Okay, bit of a looong post here:
Regarding the OP and Jindall,
1) We're one month into the Presidency of President Obama. No one knows who the Republicans are going to put forward.
2) don't judge a candidate solely by how they appear. Yes, how a candidate looks and sounds counts a lot, which IMO doesn't say a whole lot about the masses, but also count substance. Jindall is a smart guy, look at his credentials.
Yes, and a meteor could hit the planet, but that has nothing to do with the current problems. Fix the source of the problem and the rest will take care of itself. The stock markets will remain volatile until the credit and housing markets are stable.
I really find this all quite amazing. The Republicans have all but destroyed the world's economy but people still defend their model. Reminds me a bit of defending bloodletting or astrology - in spite of the evidence, we still find the faithful.
There is a lot of mis-understanding about this whole issue of deregulation, oversight, prosperity, etc...this argument that this crises was caused by "Republican deregulation" is, I would not say 100% incorrect, but definitely not correct either, and far too simple over a very complex thing. This implication that the deregulation from the Reagan era was bad and needs to be reversed shows a lot of lack understanding about just what resulted from said deregulation I think.
On a side note, if one looks, it is not the mostly unregulated major private-equity firms and hedge funds, which have been criticized as being "unregulated banks" by some, that have collapsed; it was the highly-regulated investment banks. Some of the private equity/hedge fund firms are turning out to have been shams, and some have had to be liquidated due to too much exposure to the housing crises, but I mean the big ones aren't all collapsing like flies on Wall Street the way the major investment banks have.
But deregulation accomplished an incredible amount of things:
Finance: Finance is one of the most important, if not THE most important, thing required for a capitalist, free-market economy to generate prosperity and wealth for its citizens. It is literally the throat of any thriving free-market, capitalist economy. A free, functioning financial sector of an economy is absolutely vital to generate good economic growth and wealth for the citizenry, and it is precisely because the United States has this type of financial sector, because of a very developed financial market infrastructure, that the U.S. economy consistently kicks the crap out of the rest of the world economically. Remember, no matter how brilliant or talented an entrepreneur is, they cannot make their ideas work without access to finance. Finance is what allows people to get their ideas turned into companies and so forth. Thus finance is very important.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions about finance, such as that it is a tool solely of the rich, that it solely benefits the rich, and that finance is an evil profession. There is some partial truth to this, but only when the financial market infrastructure is under-developed, thus making it where access to finance is far more limited. When this happens, finance does literally become a tool of the rich that mostly benefits the rich, but that is simply because limited infrastructure limits how the risk can be spread. Thus, no one will finance any individual or enterprise unless said individual or enterprise has a lot of capital to provide collateral for the lender. What rich person in their right mind will lend millions of dollars to a single person with no collateral? With a well-developed financial market infrastructure, however, all of these incentives change, as there are suddenly many new creative ways to finance individuals who themselves do not have much collateral, by spreading the risk over a wide amount of different things. This thus makes finance far more accessible to the middle-class and poor, which allows for a lot more wealth creation.
Heavy regulations prevent this. They are essentially a boot on the throat of the country's economy, on its financial sector. When this happens, wealth creation is far more limited as far fewer individuals can gain access to finance. Prior to deregulation, we saw this in how building a fortune took far longer. Throughout most of the twentieth century, when finance was far more limited, ntrepreneurs often had to scrimp and save for years just to start their business, and then once started, building it was a slow, steady process. You would have to grow it store by store, truck by truck, and plow the earnings back into the business. Becoming a wealthy entrepreneur before forty was virtually unheard of (it could happen, but very rarely; if Ray Kroc had been in his twenties when he started McDonald's, he'd have become very wealthy, very young). IPOs were rare and few. Most people became employees. You went to work for a big, bureaucratic corporation and began working your way up through the bureaucracy. Creating your own company was a lot less common and much tougher to do.
With deregulation, however, all this changed. Suddenly, access to finance became much more democratized; the boot was taken off the throat of the economy. Also deregulation of the technology sectors added this as well. Suddenly, there was all this opportunity for innovation and wealth creation, and a lot more access to finance to do it. Advanced technology and much wider access to finance, thanks to deregulation of the financial markets, led to an explosion of new wealth (and thus job) creation. People could become wealthy far more quickly as well. An individual could come up with an idea, build the business, and sell it oftentimes all within five to ten years, and become wealthy. Building extreme wealth (hundreds of millions) could take anywhere from ten to twenty years.
All of this is because of the much wider availability of finance that resulted from deregulation. In places like Europe, however, such access to finance still doesn't exist. They over-regulate their financial markets and economy and also tax their citizens to death. They punish success and reward failure and laziness, and as a result, their economies consistently remain in the toilet in comparison to the United States. Over the past twenty-eight years, we have seen more wealth created than was created by humanity over the previous two-hundred years. We have seen an extreme explosion in job creation and a significant rise in the standard of living for everyone. iPods, cellphones, Internet, computers, laptops, etc...all thanks to deregulation of finance and technology.
Remember, finance is one of THE most important tools for wealth creation and for allowing the lower-earners to be able to rise up in society. If you want to start a business, you have to be able to finance it initially until you get rich, in which case then you can bankroll your second one, but even then, financing may still be required. When finance is limited, as is the case in nations with under-developed financial market infrastructures, there is kind of a glass wall between the rich and the poor and middle class. The poor and middle-class cannot rise up easily even if they have the talents and know-how because finance is so limited. But a well-developed financial market infrastructure that makes finance cheap and available to entrepreneurs allows anyone with the skill, talents, and drive to become rich.
And it is also the above reasons why capitalism struggles to get going in Third World countries, because one has to develop such a financial market infrastructure, along with a political and banking and media infrastructure, etc...all of which takes time and is difficult. America itself is still in a sense experimenting with this.
Corporate Efficiency and Shareholder Accountability: A second thing that resulted from deregulation was corporate efficiency and shareholder accountability. Prior to deregulation, American corporations were far more bloated, bureaucratic, inefficient, and wasteful. And shareholder accountability was a side joke. Corporate CEOs ran their publicly-owned corporatins oftentimes like their own little kingdoms, and they cared about the four big P's: Power, Pay, Perks, and Prestige. Shareholder accountability wasn't much discussed, or cared about. Corporate bureaucrats cared much more about golf, their private jets, and all the other nice perks they got.
People think corporate CEOs are corrupt today, they need to take a look at how they were back prior to deregulation. Things like CEO pay and so forth were much more hidden from the public. Deregulaton changed all of this. The deregulation of the financial and banking sectors launched a revolution in finance and corporate governance, in which suddenly big corporations had to work at becoming efficient and profitable, or else they would go out of business, or be taken over via a hostile takeover.
It smashed through the old Republican establishment of Wall Street (yes, the old-line big business Republican establishment HATED Ronald Reagan's financial market deregulation and resisted it at every turn. Rudy Giuliani was one of the main prosecutors of these financial types when the old-line establishment launched a war with them). It got rid of all the lethargic, lazy, inept corporate managements as well.
We saw the rise of the so-called corporate raiders, who played a big role in this. They are often portrayed as scoundrels who went and took good, profitable companies and ripped them apart, selling them off for profit, and putting all of the employees out of work. The reality, however, is a good deal different. Corporate raiders would rarely go after a corporation that was streamlined, efficient, and profitable. They looked for the ones that were big, bloated, and inefficient, the ones that they could greatly improve shareholder value for.
One strategy for this was to gain control of a company, load it up with a lot of debt, and thus force the corporate board to focus on paying down the debt, and thus on being profitable. Without much debt, corporate CEOs oftentimes went on huge spending sprees, making bad and costly acquisitions which did not work right and messed up the company. This all stopped with loading up the companies with debt. Sometimes it also meant taking a corporation and selling off all of the different divisions as the entire corporation itself was pretty much unsalvageable. But the divisions themselves could make good individual companies. Thus the people in the different divisions kept their jobs, while the upper-management itself lost their jobs.
While both of these types of strategies meant streamlining of corporations and firing people here and there, it also meant that the corporations became far more streamlined, efficient, profitable, and large. And this meant the people not fired saw their wages increase more so because the productivity of their work increased, which drove up wages. These processes led to American corporations becoming the most streamlined, efficient, profitable, and largest in the world.
This is also likely why American corporate CEOs have seen their pay amounts skyrocket so much higher than their European counterparts. Because European corporations are not nearly as large, productive, efficient, etc...as the American ones, and thus their CEOs command much less money to run them. But when you need someone to head a multi-billion corporation in the U.S., you need to pay them a lot of money (if you want someone to run a $100 billion corporation, paying them $50 million a year is small potatoes).
Corporations also became far more accountable to their shareholders. Things like CEO pay and so forth became much more widely available to the public. This isn't to say corporate governance is perfected or there is no corruption anymore, far from it. But things improved a great deal from what they were.
Not that I can necessarily do any better.
