this, SCOTUS can then declare it uncostitutional.
Not unless somebody brings suit. And they don't have the power to declare a law "stupid" and invalidate it.
If you want to end "more of the same" and have real change, you have to replace the whole lot. Not place all the blame of the 488 people who saw this same piece of paper before the president and had a majority say "sure, this seems like a good idea" as his fault.
Here's the reality: I vote for 3 out of the 535 members of Congress. I also vote for the head of the executive branch who represents a roughly equal check on Congress. That means I have a lot more power to affect one branch than the other. This is true for every voter. That's one reason why voters focus strongly on what the President does and not as strongly on what Congress as a whole does.
This is the same as people saying, "Well Congress has a lower approval rating than the President does!" Yes, but basically every individual member of Congress has a higher approval rating than the President does. "My guy is fine, but the body as a whole is dumb" rules the day. You'll never throw them all out. It's hard enough to replace a handful. Vote for the guy who represents your interests and recognize that the executive branch is the source of the major policy swings.
If by "a lot of political power to push an agenda" you mean "works with the lawmakers and talks to them" then yes, absolutely.
But here is a magical, wonderful secret about the United States Government: YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN IT! You can actually talk to the senators too! Just like the President!
Thought experiment:
1) I stand up and publicly say, "I think that legislation X is a good idea and should be passed." I'm a citizen and it's my right to do it.
2) A popular President says, "I am a popular President, and I strongly support legislation X."
My Congressman may listen to me because I'm a constitution. Other members of Congress may listen to me because my ideas make sense. Everybody in Congress has to seriously consider listening to the popular President because he has serious public support behind him and standing in opposition to him is done at some political peril. He may have no more legal authority than I do, but he wields political capital and public opinion power that the average voter cannot hope to approach.
I'm not suggesting that his power is insurmountable. I'm saying that historically, the President's practical power to push a legislative agenda goes beyond just his constitutional power to veto legislation. It's just a fact.
That part's fine. It's crazy for the head of the executive branch to submit bills to the legislative branch. If President-elect Obama wanted to submit bills, he should have done so while he was a Senator.
Why? Congress can ignore them just as much as they ignore his suggestions that aren't written in the form of legislation. Crazy would be if he could propose legislation and force them to vote on it. Why is it OK for him to come up with the idea but crazy for him to suggest wording?
Sure he can veto, but congress can override that veto as well if they meet about the issue again within 14 days. And the SCJ's can override passing the bill. This is called checks and ballances.
And "checks and balances" is not the same thing as "someone else's responsibility." That's the part I take issue with. If a President pushes for stupid legislation and then signs the legislation when it's passed, that's not "somone else's responsibility." That's the President and Congress screwing up.
Bush signed, sure. But that doesnt mean he supported them. There is a political move where you KNOW they will pass it anyway if you veto, and sign it after holding it for a few days as a protest.
So you're suggesting that, say, the PATRIOT Act, which was essentially written by Bush officials and submitted to Congress for their amendments and passage, and then signed into law by President Bush, is the responsibility of Congress because they passed it, and there's no way of knowing if Bush actually supported it?
Appointments to regulatory posts MUST be approved by SCOTUS, appointments to SCOTUS must be approved by congress, see a pattern here?
Those appointments are typically apporved by Congress. And Congress screwed up by approving a bunch of them.
We chose the assholes in charge, and rather than blame the bunch, democrats blame the red herring we chose to be a fall guy. The presidential role in modern society has become just that, the fall guy to those that don't understand the true governmental meathods.
There's another reason the President is the fall guy. First, he signs the legislation. That gives him an equal share of the blame unless it's passed overwhelmingly. Often, he proposes the legislation. Finally it's usually his job to implement it and appoint people to implement it. Example: I thought that going into Iraq was a bad decision. Even if it wasn't a bad decision, its implementation was a complete clusterfuck. Congress gets a share of the blame for the decision. The executive gets all the blame for the implementation. "Someone else's responsibility" doesn't enter into it.
He was a professor of constitutional law but seems to believe that the chief executive should have a legislative agenda. (My mind boggles at what he thinks a senator should do.)
Yes, it's crazy for a head of state who wields roughly half of the power in deciding which laws get passed to have an opinion on which laws should be passed. I'm reeling from this sudden shift from a long tradition of Presidents sitting in the Oval Office and waiting for laws they know nothing about to be dropped on their desk for rubber stamping.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'd like an explanation on this one. Let's say you run a bank. Let's say that the government wants you to make a loan that you don't want to make (let's say... filthy poor people in minority neighborhoods) because you know it won't be profitable. Do you:
a) Do the bare minimum and lobby Congress to stop it?
b) Leverage yourself to death and make as many of those loans as you possibly can?
If you can explain why profit maximizing firms chose B over A, simply because the CRA existed, I'd be interested in hearing it. More to the point, it's worth looking into which financial entities made the majority of the securitized subprime loans. Hint: They weren't subject to the CRA. The CRA links are political chaff.
That being said, the general "deregulation" bugaboo is not something that can be laid neatly at the feet of conservatives. People have been making noise about the potential dangers of allowing an unregulated insurance industry to develop since before Bush was in office. Nobody in charge seemed interested in doing much about it over a couple of administrations and several congresses.
I don't see how it's surprising to see tax revenues increase after a downturn reverses. In fact, that's exactly what I would expect.
If you're seeing a long run trend indicating that tax cuts pay for themselves, you're probably prone to pareidolia.
So what you're saying is that because they believe X is true while you believe that X is false, they're hypocrites because they act as though X is true? I'm pretty sure that two distinct entities can hold contradictory beliefs without being hypocrites.
Hypocrisy would be, "We believe that gun rights are a major civil liberties issue, but we work against them because we're evil liberals!"
The question is, what's the payoff vs the punishment? If the risk is suspension and I'm going to put a murder away, I might do it. If the risk is that the murderer goes free, it does away with the incentive to do it. Instead of increasing the punishment, you simply do away with the reward entirely.
Well, yes. That's one of the properties of fiat currency. It's potentially infinite over an infinitely long period of time. We're not going to run out of integers. The question is, what does that debt represent in things that actually are scarce?
Sigh. I'm going to present to you my usual list of questions that follow from this assertion:
1) What percentage of the subprime loans were originated by lenders who were not subject to the CRA? Hint: Most of them.
2) Let's say you're a bank and the Bad Old Liberal Government makes you loan to X number of filthy poor people. You know that those loans will not be profitable. Do you:
a) Loan out the bare minimum
or
b) Leverage yourself up to the eyeballs and make as many of those unprofitable loans as you possibly can?
Your assertion seems to be that the correct answer is (b) and that banks are not profit maximizing institutions. This does not pass the laugh test.
I'm not going to suggest that FM and FM didn't purchase bad loans. They did. But there are a couple of points that your analysis is missing:
1) Their portfolios did not underperform the market as a whole, so it strains credulity to pin them down as the cause.
2) Their share of the mortgage market was *declining* through the housing bubble run-up. You'll never guess who was on the rise during that period. Unless you guess, "non-bank entities who securitize loans and who also aren't regulated by the CRA," of course.
What we're dealing with is a system-wide failure to properly analyze risk. The idea that things would have been any better with out the GSEs or without an obscure piece of Carter-era regulation (that didn't seem to cause any problems for decades) is simply political chaff.
A mere $600B? What a steal! We should have bought three or four at that rate!
No, dumb is criticizing expert opinions without actually... well... actually reading what those opinions actually are.
I think that this debate is a bit on the academic side. We're not actually paying people to dig holes and fill them up. We're paying them to do useful things. The whole "dig holes and fill them up again" argument is simply to illustrate that the primary purpose is not to get cool stuff but rather to employ stagnant resources and re-stimulate demand.
The short answer: They aren't paying people to dig and fill holes. They are paying for things like public transit. The point is to stimulate aggregate demand by putting useful productive capacity to work where it might otherwise be wasted.
As for why they don't pay down the debt, that's the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish. Without getting into the economic details, the "right" thing to do would be to take on debt when things are bad and pay it off when things are good. It's often difficult to get the government to get around to the "pay it off because things are good" part of it, but that's not necessarily a crisis either.
Holy shit. Seriously.
Then what? Hold it in cash? Buy baseball cards and hold them in a vault? It has to be held in one form or another.
Would it be legitimate for somebody to say the same thing about their political beliefs and take those out of the realm of criticism?
No, that's what a *minority* of scholars claim. Their argument seems to be based on a combination of crowding out and private investors being "confused" by unpredictable government activity. Both arguments hold more water (and are very good policy) when the economy is functioning normally. That is, when resources are being put to their best use, a massive government spending program will slow the economy, but when resources are largely sitting idle, this doesn't hold true.
So your position now is that not even World War II, which just a few posts ago was your explanation for the end of the Great Depression, is an example of government activity stopping a recession?
I'm tempted to respond to your making stuff up by making up some nonsense of my own, but I'll just stick with reality: Inflation is simply not a concern at this juncture. There is no "inflation problem" now and there wasn't an "inflation problem" during the recovery from the Great Depression. They're simply non-issues. What you're claiming has no solid basis in economic theory.
There. I said it.
It depends on the rates of growth and inflation, no?
Ahem. I'm not saying that everybody there is innocent. I will suggest that this is one of those times in our history that we're going to be embarassed about once enough years have passed. There are enough well publicised stories of the insane screw ups associated with Guantanamo that it's time to stop drinking the official Kool Aid about "Most, if not all were caught on the battlefield..." and other such nonsense.
I highly recommend this epsiode of This American Life to anybody who isn't familiar with the other side of the story.
We're not anywhere near inflation at the moment, though. I really don't see any indication that it's a likely problem in the near term, with or without stimulus borrowing. We're doing all that we can to avoid deflation right now.
The reality is that nobody is lending to private industry and everybody wants to lend to the government. Barring that, they want to stuff their money into their mattresses. The government can either borrow that money on the cheap and use it to pay private industry to get back to work, or it can let people go to the mattress bank and allow private industry to grind to a halt for lack of investment.
You appear to have abandoned your claims about the Great Depression. Is the new claim that government can stimulate the economy, but it always results in a greater deadweight loss to inflation?
I'm still having a hard time turning this into an economic model that justifies the conclusion that government can't spend money to employ people and stimulate a frozen economy.
If your claim is correct, we would expect unemployment to shoot right back up as soon as the war ended and the men returned home. That's not what happened, though. What happened was, the government borrowed a huge amount of money and put a huge segment of the economy to work, and after that, the economy returned to normal employment and output.
I don't see how things like, "The government hires women to go to work in producing things in factories" doesn't qualify as the government spending money and increasing employment.
How does one reconcile the idea that government spending can't end a recession with the idea that World War II ended the Great Depression?
This is quite true.
This is simply nonsense.
I'm not saying that Congress is not at fault for bad legislation. I'm taking issue with what seemed like a bizarre attempt to hold the President blameless for legislation that he pushed for and then signed into law.
You didn't answer my point. The President's staff essentially wrote the PATRIOT Act. Yes, Congress should never have passed it, but the idea that the Bush Administration was some sort of unwilling victim of congressional power run wild doesn't reflect reality.
Failues of Congress and . Or should that blank be left entirely blank? I would fill that blank with the name of the person who signs the legislation and appoints and oversees the people who execute it. "Someone else's responsibility" doesn't cut it. More importantly, it's worth noting that a lot of legislation that would be a good idea if implemented properly is misadministered into failure. We know which branch is responsible for that.
Not unless somebody brings suit. And they don't have the power to declare a law "stupid" and invalidate it.
Here's the reality: I vote for 3 out of the 535 members of Congress. I also vote for the head of the executive branch who represents a roughly equal check on Congress. That means I have a lot more power to affect one branch than the other. This is true for every voter. That's one reason why voters focus strongly on what the President does and not as strongly on what Congress as a whole does.
This is the same as people saying, "Well Congress has a lower approval rating than the President does!" Yes, but basically every individual member of Congress has a higher approval rating than the President does. "My guy is fine, but the body as a whole is dumb" rules the day. You'll never throw them all out. It's hard enough to replace a handful. Vote for the guy who represents your interests and recognize that the executive branch is the source of the major policy swings.
Thought experiment:
1) I stand up and publicly say, "I think that legislation X is a good idea and should be passed." I'm a citizen and it's my right to do it.
2) A popular President says, "I am a popular President, and I strongly support legislation X."
My Congressman may listen to me because I'm a constitution. Other members of Congress may listen to me because my ideas make sense. Everybody in Congress has to seriously consider listening to the popular President because he has serious public support behind him and standing in opposition to him is done at some political peril. He may have no more legal authority than I do, but he wields political capital and public opinion power that the average voter cannot hope to approach.
I'm not suggesting that his power is insurmountable. I'm saying that historically, the President's practical power to push a legislative agenda goes beyond just his constitutional power to veto legislation. It's just a fact.
Why? Congress can ignore them just as much as they ignore his suggestions that aren't written in the form of legislation. Crazy would be if he could propose legislation and force them to vote on it. Why is it OK for him to come up with the idea but crazy for him to suggest wording?
And "checks and balances" is not the same thing as "someone else's responsibility." That's the part I take issue with. If a President pushes for stupid legislation and then signs the legislation when it's passed, that's not "somone else's responsibility." That's the President and Congress screwing up.
So you're suggesting that, say, the PATRIOT Act, which was essentially written by Bush officials and submitted to Congress for their amendments and passage, and then signed into law by President Bush, is the responsibility of Congress because they passed it, and there's no way of knowing if Bush actually supported it?
Those appointments are typically apporved by Congress. And Congress screwed up by approving a bunch of them.
There's another reason the President is the fall guy. First, he signs the legislation. That gives him an equal share of the blame unless it's passed overwhelmingly. Often, he proposes the legislation. Finally it's usually his job to implement it and appoint people to implement it. Example: I thought that going into Iraq was a bad decision. Even if it wasn't a bad decision, its implementation was a complete clusterfuck. Congress gets a share of the blame for the decision. The executive gets all the blame for the implementation. "Someone else's responsibility" doesn't enter into it.
Yes, it's crazy for a head of state who wields roughly half of the power in deciding which laws get passed to have an opinion on which laws should be passed. I'm reeling from this sudden shift from a long tradition of Presidents sitting in the Oval Office and waiting for laws they know nothing about to be dropped on their desk for rubber stamping.