What I Want to Ask Mitt Romney

The question during the second debate that I would have LOVED to ask Mitt Romney is the following: Mr. Romney, you were allegedly against the bank taxpayer bailout, certainly against the bailout of GM. You seem to advocate for a bankruptcy restructuring debt of corporate entities that go belly up and against the taxpayer or legislation such as TARP giving banks billions to avoid a colossal collapse and world economic catastrophe. Our form of economic capitalism has seen many many booms and busts over at least two centuries. Occasionally, like the Great Depression, the severity is unmatched The Great Recession of 2008 came close to that. What would YOU do IF yet again while you held the presidency an unregulated in extremis Wall Street was in imminent danger of collapse?

The question I really want to know is how much does this mendacious man truly believe in laissez faire capitalism and does he believe in the moral hazard as defined by Wiki "a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of one party may change to the detriment of another after a transaction has taken place." How fervently is he against incurring this moral hazard by allowing Wall Street to be bailed out with taxpayer money. Would Mr. Romney let his Wall Street financiers of his campaign fall?

The article pasted below by Robert Reich also wants to smoke Mitt Romney out in a slightly different way!
How Obama Can Smoke Out Mitt
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
19 October 12

resident Obama should propose that the nation's biggest banks be broken up and their size capped, and that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected.

It's good policy, and it would smoke out Mitt Romney as being of, by, and for Wall Street - and not on the side of average Americans.
It would also remind America that five years ago Wall Street's excesses almost ruined the economy. Bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity traders speculated on the upside, then shorted on the downside - in a vast zero-sum game that resulted in the largest transfer of wealth from average Americans to financial elites ever witnessed in this nation's history.

Most of us lost big - including over $7 trillion of home values, a $700-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, and continuing high unemployment.

But the top 1 percent have done just fine. In the first year of the recovery they reaped 93 percent of the gains. The latest data show them back with 20 to 25 percent of the nation's total income - just where they were in 2007.

The stock market has about caught up to where it was before the crash. The pay and bonuses on the Street are once again sky-high. So are the pay and perks of top corporate executives. The Forbes list of richest Americans contains more billionaires than ever.
And the tax rates of the top 1 percent are lower than ever - courtesy of their armies of lobbyists.
Mitt Romney, private equity manager and financier - well within the top one-tenth of 1 percent, collecting more than $20 million a year yet paying 14 percent in taxes because of tax preferences for capital gains and for private-equity - is the avatar for all that's happened.

Just like the rest of the Street, Romney used other peoples' money to make big bets, leveraging like mad, pumping and then dumping companies regardless of the human costs.

Worse, Romney wants to cut taxes even further on the top 1 percent - giving them them lion's share of a $4.7 trillion tax cut - while shredding safety nets the rest of us rely on.

And he wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act that goes some way to preventing the worst excesses of the Street.

And this man has an almost 50-50 chance of becoming president?
The President should counter Romney's extraordinary solicitude toward the Street with a proposal to cap the size of the nation's biggest banks so that no bank is ever again too big to fail. And to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, which once separated commercial from investment banking.

In the 1980s the ten biggest banks had less than 30 percent of bank depositary assets. Now they have 54 percent. And the four biggest now dominate the Street almost completely. Because lenders and investors know they're too big to fail, the four biggest banks have a competitive advantage over smaller rivals that pose larger financial risks. That means they'll only get bigger.

Breaking up the biggest banks and capping the size of all banks is hardly a radical suggestion these days. The Dallas Federal Reserve Board, which has never been accused of excessive liberalism, has called for it. So has Sanford Weill, the creator of Citigroup, one of the biggest of the big. So has Daniel Tarullo, the Federal Reserve governor charged with bank regulation. So have conservative commentators such as George Will.

It's not too late for the President to advocate these measures. In fact, now may be the perfect time. Besides, it's not as if Wall Street is going to pour campaign contributions into Obama's coffers anyway; the Street is going with Mitt.

Calling for a breakup of the biggest banks and a resurrection of Glass Steagall would smoke out Mitt Romney - revealing clearly and decisively he's not on the side of most Americans.