Comments on: The Rich are Different?

By: senior citizen

senior citizen — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 13:21:10 +0000

every day more and more Americans are seeing the true obama agenda, not only is he a closet muslum but a socialist bent on destroying our way of life.God knows our children and grand children will pay dearly for our letting this happen.
we are all to blame.

By: bishrag

bishrag — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:15:05 +0000

Health Care for all, there’s a huge difference in Obama’s budget and bush’s budget. As a percentage of our GDP the budget under bush was large but not unmanageable. Best statistic ive heard is that it took 43 presidents to get to 1 trillion in debt, its taken one to get to 3 trillion. A 3 trillion dollar budget is insane, as we have noone to get money from.
Bush bailed out a number of banks to free up credit. What happened? nothing. they still wouldnt lend. They asked for more. Obama approved 1 trillion to buy the toxic assets off their books. Guess what happened. They still didnt lend. 1 trillion down the toilet.
Just like giving GM 2 bailouts. Now GM is bankrupt, doesn’t have to payback the bailout money and in partial control of the unions. Ironic thing is the unions are the biggest problem at GM. Toyota pays factory workers in Arkansas 60-70/hr. GM pays workers 110-120/hr.
And as for blaming this crisis on bush. I can go back to SEC chairman Arthur Levitt’s speech in 1998 calling for regulation and caution due to all the new financial securities being created. Who was president then, give you and hint, wasn’t Bush.
To blame any president for this is stupid and just party politics. Bottom line, People got creative with financial instruments and companies like Merrel Lynch tried to cash in on deals they brokered.
Throwing money at this problem will simply prop our economy up on wooden stilts, which will come crashing down in the near future. Debts good, like adam smith says, the wealth of a nation is measured by its consumption. To much debt and you wont be spending much in the future.
Im in London doing an internship right now. The labor party (democrats) just took the worst loss in over a hundred years. If the democrats in power in this country don’t wise up the same will happen to them. We need to take a page out of Japans and UKs book. They tried to spend their way out. Look what happened. Just my 2 cents

By: Painesright

Painesright — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:11:35 +0000

One Trillion… ONE… is $1 per second for 32,000 years. Our gov’t has unfunded liabilities of $70 TRILLION and counting. As a nation, we owe $12 TRILLION on our mortgages and almost $1 TRILLION on our credit cards.

The programs Obama is pushing will bankrupt us… just like they have bankrupt Europe… their gov’t has done exactly what Obama is planning to do (IE: over-regulate, over-tax, “free” healthcare and college education for everyone, etc) for the last decade and they are flat broke.

Britain just voted the left out… so did France… and they are warning us not to make the same disastrous mistakes that they made. Heck, even Putin is warning us about Socialism/Marxism.

Will the American public (who has been educated for the last 60 years in a liberal-dominated public school system) wake up before its too late?

We’ll see… but hey, how about that Cow Fart tax they are getting ready to hit us with?!? Great idea, huh? (not a joke, look it up).

By: JIM

JIM — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:59:28 +0000

Your right on. But, no one is listening My Congressman just sent me an email touting his envolvement in the ” dollars for clunker program “. I told him he was NUTS. We are bankrupt and there are not enought Countries willing to buy our debt NOR rich Amerivans to tax to death/

By: Health Care For All

Health Care For All — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:45:59 +0000

We cannot sustain this level of debt.

Where were these thoughts as Bush pushed us into this mess? Our debt level started with his administration. We were GOOD through Clinton…

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:23:42 +0000

Our economy basically collapsed in the summer of 2007 when the home mortgage market started to sag after 6 years of artificially low interest rates had inflated the value of property to ridiculous levels. The securitization of the mortgages also enabled this to happen as it removed individual properties as the basis of the underlying security of the loans through bundling, mixing up real estate as packages rather than individual properties. Our economy became a runaway train as the engineers kept the pedal to the metal, kept it running full speed and even started cannibalizing the train itself, running historically high deficits, throwing peices of the train into the boiler to keep it going. The real explosion occured when the boiler blew and all the hedge fund derivatives and credit swaps started to kick in. Suddenly, all those bets that the economy could only go up (derivatives) failed and all the bets to limit the losses kicked in (credit default swaps). Money lost on the up bets and the downside bets were so substantial and leveraged that there really wasn’t enough money in the system to accomodate them, especially as in the wake of the massive sell off to cover these losses, the market dropped approximately 50%. In fact, there still isn’t enough money in the system to cover all the leveraging. That doesn’t mean that the runaway train has stopped though, it’s momentum is still keeping it hurtling down the tracks and so now the engineers are trying to patch up the boiler and are printing up a bunch of new money to throw into it, in hopes of keeping the train going. If we don’t get the train going again, it will stop, we’ll all have to get off the train and start walking. Where we stop may not be to our liking, it will be unknown terrain, very possibly in inclement conditions, and perhaps far from any stations or security, perhaps amongst predators. We shouldn’t want to do that, when an economy comes to a dead halt it means that suddenly everything is tossed, lives are lost, all wealth is redistributed, governments change and not necessarily in a smooth transition. As such, we are in a race to print up as much money as we can as quickly as we can and hopefully re-create the economy. The old saw about how the last great depression was that it really didn’t end until the second world war started. But that entailed deficit spending as well, as factories were fired up to produce weapons, men were uniformed up to go kill other men, and we suspended the usual rules of economics to go and blow up all the stuff we made and others made. I think we really have to see this as a war where a cash neutron bomb was detonated, destroying all the money and leaving the buildings and people behind, what has happened is that due to a lack of regulation, gamblers got into the economic system and completely crashed it. Now, as the whole system is on its back, and discredited (must all capitalist economies boom and bust?) people are understandably wanting some security against, disease, starvation, exposure and old age. Money is a completely human invention and more an article of faith than fact, it is fake. If someone can be fed, should they starve? If someone can have shelter should they live in the open? If someone can be cured, should they suffer with disease? If someone gets old, should they be discarded. Such questions are hauntingly similar to the questions asked by religions because both are matters of beleif, not reality. It may not be to our liking, most of us having been brought up as rabid capitalists, entrepreneurs, and beleivers but the reality is overwhelming, our economy is in ruins due to speculators and a lack of prudence by those who were supposed to be gaurding the bank vaults. Improprieties were allowed and now confidence needs to be restored. Let’s try and get the train going again at any cost, because if the train stops, the cost will be incalcuable.