Partisan Messages in Financial Issues

Post by Thomas Wiggins, Great Decisions student

Going off of our discussion concerning the financial recession and the Obama administration’s goals of increased government regulation of financial institutions, this article describes Tea Party political pressures on the Republican Party.
Tom De Luca, a professor of political science at Fordham University, advised for this article and he made a very interesting statement. “What remains to be seen is how closely the movement allies itself with the GOP, to what extent the various Tea Party groups come together as a formal organization and whether the activists solidify around a more coherent message removed from vitriolic embellishments and not grounded in fear, De Luca said.”
He also asked what would happen if the economy improves and the Tea Party’s extreme messages are discredited. This goes along the same lines of what happened at the beginning of this recession when China made similar radical statements against limited regulation, statements that were later discredited when the recession leveled out and began climbing again. Is it fear and ignorance that truly drives such extreme views of governance, such as Stanley Black suggested in his Great Decisions lecture on April 13? It is my opinion that what we need is not more or less regulation, but smarter regulation. The United States, and preferably with cooperation with international financial regulation institutions, needs to create a program of incentives that cause financial institutions to regulate themselves. Such a program would limit then limit the need for outside regulation and thus government regulatory presence. So for now, I think the best way would be increased regulation until such a program can be designed and implemented that would work on a wide scale.