What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

bra_man69 said:

Nope all my energy was used dealing with my kid tonight don't have anymore for another kid.
I don't know what to tell you about that.

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mercury14 said:

No it's okay. Just name the policy. It will take you like two words.

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bra_man69 said:

Policy in what? I done forgot what your point was sorry.
Hey did you ever watch the show 6 feet under? It was on HBO

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mercury14 said:

Which of Obama's economic policies do you blame for the housing crisis?

Your response that there should be no discourse on the topic (personal attacks are your substitute).

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vetteman said:

Lack of policy, dummy.

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bra_man69 said:

Personal attack really come on asking if you seen a show not a personal attack.

If a personal attack is what you want ok fine.
it seems you like to call people Jen so I though I call you David if you seen six feet under you would understand

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mercury14 said:

Yeah. You going to answer it for Vette? Because he's just going to talk about my cock.

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vetteman said:

You mean lack of policy right? Obama made a lot of promises and has done zilch:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press...s-plan-help-responsible-homeowners-and-heal-h

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bra_man69 said:

Watch the show you well like David.
check out oz to not my cup of tea but was good.

Why his policy didn't start it it's not helping to end it
What he and the fed are doing is prolonging it.
B.O.A doing a lot of fucked up shit right.

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richard_daily said:

So.... could you maybe name an Obama policy that caused the housing crash?

You're kind of having trouble keeping on target here.

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bra_man69 said:

No really looks like you are there dick fellow along.

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mercury14 said:

Lemme get the Google translator... brb

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richard_daily said:

Really?

You make Carter sound extremely devious... He pulled one over on Ronnie good.

If it was really a powder keg, waiting to go off, how come 3 republican presidents, and the republican congress didn't do anything about it?

Doe s that mean that they have no idea how government works?

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mercury14 said:

Nobody believes you.

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mercury14 said:

This is exactly why we know you were never a liberal: you have no grasp of what liberals believe whatsoever. All we get from you are lies and caricatures of liberalism. If you actually were a liberal you'd be able to articulate the position.

You're also a doofus when it comes to conservativism if you actually believe what you just typed. Conservatives don't distort words? Is this a joke post? YOU distort words. All the time. Constantly. You're doing it right now. Let me know if you want to start a thread on this topic and I'll absolutely shred you.

And nobody believes you're a libertarian either by the way. You agree with virtually the entire Republican Party platform. You're... just another Republican.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

AJ: I live in an oak forest...

fs: AJ, I'm standing in front of this tree and it's clearly a walnut, you don't live in an oak forest.

AJ: A forest will have more than one type of tree, but one usually predominates.

fs: All I see is this fucking Walnut tree! You're misusing the term Oak. It's just a forest.

AJ: 90% of the trees are oak.

fs: Now, you're just redefining the terms... We can't go any further with this conversation until you admit that this is a walnut tree...

AJ: Yes firespin, it's a walnut tree.

fs: Then you lied, you're stupid, you're inconsistent, and you make NO sense what-so-ever...

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Housing market is likely to remain weak and may take a generation or more to rebound, Yale economics professor Robert Shiller told Reuters Insider on Tuesday.

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We recently saw lots of sit-down strikes and demonstrations — the various efforts in Wisconsin, the Occupy movements, and student efforts to oppose tuition hikes. None of them mattered much or changed anything. There is a sit-down strike, however, that has paralyzed the country and has been largely ignored by the media.

Most economists since 2009 have been completely wrong in their forecasts, reminding us that their supposedly data-driven discipline is more an art than a science. After all, a great deal of money is invested and spent — or not — based largely on perceptions, hunches, and emotions rather than a 100 percent certainty of profit or loss. And the message Americans are getting is that the Obama administration is hostile to investment and business, and thus should be waited out.

Barack Obama’s original economic team — Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag — have long fled the administration, and have proved mostly wrong in all their therapies and prognostications of 2009. Despite the stimulus of borrowing over $5 trillion in less than four years, near-zero interest rates, and chronic deficits, the U.S. economy is in the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and mired in the longest streak of continuous unemployment of 8 percent or higher — 38 months — since the 1930s. The Mexican economy is growing more rapidly than is ours. Why did not massive annual $1 trillion–plus deficits spark a recovery, as government claimed an ever larger percentage of GDP, and new public-works projects were heralded by the administration?

Much of the answer is found in the collective psyche of those Americans who traditionally hire, purchase, or invest capital. An economy is simply the aggregate of millions of private agendas, of people sensing and reacting to a commonly perceived landscape. Yet since January 2009, that landscape has been bleak and foreboding.

Take the debt. The problem is not just that Obama has borrowed $5 trillion in less than four years, but also that he has offered few plans to reduce the ongoing borrowing and none at all to pay down the debt. Instead, he has demonized as heartless anyone who opposes his serial $1 trillion annual deficits. That demoralizes the public, who privately know that they cannot buy everything they might wish, and who expect that government will not, either. In the business community, there is the unspoken assumption that, at some point very soon, either taxes will have to rise, the currency will have to inflate radically, or debts will have to be renounced — all equally foreboding for those with capital. Some even believe that Obama is not a haphazardly profligate spender but a deliberate one who welcomes the radical measures on the horizon to stave off bankruptcy as laudable in themselves.

Take energy. We are reminded that the ANWR field in Alaska — and others far greater there — are still off limits. So too are over 25 million barrels off the California coast. Federal leases have been vastly curtailed in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Eastern Seaboard, and in the American West. The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline, which would have kept billions of U.S. petrodollars inside North America, coupled with Solyndra-like federally subsidized solar and wind boondoggles, sent the message that the government would oppose energy that was profitable and subsidize sources that were not.

Worse still, in less than four years, we have now an entire corpus of Obama-administration quotations blasting fossil-fuel energy. The president himself promised skyrocketed energy prices with his now-stalled cap-and-trade proposals. He mused that new regulations might bankrupt coal-burning companies. He ridiculed the idea of increasing oil and gas supplies by more drilling and instead pointed to the importance of proper tire pressure and regular tune-ups and spoke of tapping America’s vast algae resources. Secretary of Energy–designate Steven Chu mused that he wanted gas to reach European price levels, apparently in hopes of curbing fossil-fuel consumption while making alternative sources of energy more competitive. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who as a senator had claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not prompt him to open up federal lands for oil and gas leases, shrugged that there is no way of knowing whether $9-a-gallon gas is on the horizon. More recently, it was disclosed that an EPA regional administrator, Al Armendariz, had bragged of trying to “crucify” and “make examples” of gas and oil companies in the manner that the Romans did to conquered peoples.

The current renaissance in American oil and gas production is primarily a private effort to drill on private land, despite rather than because of the Obama administration. That the Obama administration takes credit for private companies’ finding new sources of low-priced oil and gas, despite government hopes that they would fail, only heightens the sense of private-sector cynicism and pessimism. The result is that “speculators” do not believe the oil companies will be given access to enormous energy reserves on public lands — and that, to the degree they drill new wells on private lands, a horde of apparatchiks from academia such as Mr. Armendariz will make life difficult for them.

Take also new mandates. The problem with Obamacare is not just that it represents a vast new entitlement at a time of record annual deficits, but that no one knows how much it will cost employers to enroll their employees. Potential hirers instead suspect only that their health-care expenses will spike, and those who are politically connected for that very reason have sought and obtained exemptions from the Obama administration: All companies, liberally owned or not, want out, not in — exactly the opposite of what the administration forecast. The public likewise suspects that Obamacare will come to resemble the hated TSA they see at airports — lots of employees milling around, little guarantee that the job at hand is done well, and an evident resentment of federal employees toward the public they serve. Will X-rays for our kidneys resemble the sort of scanning process and pat-downs we endure at airports? And the more the government seems to take over private enterprise — the car bailouts, the mortgage industry, student loans, wind and solar partnerships — the more private enterprise is frightened of being the next small guitar company or the next Chrysler creditor. Government seems now to be not only incompetent but arrogant, as if its vast recent growth ensured its impunity from oversight — whether in the GSA scandal, the Secret Service debacle, or the Fast and Furious mess.

Take wealth. There is a crass war against wealth. Obama has ridiculed those who have done well as the one-percenters, the fat cats, the corporate-jet owners, and the ones who don’t pay their fair share or don’t know when to stop making money. But the problem with this boilerplate populism is that it does not emanate from the muscular classes and is not aimed uniformly at the proverbial rich. The first family vacations in Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, Vail and Aspen, not at Camp David; and the lieutenants in this class warfare are themselves one-percenters, an Al Gore, John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. Likewise, who determines whether to go after the Koch brothers or Warren Buffett; is this week’s enemy to be Exxon or Google? Why is the non-income-tax-paying GE under Jeffrey Immelt apparently approved, while a CEO on Wall Street is deemed a fat cat? Is it give to Obama and you are canonized; give to Romney and your name is posted on an enemies-list, pro-Obama website?

The only thing more discouraging to investors than class warfare generally is a certain type of class warfare: a hypocritical crusade that emanates from the upper classes and selectively targets enemies on the basis not of wealth, but of the degree to which they have failed to buy exemptions with their wealth. Meanwhile, on the other end, the message is more weeks of unemployment insurance, vastly more food-stamp recipients, and constant promises of mortgage-debt relief, credit-card-debt relief, and tuition-debt relief. If one were to dream up a perfect way to destroy incentives on both the top and bottom ends, one could do no better than what we have seen since 2009.

The net result is that those with capital, even if they are small businesses, do not believe that the Obama administration likes them. They feel that regulations will increase, that taxes will increase, that energy costs will increase, and that as they pay more to government and keep less, government will nevertheless become even more arrogant and inefficient — and they will become even more demonized. When people pay over 50 percent in payroll, federal, state, and local taxes and are still caricatured as “not paying their fair share,” a sort of collective shrug follows and bodes ill for the economy at large. One need not be liked to make money, but the constant presidential harangues finally take their toll in insidious ways.

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Inspired by President Obama’s cheap election-year politicking, Congress has launched into a frenzied, bipartisan panderfest over the Stafford loan program. Late last week, an emotional House speaker John Boehner led House Republicans to vote for an Obama-proposed giveaway he’d denounced just a few days previously.

For those who don’t eagerly track the ins and outs of federally subsidized student loans, here’s the deal: Five years ago, in a piece of cheap political theater, Democrats in Congress wrote an additional sweetener for federally subsidized Stafford loans into the College Cost Reduction and Access Act. Beyond offering college loans at a guaranteed rate of 6.8 percent, Congress temporarily dropped the undergraduate rate as low as 3.4 percent. The fixed rate was demanded by student-loan advocates who disliked the fact that interest rates fluctuate and wanted the feds to offer certainty (and understood that the rates would have to be high enough that they wouldn’t drain the U.S. Treasury). The Bush administration, which never worried about spending a couple billion more, cheerfully went along for the ride.

Now, the temporary 3.4 percent is set to naturally expire, with undergraduate Stafford loans reverting to the standard 6.8 percent rate. The impact? Not so much. U.S. PIRG, the big “student advocacy” lobbying outfit, calculates that the change would cost the average new borrower $2,800 over a ten-year repayment term. That’s about $25 a month. Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin has pegged the impact at $7 a month.

Meanwhile, the projected hit to the federal debt is projected at $30 billion over five years.

The Stafford program is a middle-class entitlement. We’re not talking about Pell grants for poor students. We’re talking about whether students can get an even bigger subsidy on already-subsidized loans. And, while everyone on Capitol Hill is busy offering an offset to “pay” for the extension, it’s useful to remember that we’re borrowing a trillion bucks this year. That means that none of this is paid for. All of those potential cuts are already needed just to start trimming the existing debt.

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Social Security is slated to run out of money in 2033, three years earlier than expected. So maybe it's time for politicians to stop pandering when it comes to shoring up the system and instead rethink the retirement entitlement altogether.

Maybe we just need to look back at our history.

In the early 1900s, nearly 80 percent of Americans over the age of 65 had a job. Dora Costa, an economic historian at UCLA, says people stopped working only if they were no longer physically able to. They expected to work as long as they lived.

Is that really such a terrible idea?

Look at our labor force. It's changed dramatically since Social Security was enacted in 1935. Most of us are no longer spending our time working on farms or in heavy labor. Most of us are retiring from office jobs. Should we really be funding retirement at 65 just so we can live a life of leisure for the next 15, 20, or 25 years? Some financial advisers are even suggesting that when planning for retirement, we plan to live to 100, or at least another 30 years.

Aging just isn't what it used to be. Carroll O'Connor was only 47 when All in the Family premiered -- younger than Brad Pitt. And look at Mitt Romney. He's 65; he's fit, and he surfs. While wealthy, he's hardly an outlier. The majority of us aren't sitting in rockers in our 60s. We're physically active -- playing tennis and golf, hiking, traveling. We're living longer, healthier lives than ever before.

It should be good news that we're living longer, but with an entire nation set to be on the government dole in their later years, it's not good news at all. Right now, we spend more on Social Security than on national defense. And with baby-boomers retiring and living longer than ever, it's only going to get worse.

In fact, the International Monetary Fund recently warned that retirement costs are rising faster than expected. Worldwide, people are living an average of three years longer than anticipated -- in the U.S., it's up to eight years -- and government pensions aren't equipped to handle it.

When the government first started sending out Social Security checks in 1940, the average lifespan was 63 years. Today, it's 79. Our unexpected longevity has already added another $3.2 trillion to our overburdened Medicare and Social Security systems. And it's expected that our lifespans will increase another four years by 2050.

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Our society has changed drastically over the seven-plus decades since Social Security was introduced. Maybe our thinking about it should, too.

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Imagine a president who gets behind drilling, welcomes the cutting-edge technology of companies such as ExxonMobil, and offers generous 15-year tax breaks to ensure that new drilling projects move forward. That's the kind of energy policy America needs in order to achieve energy-independence. Unfortunately, it's not Barack Obama who's behind those positive energy policies; it's Vladimir Putin.

As Russian president-elect, Putin has made it clear that he intends to open his country's arctic and Black Sea regions to drilling. The potential is so great, and the necessary investment so immense, that even Russia's giant state-run oil companies, Rosneft and Gazprom, lack the resources and technology to proceed. So, with Putin's blessing, Rosneft and Gazprom have entered into joint-production agreements with Exxon, Italian major Eni, and other Western companies. The stakes are huge -- not just for these companies, but for the Russian economy.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

No, I said every single government charitable work has the proclivity to grow into a monster long after the original need has been met. Governmental bureaucracy is no different than any business or any other mass movement, if you are not growing and expanding, ten you are dying and that is what this program did quietly for year after year, Clinton rediscovered it and used it, Bush initially thought it was a grand thing and then someone saw the stalled train on the track ahead, alerted him to the numbers and he stayed in the cab to try and slow the train down while the Democrats declared loudly and persistently that there was no obstruction on the track and then when the collision occurred, their first response was to pull a Pontius Pilate, wash their hands of blood and begin screaming that general Republican Philosophy was the problem with the housing market, not their altruistic and good intentions.

The problem, that so many Democrats are central government True Believers whom only see the good in their intentions and never ever examine the unseen effects of a Broken Window and when god things do not materialize, they become Bart Simpson, "Wasn't me!" and then begin demanding, "Don't you judge me!"

So, to answer your first question, they are well of how government works only to the good, and they refuse to look past the good and when the good turns bad, it cannot be because of them, they are the good guys, so the continue their cartoonish examination of the original problem, the solution and the aftermath and can only reach the conclusion that it was "the bad guys" who did them in. Thus Berlesconi focuses on the "Communists" while France and the Netherlands concentrate on "The Right" Ireland blames the English, Spain and Portugal blame the Capitalists and then they fight bitterly for policies steeped in the roots of King and Mercantilism with a modern veneer of Democratic Socialism (usually Nationalist) so they can build upon their bad guy list and blame Germany and the US too...

Yeah they know how government works.

It is the source of everything good in their lives...

"We know that the number of government jobs has been increasing steadily, and that the number of applicants is increasing still more rapidly than the number of jobs. … Is this scourge about to come to an end? How can we believe it, when we see that public opinion itself wants to have everything done by that fictitious being, the state, which signifies a collection of salaried bureaucrats? … Very soon there will be two or three of these bureaucrats around every Frenchman, one to prevent him from working too much, another to give him an education, a third to furnish him credit, a fourth to interfere with his business transactions, etc., etc. Where will we be led by the illusion that impels us to believe that the state is a person who has an inexhaustible fortune independent of ours?
Frédéric Bastiat

Political Realists see the world as it is: ... In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of common greed...; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.... In the world as it is, the solution of each problem inevitably creates a new one.
Saul David Alinsky
Rules for Radicals

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