DivineComedy

I obviously believe the Senate should charge another 700 Billion Dollar Bailout on their credit cards and not tell the House of Representatives about it.

http://www.debatepolitics.com/archiv...tml#post119128 (Democratic Platform STRONG, HEALTHY FAMILIES)

Let's not discuss the fundamentals of putting the onus on the usurer with the college degrees and the super computers for managing the debt. Let's put the burden only on the poor and the middle class; buyer beware of what you do not know you bought.

*****

A lad puts down money to buy land, and gets a payment he can afford, and the country bank makes a good investment. A New York bank with a super computer, and more university degrees than the small town, gives two credit cards to the household to go with more maxed out debt, and the household's monthly payments exceed the ability to maintain the good investment. The law does not care. And I know personally that the Bush family does not care if any laws are violated by the banks. If these candidates only address the so-called "mortgage crisis," this is all I have to say:

I would really like to see usurer's heads popping like grapes on the sidewalk...I would really love to see the fall colors.

John1234

I finally made my decision and voted against the bailout.
I am surprised at how many are against it.
Especially with both candidates being for it.

Ron Paul is completely against it.
I like that man more and more each time i hear about him.

If this was sarcasim then nm.
Do you know any rich people that worked hard to get rich?
I know a couple. And I know a couple hundred that didn't.
Most make more due to job title which is determined more by education than hard work.

Generally from job code to job code, the less they make the harder their job is.
A manager's job is harder work than his employees in most cases.
But the district and division manager's jobs are extremely easy when only dealing with profesional managers of which you own their life and souls.

One of the most difficult and tolling jobs on the body is a roofer.
Compare the pay of a roofer to that of an accountant or lawyer.
Seems to go this way even when sticking only to construction.
One of the highest paying trades as well as easiest is the ceramic tile guy.
But then there is also the electrician, AC, and Pumbers that is even easier and pays even more.
The general contractor just comes and checks the job for an hour each day.
He makes the most and does the least.
The roofers and framers have the hardest job. And they make less than the painters and trim carpenters.

Aside from all of that though, the majority of money in America is made with paper.
Deeds, Investments, stocks, etc.
Completely effortless when compared to actual work.
A lot of money is also simply old money.
And there is also hollywood money.

__________________
"We are all Georgians". No Mr. McCain, We are all Americans.

Ethereal

I'm against it. Americans need to take their medicine and let the market correct itself. All we're doing with bailouts is alleviating the superficial suffering while ignoring and prolonging the more fundamental problem of easy money and government meddling in the economy. People like to blame the financial institutions for this debacle but let us remember who financed and provided the regulatory impetus for these high-risk lending practices - the government.

By subsidizing down-payments and closing-costs for low-income, first-time homebuyers the government forced lenders to assume risks they would not have otherwise incurred. Not suprisingly, the vast majority of these high-risk loans went sour and sent a shockwave through the financial sector. Had not the government introduced this artificiality into the housing market the bubble would have been less substantial and its collapse less precipitous. Economics 101.

MC.no.spin

I disagree with this selfish philosophy, and I guess that's why I'm not a die-hard Libertarian.
When we make decisions in life, we base them on what is the most pro-survival thing to do. That includes our families and friends. That includes our city, our state, our country and the world.
What you're willing to concede in order to stand on principle, which on one aspect is commendable, is a the same time irresponsible. It's irresponsible because we are under one Constitution, and that exists to form a more perfect union. And that union faces great danger at this time.
This "let the economy sink" attitude should be fully cognizant of history, so let me confirm you are aware of what you are willing to accept, for the sake of standing on principle.

1930s Great Depression

In the cities, thousands of jobless men roamed the streets, looking for work. It wasn't unusual for 2,000 or 3,000 applicants to show up for one or two job openings. If they weren't looking for work, they were looking for food. Bread lines were established to stop people from starving. And more than a million families lost their houses and took up residence in shantytowns made up of tents, packing crates, and the hulks of old cars. They were called "Hoovervilles," a mocking reference to President Hoover, whom many blamed (somewhat unfairly) for the mess the country was in.

Thousands of farmers left their homes in states like Oklahoma and Arkansas and headed for the promise of better days in the West, especially California. What they found there, however, was most often a backbreaking existence as migrant laborers, living in squalid camps, and picking fruit for starvation wages.

More than half of African Americans still lived in the South, most as tenant farmers or "sharecroppers," meaning they farmed someone else's land. Almost all of those who worked and weren't farmers held menial jobs that whites hadn't wanted — until the Depression came along. When it did, the African Americans were shoved out of their jobs. As many as 400,000 left the South for cities in the North, which didn't help much. By 1932, it's estimated half of the black U.S. population was on some form of relief.

Analyzing the Causes and Consequences of the Great Depression - For Dummies

Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929. Besides ruining many thousands of individual investors, this precipitous decline in the value of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions, particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks were consequently forced into insolvency; by 1933, 11,000 of the United States' 25,000 banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravating the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; by 1932, U.S. manufacturing output had fallen to 54 percent of its 1929 level, and unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force.

The Great Depression began in the United States but quickly turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States and European economies after World War I. The United States had emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the American economy slumped and the flow of American investment credits to Europe dried up, prosperity tended to collapse there as well. The Depression hit hardest those nations that were most deeply indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In Germany, unemployment rose sharply beginning in late 1929, and by early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the work force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other countries had been affected by the slump by 1931.

Almost all nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs, raising existing ones, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of international trade: by 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen by more than half as country after country took measures against the importation of foreign goods.

The Great Depression had important consequences in the political sphere. In the United States, economic distress led to the election of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in late 1932. Roosevelt introduced a number of major changes in the structure of the American economy, using increased government regulation and massive public-works projects to promote a recovery. But despite this active intervention, mass unemployment and economic stagnation continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale, with about 15 percent of the work force still unemployed in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. After that, unemployment dropped rapidly as American factories were flooded with orders from overseas for armaments and munitions. The depression ended completely soon after the United States' entry into World War II in 1941. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces and lowered the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The Nazis' public-works projects and their rapid expansion of munitions production ended the Depression there by 1936.

At least in part, the Great Depression was caused by underlying weaknesses and imbalances within the U.S. economy that had been obscured by the boom psychology and speculative euphoria of the 1920s. The Depression exposed those weaknesses, as it did the inability of the nation's political and financial institutions to cope with the vicious downward economic cycle that had set in by 1930. Prior to the Great Depression, governments traditionally took little or no action in times of business downturn, relying instead on impersonal market forces to achieve the necessary economic correction. But market forces alone proved unable to achieve the desired recovery in the early years of the Great Depression, and this painful discovery eventually inspired some fundamental changes in the United States' economic structure. After the Great Depression, government action, whether in the form of taxation, industrial regulation, public works, social insurance, social-welfare services, or deficit spending, came to assume a principal role in ensuring economic stability in most industrial nations with market economies.


About the Great Depression


So ask yourself this: Are you willing to have your friends and family be exposed to the very high risk of some of them having to live in "Bushville?"

__________________
"The guy’s a phony. He has no experience, he has no record; he’s not nearly ready to be commander in chief."
Bill Clinton on Obama (from the book Game Change)

John1234

I respect your post.
And if we did hit something similar to a great depression where even the middle class are starving, i fully understand how bad it would be.
Living through many hurricanes has taught me a lot about just how fragile we have become and dependant on gas, power, and money.

We would not survive a real Great Depression.
That is one reason i am more concerned about Foriegn Policy, (A World War would cause a Great Depression) but i will toss that aside for now.
We've become too dependent and too fragile.

But i am also not convinced that letting bad businesses fail would cause a "Great Depression".
A Depression yes.
But things are very different now. We have the economic infrastructure in place. The equipment, the training and education.
All of these things were lacking within our Country during the Great Depression.
It is my opinion that once we hit bottom we would not stay there for long.
People who were pumped up on credit will simply have to face reality.
People who are used to paying with cash, might also not be affected as much as you think by the collapse.

Also some of the candidates have plans to put Americans to work that are already in existance.
I am not familiar with McCain's plan for this, but I know Obama intends to put 5 million Americans to work through Government money for alternate energy.
If we did fail to do the bailout, there are still mutiple ways that the Government can help the economy and the American worker.
Stable businesses will still find credit if they deserve it.

I do not see it as a Great Depression as much as I see it as a Great bubble bursting that will equalize wealth.
If we do recover quickly, then the poor would not be effected but the middle and upper class would be forced to live within their means instead of off the backs of the labor of others.

I can not put my finger on "why".
But something seems terribly wrong to have a society where most money is made by shuffling paper.
Especially when the CEO to worker rate of pay is 2000:1.
And when over 80% of our society is living on borrowed credit.

It might be that this crisis is the natural result of the above and that a bailout will do nothing without changing those things along with it.
And there is no one even remotely considering changing any of those things.
So it might be that we have to learn from failing before we can do anything about this.

__________________
"We are all Georgians". No Mr. McCain, We are all Americans.

Ethereal

This is all well and good but there are many who posit the Great Depression was prolonged by government intervention.

MC.no.spin

With all due respect, I believe you are implying you have a hither-to unannounced phD in Economics that guides your analysis of this situation, rather than listening to economic experts like the gentleman on this video, who predicted a Great Depression scenario for this country over six months ago because of this crisis he saw coming:

YouTube - 3/1 CNN Your Money: Talks of Great Depression Coming

I'm sure in your chosen profession you don't rely on the plumber to give you advice on painting. If you need advice, you seek it from someone who has the knowledge and experience to tell you what's going on. I'm sure there is a lot of clamor for such action as you recommend out there, but I've yet to hear it from one economist that has my respect.

__________________
"The guy’s a phony. He has no experience, he has no record; he’s not nearly ready to be commander in chief."
Bill Clinton on Obama (from the book Game Change)

tryreading

I'm sure the President is terrified this may be part of his legacy. That's no reason to make us pay for it, though.

MC.no.spin

He'll be on tonight at 6 Pacific 9 Eastern to tell us what he thinks.

I suggest everyone keep partisanship out of their thought process on whether this 700 Billion Dollar investment in America is a good one or not.

__________________
"The guy’s a phony. He has no experience, he has no record; he’s not nearly ready to be commander in chief."
Bill Clinton on Obama (from the book Game Change)

tryreading

Investment in America?