RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Jesus H. Christ. One trillion fucking dollars!

If they go through with this bailout, I'm gonna kill somebody.

when numbers get that big, they're meaningless. Hell, they just printed a shitload more money, nothing to back it up... yeah, THAT's the way to save the economy, Inflation! YAAAAY!

That's what you get when a bunch of lefty socialist nutjobs play "reformed" and ingratiate themselves into conservative politics.

I think these guys need to go back and read some of Kojeve's stuff to really get a firm grasp on capitalist correctives of Marxist philosophy.

Welcome to the People's Republic of America.

Nice effort by a conservative government.

the congress that fucked this up is majority liberal.

And Bush has done stupid, liberal, stuff before, e.g., expansion of social programs. He's never been a true conservative when it comes to the economy.

I'm sure that's how the GOP want to sell it but they're the ones who have been saying the economy is OK & deregulation is their mantra. Plus Bush had a republican controlled congress up for most of his run. The democrats in congress are not without blame either but any real solution will require things done that fall outside of the GOP's love of deregulating.

and he got them through with a GOP controlled congress.

Um, actually, a lot of the, if not the exclusive, problem is regulation. The regulations that all but forced banks to people with shit credit (subprime loans) had a lot to do with this mess.

As noted above, it's not a Democrat vs Republican issue. Both parties were involved in passing those regulations at times. Clearly, the GOP lost its way at times and gave into the big government temptation.

But if you think more regulation is the key...oh...wait...you're a democrat...

Another major component of this mess is that people were borrowing beyond their means and not saving.

Sometime, it's tough being right....

Why skip a link to the thread you made this comment on? Not that it's a big deal but I'm curious at the context of the comment.

Here you go. I actually thought I'd put a link in. Sorry.


As you can see, the context was, in fact, that I was bemoaning that Americans don't save, that it was going to really damage the economy someday and that most Americans didn't care because they 'knew' the goverment would come along and propose a bailout.

Sorry to tell you, but this isn't "lefty socialist" stuff or "stupid, liberal, stuff" [sic]. This is Reagan economics at its best.

Problem is, the gov't is doing the same fucking thing, spending money it hasn't got.

something D O O economics.....anyone anyone

It isn't the same thing at all, actually. There's nothing intrinsically socialist about spending money the government doesn't have.

And before anyone decides to add more meaning to my words than there actually is, I'm not saying that this government bailout is in itself a bad thing (I actually would support it in a different economy), that this whole thing is Bush's fault (it's not), or that the liberal way of handling this is better (it's not). I'm just responding to the idea that these bailouts are leftist or socialist. Both those labels are inaccurate.

I agree that there is nothing intrinsically socialist about deficit spending by a government.

However, at the same time, whenever a government engages in corporate welfare or the nationalization of a private business it's at least a socialistic act.

And how is the bailout an example of Reaganomics? What bailout did Reagan initiate?

I didn't say it were a socialist move, I said it were irresponsable and reflective of the same behavior in citizens. I never got into the whole "people want bail-outs" talk.

People forget that government money is really our money. They tend to think of it as someone else's money. So when a big scary problem shows up in the evening news the knee jerk reaction is to have the government "fix" it with "their money."

It's like (true story) the guy who told an "inquiring photographer" a few months back that congress should continue to fund PBS because, "otherwise, the taxpayers will have to." He was completely blind to the fact that congressional money is taxpayers' money.

I like that old 10% Flat Tax idea. Lets go toss about a lot of tea and try to get that.

HA HA HA! That's like that black politician and the "why's it gotta be BLACK holes?!" ...or the rainbow lady!




...

On the contrary. The Republicans have been telling the Clinton administration and the Congressional Democratic majority that this development was coming for years now. What they've done to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is what caused this crisis.

The left doesn't know how this shit works. They think they do, but they really don't. And it's that misplaced confidence in their abilities that's destroying our bottom line.



I missed the part of the Regan administration where the president advocating massive bailouts.

True. The S&L bailout wasn't on Reagan's watch but it was on account of his philosophy, which the GOP still embraces.

On the other hand, you can see the S&L crisis and the current one as nice bookends to John McCain's career.

Damn, everyone.. it's no problem.. just divide the sum into the number of the tax-paying population evenly, and collect from all of us!!

kill dat nigger.

Quiet, you!

You're the funniest alt ever!

Good luck proving that.

proving? who needs proof when you have op-eds and youtube clips?

Today's New York Times:

• there is something familiar about what is happening. Once again, we are seeing the puncturing of a speculative bubble that was the result of asset prices soaring high above the underlying value of the assets. For as long as markets have existed, bubbles have formed. And whenever one of those bubbles begins to leak, it typically needs years to deflate, causing enormous economic damage as it does.
  
  Only now, for instance, are the bubbles of the past decade and a half, first in the stock market and then in real estate, starting to go away. It’s easy to think of the turmoil of the past 13 months as being unconnected to the stock bubble of the 1990s, which appeared to end with the dot-com crash of 2000 and 2001. That crash brought down the overall stock market by more than a third, its worst drop since the 1970s oil crisis. Corporate spending on new equipment then plunged and employment fell for three straight years.
  
  But dramatic though it was, the dot-com crash did not actually come close to erasing the excesses of the 1990s. Indeed, by some of the most meaningful measures, Wall Street after the crash looked a lot more like it was in a bubble than a bust.
  
  ...a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable...Wall Street traders began to believe that the values they had assigned to all sorts of assets were rational because, well, they had assigned them.
  
  Traders sliced mortgages into so many little pieces that they forgot what they were really trading: contracts based on increasingly shaky loans. As the crisis has spread, other loans have started going bad as well. Hyun Song Shin, an economist at Princeton, estimates that banks have thus far absorbed only about one-third to one-half of the losses they will eventually be forced to take.
  
  A guiding principle of economic policy in recent years has been that nobody is smart enough to diagnose a bubble until it has already deflated. This was one of Alan Greenspan’s mantras during his tenure as the chairman of the Fed. His successor, Ben Bernanke, said much the same thing when he took office in 2006. As they saw it, no matter how high stock prices rose relative to profits, or no matter how high house prices rose relative to rents, regulators deferred to the collective wisdom of the market.
  
  The market is usually right, after all. Even when it isn’t, Mr. Greenspan maintained, pricking a bubble before it grew too large could stifle innovation and hurt other parts of the economy. Cleaning up the aftermath of a bubble is easier and less expensive, he argued. We’re living through that cleanup now.

I'm not an 'alt'!!!

"Above your pay grade," even?

However, you must have some idea of what you think should be done. What do you think strikes the right balance?

I'm not asking for a concrete document that could passed as a law, just your ideas.

.. oh.. 700$ trillion bucks would break down to $2000 bucks for each taxpayer... we should be able to swing that.

why should I bail people - or a government - out when neither will learn to live within their means anyway?

the G-man ass-kicky User Palin Maniac
15000+ posts Mon Sep 22 2008 11:34 PM Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: Jesus H. Christ. One trillion fucking dollars!

King Snarf content User 10000+ posts Mon Sep 22 2008 11:50 PM Reading a post
Forum: Politics and Current Events
Thread: Jesus H. Christ. One trillion fucking dollars!

Sorry I didn't answer this sooner. I completely forgot about this thread.

To answer your second question first (and Pariah's post too) Reagan never had the opportunity to initiate any sort of bailout. However, after first opposing Jimmy Carter's bailout of Chrysler and the New York City loan program, he supported both.

And if we're going to talk about deficit spending, it was at its higher (relative to GDP) under Reagan that it had been in decades.

Back to my argument against calling this liberalism or socialism, though, when it comes to the economy, liberals tend to favor the poor over the rich--higher taxes rates for the rich than the poor, universal health care, etc (but of course, you don't need me to tell you that). Meanwhile, socialism is based on the idea that wealth and power should be redistributed to promote equality. It also promotes state ownership.

Neither is true here, though. Bush's bailout plan included no help for homeowners facing foreclosure, no financial stake in any of these firms, and no limits on pay for executives.

Instead, taxpayers will foot the bill, to the taxpayer's chagrin. Helping businesses and businessowners for the sake of economic stability and growth is Reagan all the way.