Bernanke Said What?

Wow, it's amazing what happens when your best plan fails miserably. Remember this from last September?

What would be the dollar cost of not bailing out Wall Street? Try a number north of $30 trillion. (The awful math is detailed below.) That's why Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke were so scared last week. And, yes, I think "scared" isn't too strong a word. You don't think they convened an emergency nighttime meeting of congressional leaders and then walked out with something close to a blank check for a trillion bucks because they thought we were headed for an outright recession, even a fairly nasty one?

Or this in November, from his partner-in-crime, Hank Paulson?

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson finally confirmed what lonely bailout opponents tried to tell the American public all along: The man doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

Paulson held a bazooka to taxpayers' heads. He groveled on his knees in front of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He lured leaders from both political parties into linking arms in a panicked Chicken Little line dance for the beleaguered mortgage industry. Paulson demanded an unprecedented $700 billion troubled assets relief program for the good of the country. For the health of the housing market. For the survival of the economy. No time for deliberation. No time to review the failures of such interventionist approaches around the world. Now, now, now!

And now? The pulled-out-of-the-posterior "$700 billion" price tag has ballooned into the trillions. The "mortgage industry rescue" has expanded to banks, insurance companies, automakers, credit card companies, and possibly the entire national volume of consumer lending. Oh, and that vaunted "TARP" component, Paulson admitted this week, is nothing but a four-letter-word that rhymes with TRAP.

If Bernanke the Wise knew Paulson's plan was so bad, why didn't he say anything? The obvious answer is that he didn't disagree. He was 100% sold on the idea that this stimulus was critical to the nation's economic recovery. However, after trillions of money thrown into the toilet with no oversight or accountability...suddenly, we get this brilliant revelation:

Ben Bernanke made an important point while testifying before the House Budget Committee: lawmakers must reduce the federal deficit and return the nation to fiscal sustainability.

The deficit, set to hit $1.8 trillion this year, is not expected to dip under $500 billion per year during the next decade, even under President Obama’s unusually optimistic economic forecast. Chairman Bernanke notes, “With the ratio of debt to GDP already elevated, we will not be able to continue borrowing indefinitely.” Put simply, the country is on a fiscally unsustainable path and action must be taken to avoid calamity.

You know, if the Paulson-Bernanke circus had bothered to listen to conservatives last fall, we wouldn't be in this position, now would we?

The moral of the story is that listening to over-hyped liberals with an 'urgent' plan to save the nation is just plain stupid.

There's my two cents.