Today's one-liner: "The shortest way to the distinguishing excellence of any writer is through his hostile critics." Richard LeGallienne
Friday, August 05, 2011
"If the U.S. Government Were a Family ..."
“If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.” – Dave Ramsey
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And we're about to be downgraded to AA+ or AA and the idiots in the White House are apparently resigned to it.
Obama should be impeached. He inherited a bad economy and ignored it while he rammed a hugely unpopular health care bill through instead.
Bush was bad. This guy is the worst president in US history. He's crashed things faster and more structurally than Carter.
There's not going to be any recovery from what Obama has done.
And he's now fully engaged in fundraising and campaigning and partying.
He is the food stamp president. He has made the entire country into a big Detroit or Camden. And he did it so quickly. The full manifestation of the liberal agenda taken national. The Obama experiment has failed miserably.
He's done nothing to fix the economy. His party couldn't even pass a budget for two years when they had complete control.
Many suspect he hates this country that his wife couldn't be proud of until a couple of years ago. And now he's shown it in deed.
Its actually not Obama's fault.
It has been building for 30 years, as the easy credit made home prices skyrocket at 3000% when compared to actual increases in american wages.
This, and more easy credit, made it possible to gulp huge amounts of home equity loans, credit cards, business and commercial loans, all kinds of crazy mortgage scams, while evrything was priced way beyond its actual value.
This created inflated wealth that never actually existed, because the maineconomic driver was missing...wage increases. Everyone just kept the party going for 30 years, and here we are.
The 2008 crash happened under Bush, and stimulus was needed at that time. But the stimulus and the deficit spending, with no credit limit has bulged the debt to 16.4 trillion (megatoxic). This is Obamas fault because he thinks we can tax, spend and print our way out. We cant. The beast (megatoxic) is about to go hog wild .
Trish
regardless trish we're screwed. would you like to join me?
Tonight, S&P just down graded our Congress.
Let us not forget Clinton handed Bush a surplus and it was Cheney that said deficit spending was a good thing. Just making a point, this was in the works for a long time.
Lets not forget unfunded tax cuts, two unfunded wars, an unfunded Medicare Prescription B Plan.
What about banking deregulation that contributed to this fiasco. While Dems supported policies that encouraged more home ownership, predatory lending and flexible rate mortgage helped collapse the housing market. Banking Industry had noting to loose by giving out risking loans.
One thing is for certain, the actions of Congress and the President in 2008 and 2009 spared what could have been a more painful Depression.
Anon 643 has been asleep for the last 10 years.
Trish, makes some good points.
Clinton handed Bush a surplus, true enough BUT he also handed him a budget that had pushed th liabilies into the ledger in 2001, and a gutted (I do mean gutted) military, I know fora fact that we were ill prepared for a war.
Then came 911 and we need to take care of that and to retool the military. Katrina is still costing us. Bush was indeed too generous with our mony.
HOWEVER OBAMA HAS RUN UP MORE DEBT IN 2 1/2 YEARS THAN ALL OTHER PRESIDENTS COMBINED!
Look at the deep impact chart Bernie ran a few days ago. It tells the tale.
The fact is they don't trust us to do the right thing about our debt problem, and were not at all encourged by the recent deal. They also mention the third rail of politics, entitlements, as a reason. They don't think our current leadership is up to the task. Can't say I blame them.
This link has the text from the S&P.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/sp-downgrades-us-aa-outlook-negative-full-text
"Rationale
We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process. We also believe that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration agreed to this week falls short of the amount that we believe is necessary to stabilize the general government debt burden by the middle of the decade."
"The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year's wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently. Republicans and Democrats have only been able to agree to relatively modest savings on discretionary spending while delegating to the Select Committee decisions on more comprehensive measures. It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.
Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a 'AAA' rating and with 'AAA' rated sovereign peers""
I agree, Obama is the worst President since Ronald Reagan!
This ride scares me. I wanna get off.
If the US government was a family, it would deeply mourn the loss of 31 brave souls in Afghanistan today. Heartbreaking. May they rest in peace and may their loved ones be comforted.
And if that worthless son of bitch of a failed president plays another round of golf, he should rot in hell and never find peace. The sooner the better.
Not so Casual..are you serious? "Clinton pushed the ledger in 2001" BUT you want to give all the credit to Obama for the mess Bush handed to him? Let's not forget TARP and ARRA were efforts to clean up the Bush economy. Tarp was passed under Bush. That is what the Dent/Ohare graph presented last week was so misleading. FactCheck previously discounted some of the assumptions made in that thread.
I am convinced the GOP House allowed the economy to suffer through "Political Brinkmanship" for political gain. Every time there are signs of positive news and job gains, they are right there to provide gridlock and create more uncertainty on Wall Street that Stagnates the recovery.
I like the family analogy. It does help put things in perspective. I think another line or two should be added about the rich uncle who also lives in the household and practically stays in the house for free. His income would be about $200,000 a year and yet he contributes only about $2000 toward yearly household expenses. He convinces others in the household that everyone in the household will benefit from his low contribution. He argues that this will enable him to spread his wealth through the other housemates doing odd jobs around the house for him, meanwhile he hires the poorer neighbor kids to do the work. When the creditors come knocking he argues that the others are probably eating too much and perhaps Gramps, Granny, and the handicapped sibling need to be cut back on their allowance for survival. In the end, if the house does collapse due to lack of maintenance, rest assured our wealthy uncle will be moving to a new home down the block (where most of his assets are stored anyway.)
Actually the US government's budget is not anything like a family budget.
Ladies and gentlemen
Need I remind you that we the people are in charge of what happens in this nation. We elect the people we have in office. We tell them what they can do and not do. We tell them what powers we will allow them. We are a democratic republic that puts us in charge. We fail to vote. We fail to work in political campaigns. We fail to run for office. Everyone of us looks at us every day in the mirror and ask oursevles what are we going to do to change the political. Some will find courage others will lay down and play dead.If you need courage for this I suggest you read the lives of the Founders and how many of those men gave everything and I do mean everything for this nation.
Jon
One of the reaons your scholar had to spend so much on his education was because of your favorite idea, inflation. Our tax dollars support astronomical salaries for professors who are pretty much left-wing liberals who believe in more inflation. What a racket that is. American families who fail to stop and see what is going on in their world because they are too busy earning the money to pay off the home with more inflated dollars, are to weary to look at what causes the high prices and taxes. Nasty circle of pain to be in.
geeting, the US government is in fact subject to the same economic truths as any family. To use the large spending power of the government to shape policy was never the intent of the founders and always AlWAYS has unintended consequences. If you believe that the wise people who control this spending are doing this for our own good, well, that's been tried, and failed on a grand scale more than once.
News broadcasted this morning says the helicoper carrying the 31 remarkable Americans was very old; perhaps from the VietNam era and the thought of carrying 31 at one time was not the norm. How utterly heartbreaking for the families and all of us.
Another problem is that the people who determine the country's monetary policy are the politically appointed members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and each of the 12 Federal reserve bank presidents.They are not elected and can serve 14 years in one appointed term. You can look them up at federalreserve.gov. Their qualifications are "professors" of economics with very little real world experience in the nuts and bolts of financial management. Basically, these people need a graph analysis to boil water.
Trish
Word up with that.
“My projection is negative. But Treasurys are still safe. The U.S. can pay any debt it has because it always can print more money.”
Alan Greenspan (quoted on 8/7/2011 on moneynews.com)
Trish
So I guess the only "predictions" Bernie will not censor are those from the teabaggers, how quaint.
that actually sounds like a lot of American families.
what Dave leaves out: This "family" could easily increase its current income by about $20,000-$25,000 but one of the adults in the household refuses to go out and get a job. Instead, that adult wants the kids to skip lunch every day and wants grandma to pay more of the household expenses from her fixed income.
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