The affordable care act was attacked by the insurance companies. They did not want it and still don't.
You're joking, right? Insurance companies basically wrote ACA.
I mean, seriously? A legal provision that mandates citizens to buy their product? They're ecstatic about that. Especially since they don't have to compete in pricing and coverage against a public option.
ACA is the best thing that happened to the insurance industry. Their stocks went through the roof because of it.
Also, it would have been completely irresponsible to allow our whole financial sector to fail by not bailing them out.
It's not about bailing them out. You're missing the point. It's about bailing them out without any strings attached.
You have to get to the heart of the issue here. We were faced with a failure of our entire financial system, which is concerning, but why is it concerning? It's about credit availability. Businesses need credit to operate. We don't want business grinding to a halt. So we need the financial system to lend money constantly every day.
The bailout's fundamental purpose is to put money into the coffers of failing banks, so that they actually have resources to do business with. As in, liquid capital to lend out. That's the key here: we wanted them to lend that money out.
Except we handed them a check with no strings attached. TARP had no requirements as to what the banks needed to do with that money. So they sat on it. TARP stimulated zero lending.
This is credited by many economists as the reason why The Fed took the reigns after TARP and started pumping more money into the system in the form of quantitative easing (QE). TARP itself was utterly ineffectual.
He rails against her for supposedly taking money from big oil companies, implying that she doesn't support climate change legislation, but she does along with the rest of the party.
She says she does. Don't expect me to trust that. Don't expect me to trust anything she says. She doesn't have credibility.
Its hard for him to make these arguments because they're on the same side of most of the issues.
Hillary calls universal healthcare "free stuff". Her supporters and surrogates, and even Bill himself, calls Sanders supporters naive young kids looking for a handout.
For fuck's sake this a decades-old right-wing talking point popularized by the likes of Bill O'Reilly. Now I'm hearing it come out of the mouths of self-proclaimed Democrats in opposition to the progressive base of the party. It's like I'm taking fucking crazy pills.
From her vote on the Iraq War to her conflict-seeking foreign policy as Secretary of State, from her complete lack of action against Wall St to her support of lopsided unfair trade deals written by corporate lawyers/lobbyists, from her disgustingly dishonest flip-flopping on gun issues to her oodles of special interest money...she is pretty much a Republican minus the racism and bigotry. She runs on a campaign of "no we can't" and "settle for what you've got".
She is not on the same side of most issues, and if she gets to the general, you're going to have the pleasure of watching her abandon literally everything she has said in the primaries and flop over to a center-right position in competition with her Republican opponent. I'm not gonna chase after you to say I told you so, but I have some hope that maybe you'll remember this conversation then and just maybe have a little twinge of regret.