Tamerlan IED - He didn't build that.

[kimmy]

Just the "successful" ones ?

It's sort of hard to tax the unsuccessful ones, Mr Cheney.

-k

[bush_cheney2004]

It's sort of hard to tax the unsuccessful ones, Mr Cheney.

No it's not....they pay taxes till the bitter end. The point being that you seem to want to pick different winners and losers "debt" to "society".

[kimmy]

No it's not....they pay taxes till the bitter end.

Maybe they do if they have Archie and Jughead doing their accounting...

The point being that you seem to want to pick different winners and losers "debt" to "society".

The winners and losers have already been picked, and when frickin' Willard is paying less tax than his employees and when the most profitable companies in America aren't paying any tax at all, it's seems to me like they've been picked wrong.

-k

[Guest Derek L]

No it's not....they pay taxes till the bitter end. The point being that you seem to want to pick different winners and losers "debt" to "society".

Exactly, same goes with income redistribution tax……….If we’re talking paying fair share, let’s not piss around…..get rid of all loopholes, credits etc etc and have a flat, equal tax so everyone get’s to pay, equally, for making society tick……..If my household makes 400k a year and Joe Blow the next town over makes 40k and Richie Rich across town is making 40000k, if we’re all paying 25-30% of our income to service “society”, is that not fair?

[bush_cheney2004]

The winners and losers have already been picked, and when frickin' Willard is paying less tax than his employees and when the most profitable companies in America aren't paying any tax at all, it's seems to me like they've been picked wrong.

Willard paid a lot more tax than his employees.....maybe you meant actual marginal rate. "Rich people" and "corporations" can shut it all down if you don't like how much they pay, and we can see how that works out.

[Shady]

Maybe they do if they have Archie and Jughead doing their accounting...The winners and losers have already been picked, and when frickin' Willard is paying less tax than his employees and when the most profitable companies in America aren't paying any tax at all, it's seems to me like they've been picked wrong.-k

Willard's tax rate was close to 40% when not including his charitable donations. Regardless, depending on what type of tax breaks you qualify for, will greatly reduce your tax burden. Take renewable energy. General Electric paid zero taxes because of the renewable energy tax benefits. If you wanna get rid of those, be my guest. But you have to actually understand the details of the thousands of pages if tax law. Your blanket statements make great bumper stickers, but they don't actually get to issues of a very complex situation.

[kimmy]

Ok, fine, Willard's *marginal* tax rate is lower than his employees. Why should it be? Willard's required taxes were lower than what he actually paid; he left deductions on the table to bring his taxes up to 14% so that he wouldn't look like a complete deadbeat. Reminder: Willard's running-mate's famed Ryan Budget would have reduced taxes for people like Willard to practically zero-- so tell me who's picking winners and losers.

As for GE, they paid zero taxes because of deferred tax deductions. What about all the other big corporations? Google pays practically no taxes because they have a mailbox office in Ireland the Netherlands the Bahamas somewhere on god's green earth. So do lots of other big corporations. More wildly profitable corporations get massive subsidies and tax breaks. Again, tell me who's really picking winners and losers.

-k

[bush_cheney2004]

Ok, fine, Willard's *marginal* tax rate is lower than his employees.

Don't get mad...just get it right.

[bush_cheney2004]

Again, tell me who's really picking winners and losers.

"We" are...ain't never got no job from a poor person !

[Pliny]

kimmy, on 01 Jul 2013 - 11:19 AM, said:

And that's TARP. It's not applicable to the automaker bailouts, or previous automaker bailouts, or a large number of other bailouts. TARP or not, most bailouts are funded by conventional government borrowing. Which means the overall argument you're attempting to make fails.

Bailouts are emergency measures with out time to sell bonds. The federal reserve buys the bond from the government and that is part of conventional government borrowing and why a "fiat currency" was so popular with governments and why electronic ledgers are even more popular - they can immediately create "money" out of thin air.

A commodity backed currency would never allow them to respond to Katrina or Sandy with billions of dollars. The people would have had to have done it all themselves with charity and donations. Many contributed to private relief charities and it was appreciated. Many asked where, when and how much government money would arrive. It's no skin off their necks to provide cash. Just takes a vote in congress.

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If you work at GM and your job is assembling door panels or operating a painting machine, and you go to work one morning and the factory doors are chained shut, I'm not sure you "made your own bed".

You chose to work there. You chose to stay there. You thought it would last a lifetime - there has to be some resp[onsiblity for your life. Otherwise, kimmy when they come for you you could just say you had nothing to do with it so they should leave you alone. It behooves all of us to have a clue about who is in control of our lives because if it isn't the person it is someone else. In the case of the assemblyman union worker he left his life in the hands of the union and ultimately the auto manufacturer.

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Regardless of that, the reason people supported the automaker bailout wasn't so much that they felt sorry for laid-off workers, and were more concerned that the massive layoffs would result in a domino effect that would be devastating for the whole economy. Whether or not that's actually true, that was the reason.

Correct. The whole economy needed a correction that no one wanted to go through.

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But as pertains to this discussion, the point being made here is that bailouts are not necessarily unpopular. So the idea that voters would refuse to support bailouts if they were funded by taxpayer dollars fails. (and most bailouts *are* funded by taxpayer dollars, as we already discussed.)

In the case of a bailout, under an honest money system the public would privately fund the bailout with real money if they were convinced it was necessary and the amount of funding would be dependent upon how much they believed in a bailout.

Yes taxpayer dollars fund bailouts. There aren't any other kind of dollars. They pay back the bond the Federal Reserve bought from the government. The taxpayers now owe $17 trillion in those debts to the federal reserve and other bond holders.

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I have lost count, to be honest. I think your whole premise is just one faulty assumption stacked onto another, all resting on a foundation of more faulty assumptions.

Of course. I know you do. However, regurgitating what you have read in refutation of my "assumptions" is not a display of any understanding of my assumptions nor of the subject.

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And when was this list compiled? I wonder if CNN made this list with the knowledge of what we know now about how the banks acted.

What we know now, if we follow the mainstream, is exactly what you say. Greedy Wall Street is to blame and we need more regulation and maybe someone should go to jail but maybe not. Let's think about it for awhile longer. Hey how about those Leafs?

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There is nothing wrong with a system where anybody can ask for a mortgage. You, me, or Hobo Joe can all wander into a bank and ask for a mortgage. There's absolutely no reason why any adult should not be able to go to a bank and ask for a mortgage.

The system didn't break because everybody can ask for a mortgage.

The system broke because everybody could *get* a mortgage.

The onus isn't on unqualified borrowers to know whether or not they should have a mortgage, the onus is on lenders to say "No" to people who they shouldn't lend money to. Why is it you people keep blaming consumers for asking for mortgages they shouldn't have got, and ignoring the people who decided to lend to them?

Who are "you people"?

The fact is that they read an ad one day or a friend or neighbour said he was buying a house and he wasn't putting anything down and it was a government backed mortgage from Fannie Mae so it was all government approved stuff and he should get in on it while the getting is good.

Those heady days before the bust were pretty exciting.

I know I just made that up. But how do you see the mortgage brokers making themselves busy? Ushering people in off the street, door-to-door sales? Just how did word get around that mortgages were so easy to get? It had to be actually happening in reality but in your world people were being herded into mortgage broker offices, shown a house and told to sign on the dotted lines.

I don't think they had to look anywhere for customers, they were lined up at the door and they wanted in.

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Millions and millions of hobos and deadbeats and could go to the bank and ask for mortgages and it would not make a speck of difference to the economy, as long as the mortgage lenders said "No." The fault doesn't lie with people who asked for mortgages they shouldn't have had. The fault lies with people like the CEO of Countrywide who decided that they should say "YES!" to people who shouldn't have mortgages. "Anybody who can fog a mirror."

Boy, Barney Frank must be just seething at what those bankers did to those poor people. Saying yes to anyone who can fog a mirror. As he bought up mortgages left and right. Let's see, he was a congressman, right? And head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the time of the crash? Sounds like a government stamp of approval to me.

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You still don't get it. The short term rewards were so great that long term risk became completely irrelevant. If you can pocket $120 million in bonuses this year, why would you care if your company goes out of business next year? The collapse of Lehman Brothers had consequences for a lot of people, but not for Dick Fuld, who pocketed somewhere between 300 and 500 million dollars in the years leading up to Lehman Brothers' demise.

-k

I don't think you read what I wrote because I think I said so much. The future became irrelevant. No one thought of the future. As I said, it is the consequences that must be faced in the future that holds greed at bay.

Criminals do think only of short-term gain and long term consequences are generally ignored. Yes and maybe Dick Fuld is a criminal. Maybe all of Wall Street is a hotbed of criminals. Do you think we should support it with bailouts?

In order for your accusation to hold water you would have to prove that Dick Fuld had it in mind to intentionally harm Lehman Bros. or at least had no intention of correctly managing it and was only there for his own personal gain.

There is also another instance where people will risk long term consequences for short term gain the creation of "mob mentality", kind of a mass hysteria. Could this be the case? After all, it seems no one realized what was going on except for a few. It had to collapse before a problem was recognized. Nancy, Barney and Chris Dodd thought all was well? They kind of liked there being so many happy people in new homes.

[Pliny]

kimmy, on 01 Jul 2013 - 5:59 PM, said:

You want the things government does that you personally support to continue, but you don't think people should have to pay taxes because you're under the silly illusion that all of these good things will be done by magic for free in the absence of public management.

I said that? Wow. Things will be done by magic for free?

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Rich-guys support government acting in ways that directly benefit them, like maintaining the roads that get their goods to market, or the police forces that protect their property, or the legal system that enforces contracts and ensures they keep getting paid. But functions of government that benefit other people-- labor standards, public education, environmental regulations, whatever-- that stuff, that's "social engineering" for "vested interests". Got it.

Government too, knows it doesn't get its taxes from poor people. It may get its votes if there are lots of poor people, dependent upon them, you know a dependent permanent underclass. Teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, accountants, you know the permanent underclass that get a public education and public healthcare. The rich would not settle for that kind of mediocrity.

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The future doesn't hold greed at bay because people who have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal don't need to fear the future.

You are saying that none of them have a conscience. You are saying they don't think about their current actions as affecting their future? On the contrary, they have more to lose than you do. They think very much about the future.

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I don't even care how you want to define "community". If you don't feel that "community" is the right word, you can substitute "society" or some other word you find more appropriate. It's a distraction from the relevant point, which is this: successful businesses benefit greatly from working in *our* system as opposed to one like Mogadishu. As such, successful businesses have an obligation to participate in the upkeep of that system.

The definitioin is not a distraction. Business is a part of a community, It provides jobs to the community, it provides needed goods and services to the community, if it is not in harmony with a community it moves. Single-industry towns die when they move away. They are an essential and integral part of a community. They are comprised of people, people that make up the community.

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I find it odd that you keep complaining about crony capitalism, and yet you're basically acting as a spokesman for crony capitalists.

-k

Crony capitalism requires government as a partner to exist. I am no advocate of that. I am for capitalism not fascism.

I don't know, after all this time, how you could so misconstrue my stand.

I'm not the one that would support government bailouts of Wall Street or failing mismanaged businesses. I am not the one that wants government to provide subsidies and tax loopholes to corporations or limit a particular market to a monopoly or cartel. So where could you possibly even consider I would be an advocate of crony capitalism? Either you haven't been paying attention or you are simply on a mission.

[kimmy]

Pliny, on 02 Jul 2013 - 01:07 AM, said:

Who are "you people"?

Yourself, Tim, and Shady, as well as many others outside this forum who blame consumers for borrowing rather than the lenders who lent them the money.

Pliny, on 02 Jul 2013 - 01:07 AM, said:

The fact is that they read an ad one day or a friend or neighbour said he was buying a house and he wasn't putting anything down and it was a government backed mortgage from Fannie Mae so it was all government approved stuff and he should get in on it while the getting is good.

Those heady days before the bust were pretty exciting.

I know I just made that up. But how do you see the mortgage brokers making themselves busy? Ushering people in off the street, door-to-door sales? Just how did word get around that mortgages were so easy to get? It had to be actually happening in reality but in your world people were being herded into mortgage broker offices, shown a house and told to sign on the dotted lines.

I don't think they had to look anywhere for customers, they were lined up at the door and they wanted in.

They advertised heavily. I'm sure word-of-mouth played a role too. Who cares? What does it matter? Unqualified buyers went into the mortgage offices of their own volition. I'm not arguing that they didn't.

I'm just asking you why mortgage brokers didn't say "no" when unqualified buyers showed up in their offices.

I'll repeat the point: 10 million unqualified people could apply for mortgages and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to the health of the financial sector or the housing market. The damage only occurred because millions of unqualified people *received* mortgages.

Why did they lend to millions of unqualified buyers?

You people seem unwilling to think about the answer to that question.

The answer is that at every stage of the process, somebody got a reward if they just approved more mortgages. That goes from the agent at the office all the way to Angelo Mozilo and Dick Fuld.

Companies like Countrywide knew that they were approving large numbers of crap mortgages, but they didn't care because they knew that companies like Lehman Brothers were going to buy them.

Companies like Lehman Brothers knew that they were buying crap mortgages; internally they referred to their pools of high-risk mortgages by colorful nicknames like "Nuclear Holocaust", "Subprime Meltdown", and "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out". But they didn't care either, because they knew that they could just turn these mortgages into MBS products, get S&P to stamp an "AAA" rating on them, and sell them.

It all boils down to this: if you've found a way to spin straw into gold, you're going to need a hell of a lot of straw. That's why originators like Countrywide approved everybody who walked in their door no matter how unqualified, and that's why securitizers like Lehman Brothers bought stacks of mortgages no matter how crappy.

And that's why your search for ways to blame consumers government Barney Frank GSEs people other than the industry itself is futile.

-k

[Pliny]

Well, kimmy, let's just continue along with having to tolerate greedy Wall Street bankers duping the public and lining their pockets. The Dodd-Frank Bill should curtail that form ever happening again, I suppose, but things will remain the same as long as money for mortgages can be created out of thin air whenever monetary policy is used to heat up the economy.

The fact is that if those greedy bankers couldn't create money out of thin air they probably would have run out and been entirely unable to provide all those unqualified greedy people with mortgages for greedy Wall street to turn into derivatives and sell to equally unwitting and greedy investors.

With all the regulatory boards and agencies that already exist how could this mortgage lending have gone unnoticed by Federal and State authorities?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_regulation_in_the_United_States

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) of 1975, implemented by Regulation C, requires financial institutions to maintain and annually disclose data about home purchases, home purchase pre-approvals, home improvement, and refinance applications involving one- to four-unit and multifamily dwellings. It also requires branches and loan centers to display a HMDA poster.

Mortgage backed Derivatives were under-regulated, as you say, but the mortgage has to exist before it can be turned into a derivative. Is the creation of the mortgage the first step in the boom? How did Countrywide escape the scrutiny of the HMDA?

And how about the CRA did that play a role in creating mortgages?

And how about low interest rates did that help to create mortgages? Widening the volume of "qualified" buyers?

What were the parameters that defined a qualified buyer?

No one, in government knew the quality of the mortgages being created? Barney Frank was buying them at Fannie and Freddie, didn't he know what he was buying? We know he thought all was well and wanted to keep the ball rolling. Later he co-writes the Dodd-Frank regulatory Act, what a joke. I suppose no one was more qualified to see what happened since he was basically at the forefront of encouraging mortgage creation.

The Federal Reserve is currently busy buying MBDs but watch out headlines are screaming that the GOP sequester has affected the ability of the government to police Wall Street. I guess that's just so they can later lay blame on Republicans should the new boom take a tumble (which all booms do).

Your dislike of Wall Street bankers and wishing to stick the blame on them for the whole boom and bust is rather futile in itself. While Wall Street undoubtedly contributed to the motion, as did many others the buck has to stop at regulators pushing the whole cart. It wouldn't have happened without the aid of the Federal Reserve and the monetary and social

policies of the Bush Administration and Congress who were whistling dixie as it all went down.

I know, I know it was the bankers and Wall Street who did it all.

Let's not keep on going over the same ground. Barney has managed to keep the focus on wall Street and washed his hands of the whole thing. Quite a trick surpassing anything willard could have conjured up.

The story remains - Wall Street greed creates housing crisis. Take a deep drink.