Thread: "Class Warfare"

Originally Posted by mpg

You failed to make a distinction between Libertarians (upper case L) and libertarians (lower case l). There are quite a few libertarians, far more than 1%.

From my experience, most of them are phonies. Used to be neocons and Bush supporters, but are too embarrassed to admit their past enthusiasm for so many horribly failed policies, so they claim now that they are "libertarians". Clank!

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

Lower class, middle class...sounds like they are all out to cause you problems.


Right after the Boy Scouts. But I'm sure you'd have the usual bunch of phony slurs to offer about them in a pinch. The real problem with them of course was that they represented and organized a bunch of people who were not likely to vote Republican. This is what made them dangerous. People who are not likely to vote Republican must be stopped from getting their hands on a ballot. That's what protecting the sanctity of the democratic process means to a Republican.

Its you libs who hate the BSA for not allowing gay scout leaders. Not me

ACORN is a criminal enterprise

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

From my experience, most of them are phonies. Used to be neocons and Bush supporters, but are too embarrassed to admit their past enthusiasm for so many horribly failed policies, so they claim now that they are "libertarians". Clank!

freedom terrifies those who spend most of their waking moments justifying suckling of the public teat

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

Its you libs who hate the BSA for not allowing gay scout leaders. Not me

ACORN is a criminal enterprise

As a former boy scout, I don't hate boy scouts. But, I would prefer they not be homophobic.

As for ACORN,

Originally Posted by Boo Radley

As a former boy scout, I don't hate boy scouts. But, I would prefer they not be homophobic.

As for ACORN,

I think a private organization ought to be able to hire only straights if that is their bias. And if they lose good people that is the price the pay. The best teacher and coach I had in HS was a closeted gay man-we who were on his CC team knew he was gay. None of us were though one of our star runners -many years and one wife and two daughters later-had a sex-reassignment surgery. his orientation didn't bother us at all. It didn't matter to us. The guy was a fantastic teacher and a great coach. we had the best winning record of any team and we also had by far the highest average GPA and this guy was a major reason for that. I never worried that the guy was "feeling me up" when he was taping my ankle or rubbing a charlie horse out of my leg. He blew his brains out a decade after I graduated because some kid "outed him" and some hysterical parents went ballistic even though there was not a single hint of him abusing or hitting on any students.

Originally Posted by mbig

That Chart Backs what I was saying.
The Vast Majority of the sub-prime crisis was Post-Glass-Steagall-Repeal, 1999.
And remember, there has Always been 'subprime'. The Crisis was due to Cheap and adjustable rate sub-prime on houses bought at inflated prices.

If you bought a house in ie, 1997 even 'subprime', you were 10 years paid in (of 15 or 30) and still had appreciation in value by the time crap happened. That is NO problem. The rest described above WERE the problem.

Really... So in your world... A trend that started prior to the repeal.... is proof that the repeal caused it? In your world, a decline in the sub-prime market the year after the repeal, proves it was the cause?

Further, a very explicit flat line of growth in sub-prime mortgages until 1997, proves that it was a repeal in 1999 that caused the problem? A repeal that didn't go into effect until 2000 I might add.

Just out of curiosity, in your world, do you use logic or reason? Or is that irrelevant in your world? Absolute stupidity spewed on this forum sometimes.

Finally, subprime mortgages had a higher default rate from the very start. Um... 'duh'.... that's why they were sub-prime loans to begin with. In the 90s, when banks were arguing against CRA rules to have sub-prime loans, one of the reasons they said they shouldn't make them, is because the lost money on their sub-prime portfolios.

This idiotic idea that subprime didn't have a problem until all the "other crap" started, is BULL. Just flat out you are completely and utterly wrong.

Many banks were balance-sheet broke. ALL would have gone down due to inter-bank dependency/paper.
the Bailout was NOT optional.
Bankamerica is arguably broke right now/Still if marked-to-market on all it's paper, including the horrendous loans of 'Countrywide' it 'saved'.
Citibank was down to below $1 a share from $55 a share. The govt Bought stock from them to save them and Guaranteed another $280 Billion in obligations.
Citibank has 200 Million depositors worldwide. They were Insolvent.
To many more to name, including big ones, junk.

As to Bankamerica:


Does that look like they would have survived without feeding at he Fed trough? It's still dicey as I post.
The govt shoved Merrill Lynch and Countrywide in there and simplified the rescue.

Um... What does stock value have to do with whether the company can survive? Stock value doesn't directly mean anything to the companies budget. Usually stock value is a reflection of where the company is perceived to be. But that doesn't mean anything about how well the company is actually doing. Toyota had a massive hit when the brake failure crap came out. Yet Toyota is fine, and GM and Chrysler went into bankruptcy.

Further, notice when Bank of America went into a nose dive. It was late 2008, early 2009. When did they buy Countrywide? 2007. Interesting.

You'll also note that BoA didn't buy Lehman brothers, as opposed to Countrywide. Why? Because the government refused to pay them to do it, so they didn't do it. BoA bought Countrywide because the government paid them money to buy countrywide, and they determined it was a good deal.

Had absolutely no problems at this point. None. They were perfectly fine. It wasn't until they bought Merrill Lynch that they had problems. Further, the CEO of BoA said in congressional testimony that they didn't want the deal, but the government pressured them to do it.

This coerced deal happened in September of 2008. Now look at your own chart. Where does the BoA stock start taking a dive? Last quarter of 2008, when the government pushed deal went through? Funny that huh? Once again, your own sources back my position... .oh wait... we're in lib-tard land, and really this proves your point somehow I'm sure.

I guess the word 'illegal' means nothing to you You've also just lost your conservative allies.

Nope. Strawman. In other words, you can't come up with a valid response, so you'll just make up something I didn't say or imply. Congrats. You are a typical leftist.

It's working all over the planet as a matter of fact, including ... China!
Ag subsidies and tariffs are in effect all over the planet to protect jobs.. successfully.
China just leveled a 22% Tariff on American Cars! (unbelievable, even while the world/congress is watching ongoing outrage)

Are you stupid? Are you really trying to suggest that a tariff put in place in the past whooping three months, shows how protectionism has worked in a growing economy for the last 30 years?

Adults? Any adults here to debate?

Uh.. No.
Overheated speculation and stock market, Overextended populace.

Uh no. Protectionism.

Moving the goal posts I see.
But Still Wrong in any and all cases.
You were completely Wrong that China had Free Market Currency. It's Pegged to keep it artificially low t create and keep jobs.
So now you Backpedal to the isue of whether that 'peg' is undervalued or not.
By almost all accounts it's WAY undervalued.
Everyone and his mother would love to have their Yuan made free-floating,
Consensus would be, as I said, about 40% undervalued; moving from 6.3 top the dollar to 4 if fairly traded.

You don't seem to understand what pegging to the dollar means. Pegging it doesn't mean it's artificially high, or low. When you look at money trades on the free market between the USD and the Yuan, it's pretty close to the official exchange rate.

If the official exchange rate was truly low, then you should be able to point to the free market money changers, and see a difference in the free market rate, verses the official exchange rate. Just like you can with the Venezuela Peso. But you don't. Because it's not.

The plan IS working by all accounts in growing China.
Even other Third World countries (like Vietnam and others in Africa/Middle East) complain they are being screwed. And they are.

Everyone complains they are being screwed, because it's politically beneficial to blame other people for your problems. Castro repeatedly blamed America for it's economic destruction, even though they have more than enough trade with other countries. North Korea blames South Korea for it's problems. It's just politics. Get over it. Every dumb leftist, blames capitalists for their country being impoverished, while the other is wealthy.

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

Taxes are not theft. They are an expression of your share of the costs of running the country. Those who protest such a thing are simply casting themselves in the role of shoplifter.

Right, and then when someone suggests that *gasp* "everyone should pay tax" and not just the rich, the moronic left claims this is class warfare. Or even that *gasp* everyone should pay "the same percentage" in tax, as in an equal share of income from every US citizen, the moronic left SCREAMS about class warfare.

Then when they claim that the rich should pay 50% of their income, and the lower 40% should pay nearly NOTHING in income tax.... and a conservative dares to accuse a leftist of class warfare.... Well then it's how dare they! The right is always causing class warfare! How awful to suggest that the benevolent left would engage in such a thing!

If we are equal under the law, then how much you pay as a % of your income should be equal too. And that means everyone, rich to poor, should pay the same % in income tax.

If you don't believe that, then with all due respect, bag your envy and greed motivated policies cloaked in the self-righteous "your share of running the country" crap. You are full of crap, just keep it to yourself.

As for inheritance taxes, maybe you should read the law. It applied formerly to less than the largest 2% of all estates and it just got narrower. Unless you are well up among the wealthiest of Americans (with an estate in excess of $5.12 million), you need not concern yourself in the slightest with inheritance taxes. Nobody in your family wiil ever be paying any at the federal level.

That's not point. It's not yours. What I worked for my whole life, is MINE. Not YOURS. You don't have any right, at all, to determine what I do with MY PROPERTY, whether it's $50 in a coffee can, or $50 Million in land, assets and investments. We left Briton because people thought it was their business what other people did with their stuff. Now we have a bunch of pathetic whiny socialist wannabes, running around demanding things of others again. I paid my taxes on every dollar I earned, and just because I die you think you have a claim to it now? Because you can't stand someone being given a gift from their father? Grow up. Babies every single one of you.

You disagree because you don't understand what was said.

Funny I think the same thing every time I read one of your posts. Complete ignorance.

No, I'm happy to tax anyone 28% who makes a long-term capital gain from investing in antiques and collectibles. You'd kind of expect that people would know about such taxes beforehand, but I suppose there could be some sufficiently out of the loop to be taken by surprise.

Exactly. Keep the poor, poor. The leftist mentality.

Home ownership is a good thing. Finding ways to make more people able to afford a home is a good thing. Finding ways to make a huge profit by pretending to make more people homeowners by giving them credit under terms that you know will swamp them in short order, then selling that paper off to other people and eventually creating a global credit crisis by it is not a good thing. Fannie and Freddie did not do that. Wall Street and their private broker allies under the watchful regulatory eye of the Bush administration did that.

Fannie and Freddie did do that. CRA did that. Government did that. Like I said before... when I read your post, it screams "complete ignorance".

Boy, oh boy! Social Security is not a retirement account. It's an insurance program. Your SS retirement benefit may be taxable to the extent that you have other taxable income and the sum of one-half of your pension plus that other taxable income is greater than $32,000 on a joint return.

Well you can define it whatever way you want, it doesn't really matter.

You are taxed at a income tax on your total income. You pay that tax. Plus you pay an additional amount into Social Security of 15% of your income. For someone earning $50K a year, that would be $7,500 a year. Over 40 years, that's roughly $300,000.

If you retire at 70, the maximum monthly check from social security is $2,350. That's about $28,000 a year. If you live till 80, you'll have collected only $280,000. So for most people, you will never get back, what you put in. It's a horrible system. If someone put in $7,500 into a regular mutual fund, they'd be millionaires by the time they retired.

But back to the point. If you have a combined income of over $25,000 a year, you will be required to pay taxes on 50% of your social security income. You can, if you get paid the max amount of social security benefit, be forced to pay taxes on your benefits, even if you don't earn a penny outside of SSI.

So you got taxed on the money you put into the system, and then you get taxed on the money you get back from the system.

Now granted, very few people pay taxes on their SS benefits, because very few come even close to getting $25K in benefits. Most get far less. The average is $1,000 a month. Which makes Social Security even worse as a system. But if you work a minimum wage job at Wendy's and collect $1,000 a month from Social Security, you'll be paying taxes on your SS benefits. Which once again, this is how government makes sure to punish anyone who puts in the effort to improve their lives.

Well, income limits preclude some folks from using a Roth IRA, and you may have forgotten also that they are funded from after-tax income. 401-k's are funded from pre-tax income. 401-k's can also soak up a much larger total per year. For a couple over age 50, taxpayers can contribute $44,000 tax-free. That's like getting $15,400 handed to you by taxpayers. Thanks, guys.

No it's not like getting handed $15,400 from tax payers. No one else pays more tax, because you pay less tax.

Leftist like to pretend that somehow, your money is really.... their money that they are allowing you to have. Wrongs. It's not yours. If a robber came into your home and then decided to not steal something, should you send them a thank you note for "allowing you to keep your property"? Of course not. Well when government doesn't take OUR property, that's not then being benevolent. That's them not stealing something that isn't theirs.

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

I think a private organization ought to be able to hire only straights if that is their bias. And if they lose good people that is the price the pay. The best teacher and coach I had in HS was a closeted gay man-we who were on his CC team knew he was gay. None of us were though one of our star runners -many years and one wife and two daughters later-had a sex-reassignment surgery. his orientation didn't bother us at all. It didn't matter to us. The guy was a fantastic teacher and a great coach. we had the best winning record of any team and we also had by far the highest average GPA and this guy was a major reason for that. I never worried that the guy was "feeling me up" when he was taping my ankle or rubbing a charlie horse out of my leg. He blew his brains out a decade after I graduated because some kid "outed him" and some hysterical parents went ballistic even though there was not a single hint of him abusing or hitting on any students.

They can. And people can choose not to be part of them. Freedom works both ways.

And while I'm saddened to hear about your coach, I'm not sure supporting banning people like him is the way to honor him. but that too is another subject.

Sparkles, I am glad you represent all those poor, over taxed rich people...Wait..that is an oxymoron

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

LOL!!! More tales from pure fantasyland...

Total federal corporate income taxes paid in FY2007: $370,243 million.
Total federal corporate income taxes paid in FY2011: $181,085 million.

So basically the fact that declines in tax revenue due to a recession, doesn't mean that government isn't trying to pass new taxes like the Buffett rule, and others? Whoops, you just lost another argument.

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

Actually, the last minimum wage increase was in three equal tranches of 70 cents an hour. These occurred in July of 2007, 2008, and 2009. Millions of people lost their jobs because of the Great Bush Recession at about that time. As usual, the increases did not results in job losses themselves.

The minimum wage was part of the cause of the 'great bush recession' as you put.

What happened to Ford? And I asume you realize that the non-union southern auto plants simply mimic the benefits of UAW contracts. They even brag about it. If they didn't do this, all their best employees would pack up and go work in a union shop.

UAW Boss Backs Ford Contract Concessions - Memphis Daily News
Ford's Union Workers Approve Union Concessions - Louisville News Story - WLKY Louisville

Ford got many Union concessions which allowed it to avoid the crash.


Again, the truth contradicts your BS.

Maybe China. China produces nearly half the world's steel and five times the amount that Japan does. Japan produces only about 25% more than we do. Our steel industry got in trouble because brilliant CEO's were slow to invest in new and far more efficient technologies. Other nation's who did were soon able to produce high-quality steel more efficiently and therefore undersold us. Way to go, CEO's!

Well, no you are wrong. Some steel plants were sold off and reopened as non-union steel plants, and they are competitive with the market.
Non-union mill will supply some steel to Sparrows Point | Baltimore Brew

There are actually hundreds of small non-union shops that are successful and compete internationally, while the union shops slowly wither and die.

As for China, they are doing something really really stupid. They are directly subsidizing steel.
Think about that. They are taxing Chinese citizens, to offset the cost of steel production, so we can buy steel from them, at Chinese tax payer expense.

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

Most economists tend to believe that reuniting the commercial and invstment sides of the house all but immediately led to a rash of rigged IPO's that swindled ordinary Americans out of billions. They aslo tend to agree that it gave the investemnt side access to huge commercial deposits that they could then go ahead and gamble with. Such gambling was in fact to become very popular within a few years.

Well, the facts, and I, disagree. Thanks.

That's ridiculous. They ALL would have been very different places without GLB.

No they would not. The fact you think they would, shows how little you know. Merrill Lynch, Indymac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, all of them would have been affected in any way by GLB. You can go down the list of failed banks, and the majority by far would not have been effected by GLB.

It wasn't just banks. See WAMU and Countrywide. And all of the big five investment banks either died outright or gave up the ghost and converted to bank holding companies. GLB didn't cause anything, of course. It merely set the stage for monstrous amounts of reckless behavior that having been left unchecked by supposed regulators ultimately ended in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

GLB didn't prevent the regulators from doing anything. No the regulators didn't do anything because they didn't want to. They didn't want to, because the government itself was pushing sub-prime loans. Obama himself, was personally involved in suing banks to make sub-prime loans. You act like GLB did something.... it didn't do anything. If GLB had never existed, the government would have still been pushing sub-prime loans. And the regulators certainly would not have been trying to stop something that the government was actively pushing.

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

I don't have anything to say, so I'm going to babble about and hope no one notices

Take a hint. If you have nothing at all of any value to say... shut up. None of us want to read whiny crap that doesn't address any point made, by anyone, let alone me. You were just driveling on, babbling like Jessica Simpson on tuna fish.

Speaking of looking stupid, there has only been a surplus sizable enough to talk about since the 1983 revisions. SS was a pay-as-you-go system prior to that. Tax rates were periodically revised to reflect expected changes in the needs of beneficiaries, but only to maintain rough equality between receipts and outlays. It was only with the declining birth rates of the late 1960's and 70's that the nature of the baby-boomer blip and the need to build a cushion to help handle it was identified, and that was the event that drove annual suprluses to ten, twenty, and more than thirty times what the previous record for them had been.

Really..... then why did the taxes required to fund the system triple between inception and the 1960s? Opps... facts contradict you. Oh well.

Yet another ridiculous myth. Location decisions are made with regard to overall profitability. To the extent that taxes end up playing any role at all it is as a tie-breaker between the last few alternate locations that have managed to survive all the earlier and far more important tests -- things like proximity to markets, needed natural resources, and reliable transportation networks, along with dependable access to a competent, industrious workforce and instruments of the rule of law.

And yet there are companies that have openly admitted to moving to a different location over taxes. Obviously, if there is only one possible location that is profitable, then they are going to use that location regardless of taxes. That's the 'no duh' level of thinking you are presenting.

But are you really going to claim that companies are often faced with no alternatives?
Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore (Update3) - Bloomberg
US corporate tax rates the primary cause for companies moving overseas - National Finance Examiner | Examiner.com

Cisco has moved seven different companies out of the US, to Ireland because they have a lower tax rate.

You can claim that companies don't move off shore to survive, but... did you notice that GM America was the only one to go bankrupt? GM Holden, India, Brazil, and other international GM subsides were all doing just find, and recording profits. Only GM America crashed. And then you wonder why US GM plants close, and India, Korea, Australia GM plants are opening, and you squeal over jobs going off shore.... no connection there, right?

Long-overdue increases in the minimum wage were phased in in three tranches, and the fact that they were coming had been known for
a year or more and factored as necessary into pricing and hiring decisions. The increases -- as has always been the case -- resulted in no losses of jobs except for the imaginary ones that right-wingers will dream up.

Every minimum wage increase causes job loss, including the last ones. This has been such a well established fact with hundreds of articles throughout economics, that you'd have to have your head shoved up your ideological butt to deny it.

An intelligent person would understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with subprime lending and that it has been going on for decades. The problem between 2002 and 2006 was abuse of subprime (and other) credit markets principally by unscrupulous brokers who pushed high-cost, high-profit terms onto people they knew fuill well would not ultimately be able to afford them, then selling those notes off into secondary markets as if they were quality paper. People with specific oversight and regulatory power over those markets and such behavior sat by and did nothing. The resulting credit crisis and global economic collapse is what cost people their jobs. Thanks, Republicans, for being so on your toes like that.

An intelligent person would have to realize that something must have changed in 1997, to cause a sudden and drastic spike in sub-prime lending. Namely the focused push by government to expand sub-prime loans. Which they did. Which caused the problem.

GM signed a new four-year contrtact with the UAW back in September.

Irrelevant to the fact.

The free-loaders who get the copy-cat benefits of union-won increases without paying any actual dues.

Irrelevant to the fact.

Clearly, you haven't understood the concept. It isn't partisan in nature. Thanks in large part to Republican-driven deregulation, concentration rather quickly created a handful of banking behemoths that were connected to everything via massive (and opaque) networks of systemic risk. If any of those failed, half of both their clients and investors would fail, and if those failed, half of what was left would also fail, and there was no known limit or end to the consequent chain of failures. There is a near certainty under such conditions of ending up with a non-functional financial system, and without a functional financial system, economic activity (like whatever you do) comes to a screeching halt. The people who bailed out the banks would actually have rather water-boarded them and their officers, but they had to restrain themselves and instead act in the interests of the people. You know, like you.

No, Lehman brothers went into bankruptcy, and no such massive catastrophic event wiped out the banking system. Again, Iceland allowed their banks to fail, and the banking sector was actually a larger part of the economy of Iceland, than the banking sector of the US was of the US economy. Yet, Iceland completely recovered, and did so faster than the US did, and is doing better now than the US is.

Thanks for your socialist excuse to "save us" from this impending doom, but you are wrong. Further, it is exactly this logic that led us here. Several years back, regulators had a meeting with bank officials, and in the course of discussion, asked why the banks didn't have larger contengency plans for an economy down turn. One of the banking officials said plainly that the reason they didn't bother with such large plans, was because they knew the government would bail them out. And they were right. The very fact you believe such bad irresponsible beliefs, is exactly why banks didn't bother to protect themselves.

You left out George W Bush.

You left out Obama. Any adults on this forum to talk to? Or is this an amateur high school debate club forum?