The Republicans know something needs to be done but don’t like all the pork in the current bill. Of course, not a one of them added anything even remotely like pork to it. That would be hypocritical. They also don’t want the bankers to starve by capping them at a paltry 10x what the average family makes, assuming they still have a job at all. Some banks are ready to pay back the money they got last fall so as to prevent this, but oddly, may not be allowed to do so.
Do you approve of Obama’s plan? What if all the pork were stripped from the current bill? Would you then support it?
If not Obama’s plan, with or without pork, then what? With jobs disappearing at a staggering rate, something needs to be done fast.
Oh, by the way, Paulson is accused of lying when setting up TARP. Just can’t trust anyone with a billion dollars these days.
Did anyone catch just exactly where this speech was given?
Obama, speaking to about 200 House Democrats at their annual retreat at the Kingsmill Resort and Spa…..
What’s wrong with that picture?
We need to keep American jobs from going over seas. Best way to do that is to convince consumers that price is not everything. Its about buying products that produce jobs here.
We also need to educate Americans on how to manage credit. People have spent their way into a recession for many cycles now. Each time credit is more of a issue because it becomes more of our spending. Maybe our government should stop thinking we are going to get back to the same levels of spending that we were at. Its not possible for Americans to keep up without many going into debt. Some business such as auto manufactures will simple have to shrink or go out of business. We should not keep propping up companies that can’t adjust output fast enough or make products that consumers somewhere in the world want. This is protectionism at its worst. Sorry UAW but your losing jobs because wages and especially benefits are not in line with the rest of the industry. Having a job with a bit less pay and benefits is better then sitting in the unemployment office isn’t it? Our government should sidestep bailing out banks and just do loans on their own to people who have good credit and a job. Let them buy cars and homes. Give them low interest loans for extended periods to lower payments.
Quit trying to create short term jobs that do very little to stimulate long term employment. The payoff is too little. Instead give businesses credits for every American job created. Provide tax breaks to consumers who buy American products. You cannot create jobs immediately but you can build the future for good jobs that last and help people change their lifestyles of over spending and maintain reasonable spending periods that prevent severe recessions.
Why isn’t this easy… it’s a capitalistic country right? Why are we bailing out big business? These people f’d up and and got greedy… Let them pay for their mistakes. What about if the bank goes under the debt goes with it… so all the people in the houses they can’t afford suddenly own them free and clear. 🙂 Seems like they would then have some money to spend elsewhere.. I know this is way simplistic but it sounds sooooo good.
Add up all the pork complained about it’s about 1% of the Senate proposal. Most already withdrawn.
All we’re witnessing is pundits trying to make political hay, political hacks trying to protect policies that have failed for decades. Mostly reactionaries with safe seats in redneck precincts.
Fact remains that traditional conservative Republicans in swing districts who want to keep their seats will have to work with Dems once the photo ops are over.
Lameo McCain’s proposal for example didn’t last 6 hours on the floor. Why even waste TV time on his blather?
But, you all have read the details of the proposals haven’t you?
1. Eliminate the personal and corporate income tax.
5.Eliminate the DEA and the SEC
6.Cut the Pentagon budget in half.
7.Eliminate the Department of Education.
8.Cancel all the pending “stimulus” and other bailout packages.
9.Allow unrestricted immigration so long as the incoming folks had a secure job
10.Abolish the minimum wage.
from: http://mises.org/story/3316
one man’s pork is another man’s poison
Obama could have just had Senate Democrats agree to Republican spending cuts. Cutting out one hundred or two hundred billion and he has 80% of his stimulus while Republicans look foolish still opposing it.
SHORT TERM:
Simply put — the “demand” side of capitalism has failed. (thank you, Reagan conservatives!)
So, the government needs to step in and be a consumer before our dysfunctional capitalism becomes irreversible..
But what to spend on? Infrastructure. Infrastructure. Infrastructure.
Stuff that we’ll use for years. Contracts should be given to non-international corporations that are totally 100% American — headquarters, workforce and products.
LONG TERM?
BRING BACK THE MIDDLE CLASS!
The fewer super-poor and super-rich, the better our economy becomes.
So this means repealing Reaganomics and returning to traditional American values and economics.
Is there really anything wrong with the economy? It’s shrinking because the practice of shopping as recreation has dramatically shrunk. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. We need new industries to build a new economy that isn’t so reliant on conspicuous consumption. Simply propping up the old model isn’t going to get us very far. I personally think we should focus on clean energy for example. Create manufacturing jobs building wind, solar, tidal, battery and geo-thermal, components and construction jobs deploying them.
The reason we are here is that investors stopped lending money to the banks because of the revelation of huge industry-wide fraud in July 2007. Ironically, only government can fix this by enforcing the law and lending the industry some legitimacy. To-date, because government is enslaved to the financial industry, it has done nothing but try to support its attempts to shift losses onto the taxpayer and support its accounting games.
The top ten US banks are all insolvent. They should be liquidated, or go throw a cramdown bankruptcy that wipes out management, shareholders, and leaves the debtholders with equity, while protecting depositors through the FDIC. If you want to spend some government money on this, create some new banks or better yet give money to healthy banks.
The SEC should be cleaned out, CDS regulated as an insurance product, institutional leverage restricted to 12:1 or less, mark-to-market accounting enforced, the sillier accounting tricks outlawed (off balance sheet entities, counting market declines in your own debt as revenue), and the government-sponsored ratings agencies should either be nationalized or opened up to competition.
Then, and only then, will investors come back to the banks. It will probably happen eventually, but apparently they want to try bankrupting the US government first.
Obama needs to begin talking about regulations for banks and the food industry. There is no reason for bankster’s salaries to be at millions of dollars per year when banking is obviously an industry that should be carefully regulated.
Are people really that shortsighted that they don’t understand that excessive government debt spending at best fills in today’s hole by packing it with material from a bigger hole from the future?
Nothing is going to work until the US banks are straightened out (again). The bad debt has to go off the books, insolvent banks closed, and healthy banks made solvent.
You can cut or increase government spending, cap salaries, do stimulus packages, or neuter your dog. If the banks aren’t working then nothing else matters.
>> The Republicans know something needs to be done but don’t like all the pork in the current bill.
Republicans don’t like pork?
This needs a BS meter, with the needle pegged and bent on the red-line.
>> QB said, on February 6th, 2009 at 8:26 am
>> If the banks aren’t working then nothing else matters.
You’ve bought into the conservative BS about capitlalism.
Banks need to work because they fund supply
But without demand, capitalism fails.
That’s why the middle class, earning a living wage, made America great.
Not banks.
Tax consumption, not income. Problem solved.
Republicans do not like pork means they do not like THIS pork.
And what difference does this all make? The Democrats have enough votes to vote in anything they want. What is the fuss? Why is there this debate? Why is Obama grandstanding?? What’s the point?
16,
Obama is a uniter, not a divider… oh.. wait.
#13: That line was meant as satire.
Eliminate the capital gains tax.
Eliminate the AMT.
or eliminate income taxes altogether and institute a VAT.
#8 – Greg,
Well said!!
#15 – green,
It’s an excellent idea. I doubt it will get much support though, here in the home of the consumerist religion.
#19 – Alfred1,
The barriers to the U.S. being the number one supplier of gas and oil have a lot more to do with geology than with politics.
Oil: http://tinyurl.com/dhezuo
Gas (see figure 44 on this page): http://tinyurl.com/2t7wl6
Of course, we can’t be any kind of a supplier of either as long as we are the number one consumer and have far from the number one reserves.
If you think the U.S. should be the number one supplier of energy, however, there we’d be in agreement. If we’d just acknowledge that there is a huge new industry in renewable energy and that we could try to catch up to the other countries that are already in the lead and then maybe even surpass them, then our future would be very bright (so to speak) indeed.
Let it all collapse. When the dust settles, figure out who’s still breathing and build it up from there.
We’ve obviously forgotten everything our grandparents told us about the depression. It’s time we learned again.
eliminate corporate welfare and let unsuccessful businesses fail. Yes it would suck in the short term but propping up companies that are losing money isn’t helping things in the long term. Maybe the car companies don’t need to have half a dozen brands each with each making a dozen different models. Maybe we should stop pretending that people who invest money in a company are more important than the people who spend their lives working for that company. Revise intellectual property laws so that the people who come up with ideas actually profit from them and not companies and not the grandchildren of the creative ones.
# 20 bill said, “or eliminate income taxes altogether and institute a VAT.”
As soon as you pull the gov’t ability to directly reach into each citizens pocket book, you take away control of people. Good luck with that. Name one party that wants individuals to have more power over their own life.
Support HR 833, Abolish the Federal Reserve. Everything else is built from this scam and wouldn’t be able to continue.
#26 You beat me to it. Ya, get your money system out of the private hands of the Federal Reserve.
What I am hearing from most of you, I agree with. Government needs to be smaller, all of it. I am a big supporter of the military, but most of our overseas bases should be either closed, or turned into refueling stations. Europe is big enough that it can support its own military without our help, and South Korea should be taking care of itself too. Japan we are obligated by treaty to protect them, so we can’t easily get out of their.
But make no mistake we need to cut back social services too. Welfare, Education, ect. Should be the responsibility of the states. If the people of that state believe they need welfare, they should be able to enact it on the state level. In short, decentralize government. The feds have way, way too much power over our individual lives. Much of that power should be at the state level.
I have much, more influence with the people of my state capital than I do with the people in Washington DC.
# 26 Aaron said, “Support HR 833, Abolish the Federal Reserve. Everything else is built from this scam and wouldn’t be able to continue.”
This will fall of deaf ears here. The VAST majority of posters on this blog are clueless about this issue. Most think the Fed is a gov’t agency that answers to the Congress. Fools.
#25 – Alfred1,
Greetings Misantropic [sic] Scott
In the real world we are sitting on some of the largest deposits of oil and gas known to man…
And there is lots more in the ocean.
Oil is biodegradable…a natural product made by the earth recycling sunshine and other natural elements…
It truly is a blessing from God…
I don’t really know how to respond to this. I don’t usually endorse this type of reply. I’m going to have to say it anyway though.
Here’s your sign.
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/773341/3302294
A biodegradable blessing from god … that’s truly a new one on me.
Care to provide a link for any of that crap? Care to tell it to the birds, seals, and otters in Valdez? Care to explain why turning over a rock anywhere near Valdez still smells like a gas station?
Nevermind. Just remember to wear your sign.
Tax the rich, feed the poor.
Cut the military and police budgets, give more to infrastructure and social programs.
Let’s have a maximum income level, as well as a minimum wage that a family can live on.
Screw these rich bass turds. They only screw the rest of us, given the chance.