Fogbuster

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There, fixed that.

It is the Congress that passes ALL laws, Congress passes ALL budgets, Congress makes All expenditures. The President does NOT pass one single law. Never has, never will. It is the Congress and ONLY the Congress that passes all laws, the laws that make the expenditures the U.S. government makes.


Geo Bush, John McCain, and many other Republicans -- and probably a few Democrats, too, before they were taken to the wood shed by the Dem hierarchy -- all voiced their disapproval of the criminally malfeasant ways of spending tax-payers' monies, but the Dem leadership in Congress opposed such concerns, ignored them, and voted against them.

From the economic holocaust caused by the utterly failed "Community Re-investment Act" (CRA), touted by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and passed by their Democrat Congresses, the U.S. economic system has been laid to waste by those who control the Federal Reserve and their willing accomplices, like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, who will sell out America just so they can get their power fix by making the laws that have destroyed America.

Everybody knows this now, and those who have been fooled in the past will learn who fooled and abused them, and due payment will be required. The results are not going to be pretty for those who have destroyed America.

//

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"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing."

Patters

Your claim about the CRA has been debunked numerous times, so let's not rehash that. Yes, the Democrats are going to try to buy us out of our economic problems. If they don't, then things might get so bleak around the world that it will lead to world war, which would force massive spending anyway. Better to spend money on helping people than killing people, but you perhaps, being a conservative whose religious leader sells weapons (Kahr Arms), disagree.

PressCoverage

Gawd... you just keep squawking the same tired self-rationalization every month or so, as if it hasn't been completely blasted out of the water...

It's people much much closer to your ideology that have ruined America... Nice try...

MrBigglesWorth

this is the most ridiculous thread I've read. First of all, an all republican leadership doubled the national debt. people blame the CRA but honestly saying that giving people homes is the root of this? let's try derivatives as a possible source of greed or even economic terrorism. let's blame bush, cheney.

both parties signed the bailout. do you honestly think we'll ever pay back the national debt? at this point everyone is worried about surviving and the monthly bills. I have doubts the nation can keep up with their monthly bills.

it's funny that people have already blamed the democratic party for the upcoming projected problems.

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"There are two categories of superbowl participants that nobody remembers:

The team that lost the game and the team that only won one." Dwight White- Steelers

DarrylS

To blindly blame anyone for this fiasco whether it be Bush, the Dem Congress or anyone else shows sign of a serious mental disorder.. and deficient thought processes. It also shows a very lazy person who does not want to work to find the actual facts.. this says this so it must be true.

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

Harry Boy

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Harry Boy (Genius)

In The Absence Of Law And Order Society Will Surely Destroy Itself

scout

five and one half years.

PatsFanInVa

Darryl's got this one right. We've already established that Foggy's particular hard-on for a piece of carter-era legislation is just a matter of trying to deflect blame. But while Bush showed an enormous cluelessness over the course of his tenure, and an enormous willingness to wish rather than plan across a range of issues, "the economy" is indeed more complex than any particular use of "the economy" as a blame issue.

We talk about "the economy" as if it's a known quantity, rather than an interwoven but functional shared delusion.

Here's the trouble, very simply: If I know how to make shoes, and you want shoes, and we both start with 10 bucks... maybe I'll buy tools, leather, etc. for 5 bucks, make shoes, and you think the shoes are worth 6 bucks.

At the very simplest level, wealth has been created: I spent 5 bucks, I have 6 bucks, and furthermore, I have some tools which will work the next time I make shoes. You believe shoes are worth 6 bucks, and you paid 6 bucks. So you have 6 bucks worth of shoes and 4 bucks left in cash. I have 11 bucks+ in cash and goods. You have 10 bucks. A dollar of wealth has been created through the very act of trade.

That's the argument of the trade enthusiast.

(The Marxist would impute the wealth to the labor value I put into making the shoes, holding as constant the value of the tools and leather (capital)... but the buyer still must believe in the 6 dollar value of shoes.)

One difficulty is that either analysis, indeed any analysis, is dependent on these moveable and notional values of goods and services.

So we all make purchases that create a world in which we all have $15, based on various trade decisions, and the notional values we've all agreed on, based on the ability to "create wealth" through borrowing.

Well, borrowing creates an actual set sum owed, and not a notional sum owed. So we have all sorts of wealth based on a shared delusion, and a hard and fast amount we have borrowed, which is based purely on our agreement with a lender which continues into a future over the term of the loan.

Our shared delusion collapses; our $15 of notional wealth, which we borrowed, say, $12 in order to create, reverts to a pre-runup valuation of $10.

And we have created what, class? Debt.

To be sure, the elimination of post-depression regulation, [possibly marginally] the CRA, the inactive SEC, the FED's easy money policies, etc. etc. etc. can all be pointed to to explain the mechanisms by which the phenomenon of debt creation has thrived.

It's a bit of a pickle. If we imagine a system devoid of robust government regulation, it works fine as long as you like the roller coaster ride between affluence and misery. I often see people here advocating that we never "fix" anything, so that the invisible hand of the market sorts things out as Adam Smith said it should... I say that would be the short route to a revival of Marxism in the West, within a few decades. The acceptance of vast inequallities in fortunes is not in human nature, and the pure dumb inefficiency of a command economy is easily forgotten, when a people gets pushed close enough to the brink, while watching elites thrive. There's a reason that communism and socialism were in-vogue notions throughout the world during the Great Depression.

But if we attempt to foist the blind-faith idea of the goodness of unregulated markets on the populace, we go exactly the same place -- as seen prior to the "holding actions" taken in the last few months. We are still at the edge of a precipice, which many here still recognize. And the reason is, we have drawn closer to the inevitable free-market truth of oscillation from "wealth creation" to "debt creation". Note that the actual goods and services remain constant; they are just valued differently.

So in a period of "wealth creation," we are all happily employed, as the shared delusion (divorced from the classical mechanism of supply and demand by the intervention of psychological/speculative, non-need-based factors) drives higher and higher valuation of what we own and the worth of our labor. In a period where we view the goods and services as worth less than invested, the "wealth creation" becomes "debt creation," but only in retrospect. The party's over, people lose jobs, peoples' assets are worth less than the hard and fast dollar value owed, etc.

Paradoxically, the wall streeters of the 90s and 2000s were obsessive risk-management buffs. the siren call to them was protection of downside risk to the point that it is virtually guaranteed that they end up with decent to high returns. So they invested in hedging activities, including the insurance of their debt through credit-default swaps (for example.) Other examples abound. If market condition A happens, the insurer pays the insured X amount. The trouble is that since deregulation, the rules on said insurers are weak and inappropriate, compared to your car insurance company. Private insurance companies are regulated very strictly, by state, and are expected to have assets that can cover a great deal of their worst-case scenario liabilities. But since the repeal of Glass-Steagall, your local bank gets to offer insurance for these types of financial events, but without the same requirements a normal insurance company has to fulfill.

So it wasn't a bunch of Gordon Geckos playing craps with peoples' investment dollars; it was precisely the opposite. They were professional risk managers. However, they trusted various instruments meant to indemnify them against downside risk. And nobody was insuring the insurers, or checking that they were capable of insuring against the possible insured event.

We will one day come out of this. I do not think it will be within the year. I think we are moving into a secular bear market that might go a decade or two; that's not unprecedented. We will be cleaning up the excesses of the secular bull market of the last few decades for some time, one way or another.

Free markets? Of course. There is no better model for an economy.

But we need to stop getting greedy. I would favor a tightly regulated free market system... which of course the right wingers will call socialism. I just call it common sense.

PS, all, please try to remember that "creating wealth" under one valuation regime is "creating debt" under another. Next time someone says "The Europeans" (or "The Chinese") are "Getting ahead of us," remember they might just be the lemmings running fastest to the cliff edge.

PFnV

BelichickFan

The stupid liberals here haven't figured out this "simplistic view" is merely in response to PC's bumped thread saying the same thing about Bush.

DarrylS

Yes they have, they are just responding to the resident village idiot.. this one is more fun.

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.