TodayBailout stirs area reaction
A Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce survey this week garnered a lot of sentiment against the bill.
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Article RatingGiven a chance to share their thoughts about the current economic situation and what government should do about it, a number of area business owners sounded off.
On Tuesday, the Greater Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce sent a brief survey to its primary members, asking questions about what chamber President Michelle Crowley described as “the potential reinvestment in the country that the government was talking about supporting this week.”
About a quarter of the 500 people who received the survey responded, Crowley said Friday.
On one question — “Should Congress and President Bush quickly pass a comprehensive plan to deal with the crisis?” — the response was split right up the middle, with almost 52 percent saying yes, Crowley said, noting that Friday’s passage of a bill makes that “kind of a moot point.”
But on the next question, which gave participants a chance to share their opinions in their own words, the majority of the 30 or so responses were against what the business owners described as a Wall Street bailout.
“We should not be bailing out those who have squandered their stockholder’s assets,” one respondent wrote. “If they fail, they fail. No one is coming to the aid of the small business owners who fail!”
Some said they have already felt the economic pinch in their own businesses, with a few saying business was still fine. Others pointed to the lax controls that allowed people to get in way over their heads financially.
“I’m sick of everyone blaming everyone else,” someone else wrote.
To her, Crowley said, one of the most poignant was from someone still in the first year of business and having trouble making ends meet.
“My fear is this is making it that much harder to survive,” the newcomer wrote. “Without working capital as an option to build my business, it will surely suffer. My hope is that it doesn’t suffer the ultimate cost of closing and bankruptcy.”
Benchmark
The chamber has done surveys occasionally in the past, Crowley said, but it is a tool that she expects to see used more in the future.
Besides giving the chamber a benchmark idea of the members’ positions in regard to programming issues, she said, such information also guides the chamber in providing feedback to lawmakers who want to know, as several did this week, what constituents are thinking.
“I can tell you almost every person I’ve talked to, we’re not in favor of the buyout,” said Doug Heineman, a real estate broker with B-H Agency in Carlisle, shortly after the bill passed Friday.
However, he said, it’s worth noting that while the central Pennsylvania real estate market is dropping — statistics came out Thursday and showed a 2 percent drop this year — that’s a far cry from the 20 to 40 percent decreases reported in places like California and Washington, D.C.
Heineman said he sees the situation as a “normalization of the mortgage market,” and expects that people who want to buy houses from now on will once again need a down payment and half-decent credit score.
With the bill passed, Heineman said, he expects that credit will loosen somewhat. But a lot of unknowns remain, he said.
With new market rules in the last few years, reporting requirements make assessment more difficult: “No one knows really how much bad loans are out there.”
