You've got to love brutal honesty, especially when it comes from the financial media.
The Senate's version of a bailout bill, which passed last night by a margin of 74-25, included "sweeteners" - or obscure tax breaks - including benefits for the manufacturer of wooden arrows used in children's toys and another for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Melissa Francis, co-host of CNBC's "The Call," and "Squawk on the Street" co-host Mark Haines called it all "crap" on their Oct. 1 special coverage of the vote on the network. Their description was similar to the one used by House Minority Leader John Boehner's regarding the House version of the bailout: "crap sandwich."
FRANCIS: "Steve, what about all this crap they added on? I mean - the arrows and the ..."
CNBC Correspondent STEVE LEISMAN: "I didn't call it this ..."
FRANCIS: "Well, I called it crap. It's crap. Mark, is it crap?"
HAINES: "I will second that emotion."
LEISMAN: "You didn't say the word."
HAINES: "Crap - it's crap. Are you happy now?"
LEISMAN: "OK - you did."
FRANCIS: "I'm less delicate than you guys are."
The bailout portion of the bill is similar to the House bailout, which was defeated. It includes the $700 billion, but an additional $150 billion in tax extenders. In the same segment, Dan Mitchell, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Business & Media Institute adviser described the bill as "lose-lose" and referred to similar bailouts that occurred in Japan and Argentina.
"It's a lose-lose situation for taxpayers because we're going to get raped $700 billion to bail out Wall Street in a way that's going to make our economy worse just like it made Japan's economy worse in the 1990s and we're paying for it with a bunch of special interest provisions," Mitchell said. "Making government bigger and more powerful is not a recipe for prosperity. We don't want to be like Argentina."
