Dear Mr. President, I read your New Era $3.6 Trillion Budget Proposal. I also listened to your speech Tuesday night. You made a great campaign speech. However, the campaign is over. You won. And the reason you won is you offered hope as well as a promise of change.

With all due respect Mr. President, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are offering the same policies as President Bush and Secretary Paulson. Those policies are to bail out banks regardless of cost to taxpayers. Mr. President, it’s hard enough to overlook Geithner’s tax indiscretions. Mr. President, it is harder still. if not impossible, to ignore the fact that neither Geithner nor Bernanke saw this coming. Yet amazingly they are both cock sure of the solution. Even more amazing is the fact that solution changes every day.

With all due respect Mr. President, Geithner and Bernanke are a huge part of the problem, and no part of the solution and the sooner you realize that the better off this nation will be.

With all due respect Mr. President, your budget proposal is the same big government spending as we saw under President Bush. The only difference is you promised more spending and bigger government, while President Bush promised less government and less spending and failed to deliver on either count.

With all due respect Mr. President, it is impossible to spend one’s way out of a problem, when the problem is reckless spending.

With all due respect Mr. President, you and Congress want to force banks to lend when banks (by not lending) are acting responsibly for the first time in a decade. Mr, President can you please tell us who banks are supposed to lend to? Do we need any more Home Depots? Pizza Huts? Strip malls? Nail salons? Auto dealerships? What Mr. President? What? And why should banks be lending when unemployment is rising and lending risks right along with it?

With all due respect Mr. President, we were hoping your administration would not carry on the war mongering policies of your predecessor. Instead we see amazingly that you Seek $75.5 Billion More for Wars in 2009. Mr. President, do we really need another $75 billion for wars? Was there nothing in the military budget that could be cut?

With all due respect Mr. President, The United States spends more on its military budget than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined; The United States accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending; The United States spends on its military 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and 98.6 times more than Iran. Isn’t that enough Mr. President?

With all due respect Mr. President, the downfall of every great nation in history has been unsustainable military expansion. Mr. President, the US can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman. You act as if we can. Mr. President, can you please tell us how we can afford this spending?

With all due respect Mr. President, Fannie Mae Reported A Fourth Quarter Loss Of $25.2 Billion. Can you please tell us where you draw the line on taxpayer bailouts of Fannie Mae? Freddie Mac? AIG? Mr. President is there a line anywhere, on anything? If there is, we would appreciate knowing where it is.

With all due respect Mr. President, how can you talk about reducing the budget deficit while proposing the biggest budget in history?

With all due respect Mr. President, how is it possible to talk about reducing health care costs while proposing to increase the health care budget?

With all due respect Mr. President, you have talked about “hard choices”. Can you please tell us what hard choices you have made other than to throw money at every problem? Sure a few programs have changed but Bush orchestrated the biggest Medicaid/Medicare package in history and you upped it. You upped military spending. You criticized McCain for cutting programs that amount to peanuts, and all you can find to cut out of the budget is peanuts.

With all due respect Mr. President, your “Era of New Responsibility” is nothing more than a continuation of the Bush administration Era of Irresponsibility. Mr. President, we hoped for more and deserved more. Yet, behind the charade of campaign messages of hope and change, we essentially see the same fiscal irresponsibility and misguided policies as before. Oh sure Mr. President, your budget priorities have shifted a bit, sadly the irresponsible spending did not.

I would have left out all the “with all due respects.” The man isn’t due any respect. No point in implying he is. You need to show some respect first and his actions have shown us he does not respect us or our family or the future generations.

Related posts:

1. President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank advocates global bank framework
2. $490 billion
3. Rather scary propositions

Things are looking pretty bleak. There is bad news in housing, the stock market, commercial real estate, jobs, and wages . Unfortunately, no matter how bad things are, someone always comes along to propose a “solution” that is guaranteed to make the situation much worse. Please consider the following ideas.

Punish savers and make them spend money: Near-zero interest rates and even a tax on bank deposits are necessary to force those with cash to use it productively

Assuming interest rates are reduced to about 1 per cent today, it will make little difference to savers if they fall all the way to zero. To all intents and purposes, income from bank accounts will be reduced to nil.

The next logical step, although it may be politically controversial, would be to do the opposite of what the Tories suggest. Instead of reducing taxes on interest payments, the Government could tax all bank deposits and other risk-free savings. This would create a negative risk-free interest rate, encouraging savers either to invest in property, shares and other productive assets – or simply to save less and consume more. In either case, the result would be more consumption and physical investment, less unemployment and faster recovery from the slump.

The Case for Bigger Government

Thirty years ago, Americans were told that government was part of the problem, not the solution. We bet on the magic of the marketplace, but the magic proved illusory. Every major part of the economy – health care, energy, transportation, food and finance – is deeply troubled. Now we are ready to invite government back in to help solve our problems, if the price is right and the strategies are convincing. By spending more through government and treating government as a partner rather than an enemy of the private sector, we can potentially save vast sums in the long run through a more efficient health-care system, safer climate, more competitive economy and more secure country.

A big difference between the U.S. and the rest of the rich world is that for the past 30 years or so, Americans consistently rejected “government solutions” to the problems of health, poverty, education and the environment.

What Hath Big Government Wrought?

• It was big government that brought us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• It was big government that sponsored the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq.
• It was big government that gave us nightmare problems we face with Medicaid and Medicare.
• It was big government that gave us overlapping hundred billion dollar systems in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
• It is big government that sponsored 10’s of thousands of pork barrel projects and bridges to nowhere.
• It is big government that gave us the Davis Bacon Act and the insanity pf prevailing wages.
• It was big government sponsorship of the rating agencies that created the “AAA” rated securities that went to zero.
• It was big government that took us off the gold standard and illegally confiscated citizen’s money.
• It was big government that allowed fractional reserve lending and theft by inflation this is the root cause of a shrinking middle class today.
• It was big government that created the Fed, and it was the Greenspan Fed that blew serial bubble after bubble culminating in the housing crash we are in today.

Big government either created or made worse every problem we have today. Yet Time Magazine and free lunch proponents like Krugman propose an even bigger government is necessary to fix the enormous problems of an already too big government.

I’d like to add that the idea that “Americans consistently rejected “government solutions” to the problems of health, poverty, education and the environment” is completely fallacious and ridiculous. Medicare, medicaid, the war on poverty, from little or no federal involvement to No Child Left Behind, huge federal college subsidies, the increase of scope and power of the EPA, etc. Just because Americans didn’t jump on board as quickly as other socialist / fascist States doesn’t mean such ideas were rejected.

Related posts:

1. With all due respect?
2. Goldman Sachs Chief U.S. Economist: turn on the printing press!!
3. Slowdown could have been avoided says idiot economist

Now that Hillary Rodham Clinton has conceded the Democratic contest, we are faced with the prospect of another round of boring, scripted party conventions.

The only sign of life is the alternative convention scheduled for September in St. Paul by Ron Paul. The losing candidate for the Republican nomination has hired a hall so he can put on a show for the libertarian wing of the party as the big GOP show goes on nearby.

This promises to be fun. But it would be more fun if the Republicans had simply given the Texas congressman a speaking role at the convention and thereby brought his supporters into the fold. John McCain certainly needs them in what promises to be a close election. But why doesn’t he want them?

The answer may offer an insight into the senator’s soul. A lot of people have been psychoanalyzing McCain recently. So let me analyze him from this angle.

I have always been a big fan of Barry Goldwater, the late Arizona senator whose Senate seat McCain now occupies. And McCain has always claimed Goldwater as his mentor. Yet philosophically, it is Paul and not McCain who is closer to the ideas of Goldwater, who despised the Beltway crowd and believed the federal government should be scaled back to 19th-century levels. The big difference between Goldwater and Paul is that Goldwater could win nationally — at least in GOP primary races.

As for general elections, Goldwater didn’t do so hot. In 1964, he lost the presidential race to Lyndon Johnson in the biggest landslide in history. So on a practical basis, it’s easy to understand why his successor in the Senate might not want to be his successor in policy.That successor is clearly Paul, at least in the judgment of Barry Goldwater Jr. That former congressman and son of the great man endorsed Paul for president, saying that he “stands above all of the other candidates in his commitment to liberty and to America.”

You can see the conflict. On the one hand, McCain claims Goldwater as his political mentor. On the other hand, he is openly hostile to the man who most closely mirrors his mentor’s legacy.

During the primary debates, McCain went out of his way to pick fights with Paul. The subject was the Iraq war. Paul has espoused the traditional conservative stance of non-interventionism. McCain has taken the neoconservative view that the United States should continue its nation-building exercise in Iraq indefinitely.

In the runup to the war, Paul correctly predicted a quagmire. McCain predicted the war would be over “in three weeks.” So a bit of humility might have been in order. Instead, a sneering McCain said of his Republican rival’s stance that “that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.”

No, “we” didn’t. It would require a complete misreading of history to make such a remark. And McCain’s the man to do so. In one of the endless series of auto-hagiographies that he cranks out, McCain let it be known that his favorite book is “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an Ernest Hemingway novel about the Spanish Civil War. His fictional ideal is Robert Jordan, the hero who blows up a bridge in Spain on behalf of the Communist side before getting capped by the capitalists.

McCain’s hero, in other words, is an American who got himself involved in a war in a foreign country whose language and culture he failed to understand. It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for McCain’s views on Iraq. In his reply to McCain during that debate, Paul pointed out that the U.S. had once been allied with both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. “Who are our friends one day turn out to be our enemies,” he noted.

This is inarguable. Yet McCain has to this day not given the slightest indication that he is aware of just who the enemy is in Iraq. And he has continued making sneering remarks about the man who is most like his mentor. It may indeed be true that such Goldwater-Paul stances as opposition to Social Security and Medicare are not exactly winning positions at the polls. But McCain’s sneer is the sneer of the inside-the-Beltway establishment. His connection to Goldwater’s home state consists mainly of having hooked up with an heiress from Arizona.

Does the man have some sort of deep-seated anxieties regarding a father figure? If so, someone should tell him to keep these anxieties to himself, at least until November. Or at least that’s what I’d tell him if I were his adviser — or his psychoanalyst.

I like the first comment.

“Ron Paul is the most honest man in Congress” – John McCain

Related posts:

1. McCain looking for Paul’s backing
2. RNC Results
3. McCain wins Bay State Ron Paul backers

Fisher begins by recalling a speech made by the longest reigning Fed Chairman, William McChesney Martin (April 2, 1951 to January 31, 1970, or 19 years and 5 presidents!) at Columbia University some forty-three years ago:

The opening lines of that Columbia address were as follows: “When economic prospects are at their brightest, the dangers of complacency and recklessness are greatest. As our prosperity proceeds on its record-breaking path, it behooves every one of us to scan the horizon of our national and international economy for danger signals so as to be ready for any storm.”

Fast forward to today, and Fisher believes that we have “fallen victim to the complacency and recklessness Martin warned against.” [snip parts absolving the Fed / we're not here to debate present Fed policy tonight disclaimer]

In keeping with Bill Martin’s advice, I have been scanning the horizon for danger signals even as we continue working to recover from the recent turmoil. In the distance, I see a frightful storm brewing in the form of untethered government debt. I choose the words-”frightful storm”-deliberately to avoid hyperbole. Unless we take steps to deal with it, the long-term fiscal situation of the federal government will be unimaginably more devastating to our economic prosperity than the subprime debacle and the recent debauching of credit markets that we are now working so hard to correct.

You might wonder why a central banker would be concerned with fiscal matters. Fiscal policy is, after all, the responsibility of the Congress, not the Federal Reserve. Congress, and Congress alone, has the power to tax and spend. From this monetary policymaker’s point of view, though, deficits matter for what we do at the Fed. There are many reasons why. Economists have found that structural deficits raise long-run interest rates, complicating the Fed’s dual mandate to develop a monetary policy that promotes sustainable, noninflationary growth. The even more disturbing dark and dirty secret about deficits-especially when they careen out of control-is that they create political pressure on central bankers to adopt looser monetary policy down the road. I will return to that shortly. First, let me give you the unvarnished facts of our nation’s fiscal predicament.

Fisher explains the brief budget surplus from the late ’90s, and subsequent return to budget deficits. Anyone smart enough to question the current administration’s dodgy math will quickly find that they’ve cooked the books. Less rose-tinted figures reveal that the deficit is here to stay, but it gets even worse. [snip typical complaint about Social Security's insolvency.]

The good news is this Social Security shortfall might be manageable. While the issues regarding Social Security reform are complex, it is at least possible to imagine how Congress might find, within a $14 trillion economy, ways to wrestle with a $13 trillion unfunded liability. The bad news is that Social Security is the lesser of our entitlement worries. It is but the tip of the unfunded liability iceberg. The much bigger concern is Medicare, a program established in 1965, the same prosperous year that Bill Martin cautioned his Columbia University audience to be wary of complacency and storms on the horizon…

The infinite-horizon present discounted value of the unfunded liability for Medicare A is $34.4 trillion. The unfunded liability of Medicare B is an additional $34 trillion. The shortfall for Medicare D adds another $17.2 trillion. The total? If you wanted to cover the unfunded liability of all three programs today, you would be stuck with an $85.6 trillion bill. That is more than six times as large as the bill for Social Security. It is more than six times the annual output of the entire U.S. economy…

Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon…

I want to remind you that I am only talking about the unfunded portions of Social Security and Medicare.

Awesome. 8-O Bile’s Gross National Debt ticker on the right hand side pales in comparison. So why is the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas talking about government sponsored entitlement programs anyway?

Now that you are all thoroughly depressed, let me come back to monetary policy and the Fed.

It is only natural to cast about for a solution-any solution-to avoid the fiscal pain we know is necessary because we succumbed to complacency and put off dealing with this looming fiscal disaster. Throughout history, many nations, when confronted by sizable debts they were unable or unwilling to repay, have seized upon an apparently painless solution to this dilemma: monetization. Just have the monetary authority run cash off the printing presses until the debt is repaid, the story goes, then promise to be responsible from that point on and hope your sins will be forgiven by God and Milton Friedman and everyone else.

We know from centuries of evidence in countless economies, from ancient Rome to today’s Zimbabwe, that running the printing press to pay off today’s bills leads to much worse problems later on. The inflation that results from the flood of money into the economy turns out to be far worse than the fiscal pain those countries hoped to avoid.

Earlier I mentioned the Fed’s dual mandate to manage growth and inflation. In the long run, growth cannot be sustained if markets are undermined by inflation. Stable prices go hand in hand with achieving sustainable economic growth. I have said many, many times that inflation is a sinister beast that, if uncaged, devours savings, erodes consumers’ purchasing power, decimates returns on capital, undermines the reliability of financial accounting, distracts the attention of corporate management, undercuts employment growth and real wages, and debases the currency.

Purging rampant inflation and a debased currency requires administering a harsh medicine. We have been there, and we know the cure that was wrought by the FOMC under Paul Volcker. Even the perception that the Fed is pursuing a cheap-money strategy to accommodate fiscal burdens, should it take root, is a paramount risk to the long-term welfare of the U.S. economy. The Federal Reserve will never let this happen. It is not an option. Ever. Period.

[snip political call to arms and placement of the blame on the voters at large.]

After reading what Richer Fisher had to say, a few questions spring to mind: Haven’t Americans already assumed the Federal Reserve to be pursuing “a cheap-money strategy” by lower rates? Is Fisher simply deflecting criticism of the Fed by tattling on Congress? He throws some strong words out there, promising harsh medicine from the Fed, but really what can they do if Congress is hell bent on destroying our currency? (These words seem toothless after his desperate plea for a political fix at the end.) Tougher question — what politician is going to willingly cut these programs?

Related posts:

1. Slowdown could have been avoided says idiot economist
2. Entitlement Mentality
3. Not all Fox News employees economically retarded

Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it’s going to result in a more costly government … police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What’s the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say “yes, we shouldn’t be funding that stuff.” But what you’ve done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.

I think this guy needs a lesson in libertarianism and for that matter Republicanism. Perhaps a few quotes from a man he espoused to be like, Ronald Reagen, would point him in the right direction. Or maybe he could have paid attention when in the debates with Ron Paul.

Related posts:

1. Another ignorant socialist attacks libertarianism
2. Another positive interpretation of Super Tuesday
3. On the Huckabee vs. Paul tit-for-tat on Iraq

Time to listen to Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the lone voice of reason in Congress today who’s got to feel like he’s shouting into a field of cotton with his repeated warnings about the dangers of a collapsing dollar, while the administration goes AWOL on the problem.

The dollar just hit a record intraday low against the euro on reports that consumer confidence levels have dropped to levels not seen since the post-Watergate era. It is down 7% year to date against the Chinese renminbi, it’s weaker than the Japanese yen and the Canadian loonie.

The joke is the greenback is now only stronger than the Mexican pesos and the Zimbabwe dollar, an overstatement for dramatic effect, to be sure.But since hitting a peak in 2002, the dollar has lost about a quarter of its value against a trade weighted basket of currencies.

A weak dollar acts as an anvil around the neck of the US economy and consumers. Rising inflation is essentially a tax on consumers, so are rising energy prices, and that double whammy threatens to undermine the purchasing power of the rebate checks due out in May–backed by printing even more dollars.

A bellwether event of significant import to our nation’s finances happened this past January 1 with little notice. That’s the day the first baby boomer was allowed to retire. A new federal report wearily warns once again for the umpteenth time that the nation faces some $60t in Social Security and Medicare unfunded liabilities alone.

We’ve heard time and again conservatives say deficits don’t matter. To say that deficits don’t matter is like saying ketchup is a vegetable or trees cause pollution.

This article is almost too positive. If she’s so in agreement with Paul’s economic position or at least parts of it then why haven’t I seen more of him on her programs?

Related posts:

1. Liberty Dollar employees arrested by FBI
2. Ron Paul introduces the Free Competition in Currency Act
3. Fed President Warns of Frightful Storm on the Horizon

Total percentage of AGI: 33.7628%

Total days spent explicitly for the government: 123.315993

This obviously doesn’t include the matching Social Security funds my employer pays, property taxes I pay indirectly through my landlord, NJ sales tax, state and federal gas taxes, import and export taxes, corporate income taxes, etc.

Related posts:

1. Bush does not support bailing out foreclosuring homeowners
2. New Jersey General Election : 2007/11/06
3. Ron Paul Tea Party 2007 results

If you forgot to get a Christmas present for Charlie Rangel, don’t worry. The congressman picked one out for himself, and he’s sending you the bill: $2 million for a shiny new Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College.

The New York Democrat’s Monument to Me was one of about 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved before going on vacation. Most represented a more subtle form of self-aggrandizement, aimed at maintaining power and prestige by currying favor with voters.

According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total cost of the 11,000 or so earmarks in the omnibus bill and an earlier defense bill is about $14 billion, which is not much in the context of a $2.8 trillion federal budget. But the same tendency that explains the persistence of earmarks — the habit of staying popular by pretending your constituents can get something for nothing — also explains the failure to address the federal government’s increasingly dire fiscal predicament.

The root of that predicament is not earmarks, which represent less than 1 percent of federal spending. Nor is it the war in Iraq, which at $100 billion or so a year accounts for less than 4 percent.

So-called entitlement programs are the reason “America faces escalating deficit levels and debt burdens that could swamp our ship of state,” as Comptroller General David Walker put it in a recent speech. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 40 percent of federal spending and are expected to consume 51 percent in a decade.

I wasn’t going to post this story originally. While I believe his $100 billion Iraq figure is disingenuous given that there is also other military discretionary and non-discretionary spending. Totaling just shy of $700 billion for 2007. Regardless he makes very important points but they are fairly well known. The reason I had to post this is because of one of the comments. Comment #2 from Charles in Ohio:

We need to raise taxes, bust up corporations, mandate living wages for workers, and cap salaries for executives. We need a one child policy to prevent overpopulation, send more money to public schools, and oversee a total dismantling of the military.

What Democrat will do that? Any?

It’s time this country realized that the way to pay for all these illegal wars by an unelected president is to tax at 100% levels any rich person, that is, anyone making over $100,000 per year. Then we end the wars, tax corporations at historically high levels to erase the deficit, nationalize health care and ban all private medical practice forever.

The government is the solution and must provide basic needs to all Americans. That is FAIR! Watching retired generals and former defense contractors show up in welfare lines is FAIR because of all they stole from the poor.

Which Democrat will do that? Any?

Will any Democrat dare do what is FAIR and start taxing by race and gender? Blacks, Latinos, women, and gays should be given tax breaks and rich white men’s taxes should be raised to pay for those breaks and that is FAIR!

Will any Democrat do this?

At first I thought it was your average egalitarian socialist but Charles goes a whole lot further. I wish he would have told us who will do what he proposes.

Related posts:

1. Bush signs $555 billion spending bill
2. $8 billion of pork in transportation bill
3. CAGW’s 2008 Pig Book released

There has been some good analysis of this week’s much-hyped agreement between the U.S. Treasury Department – which facilitated the meeting, we are told, but didn’t use any form of coercion – and mortgage lenders to bail out assist homeowners in danger of being slammed with a much higher monthly payment on their subprime mortgage come January. But there are some elements of the deal that haven’t been greeted with much skepticism – or, indeed, haven’t been reported much at all.

When the market started to melt down a few weeks ago one firm released a statement about their multi-billion dollar write off to the affect: “In the financial field you have to make calculated risks… and this time we lost.” It infuriated me. These people knew damn well that what they were doing was extremely risky and there was a very high chance of failure. As the first article cited in the above there are NINJA loans. Now while that may sound really cool (unless you are a pirate supporter) it’s really an amazingly stupid business transaction. NINJA stands for “No Income, No Job or Assets.” A hobo who’d taken a shower could have gotten a loan for a few hundred thousand dollars and the lender wouldn’t have bothered to even check if any of the info provided was accurate. Why would these otherwise reasonable businesses take such great risk?

Because of the corporate nanny state. For nearly 100 years the Federal Reserve has been the lender of last resort, the link between government debt and the banking system and the controller of interest rates. These all distort the market and redistribute wealth. Wall Street knew that all these risks could ultimately be pawned off. Sure they may take a hit but by lowering interest rates and inflating the money supply the contraction and resulting deflation that should be happening… and needs to happen… will be pushed out into the future. Perhaps the biggest issue here is the obviousness of the corporate bailout. This can only add to the existing deflated risk by allowing investors to believe the government will so easily provide a way out when they dig themselves a hole. Reminds me of the suspension of specie payments enacted by the federal government throughout our history. The banks didn’t have the specie on hand to cover the redemption requests so the government allowed for the redemption contract that is a paper bank note to be postponed.

So now we have this secondary bailout. This time by the federal government on behalf of those debtors who are at risk of defaulting on their loan. While they claim it won’t cost tax payers money… this CATO article shows how that could change. Worse than that however is that the government will now be seen by the public as the great protector when they make poor investments in housing too. It creates a moral hazard and will only lead to more bad investments and dependency. Also the stepping in to request contracts be rewritten is an affront to contract law. Down the road this disrespect will only worsen. This nanny state response will be thrown on the stack of other ’safety nets’ like SSI, Medicare, etc. and become an expected role of government. Seems to me the next step is more explicit government  subsidies for the average individual looking to own a home and after that government granted or guaranteed homes.

Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this is a bad idea. Also Dick Army of FreedomWorks can be seen arguing Hillary Clinton’s plan on CNBC.

While I have money invested in the market and would rather not lose a large chunk of it to this adjustment, it needs to happen. We have a couple hundred years of evidence showing how the distortion of the market creates these problems and more government interference almost always results in more.  When will they learn? Perhaps Rothbard’s A History of Money and Banking in the United States should be required reading for members of our government.

Related posts:

1. Government subprime bailout
2. Bush does not support bailing out foreclosuring homeowners
3. The Free Market Fails

President Bush said Thursday concern should be shown those who’ve lost their homes but it’s not the federal government’s job to bail them out.

“Obviously anybody who loses their home is somebody with whom we must show an enormous empathy,” Bush said. Asked whether he would champion a government bailout, Bush responded: “If you mean direct grants to homeowners, the answer would be `No, I don’t support that.’”

A Treasury Department study, released earlier this year, showed the federal corporate tax rate could be cut from 35 percent to 27 percent with the same amount of revenue collected if a number of corporate tax breaks were eliminated, thereby broadening the tax base.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., called Bush’s interest in a corporate tax cut irresponsible given the government’s rising debt. “It’s hard to make a case that large U.S. corporations are paying too much in income taxes,” Dorgan said.

It’s irresponsible to tax companies and individuals into the poorhouse. It’s irresponsible to have a rising government debt. Senator Dorgan is part of the problem. The president doesn’t allocate money and tax the public, Congress does. If he doesn’t want the government to be in debt he can lobby his fellow representatives to get rid of nanny state social programs and vote to stop funding the unconstitutional war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hard to make a case that US corps are paying too much? They pay taxes on their income… then they are forced to withhold taxes from that when they pay their employees. They are forced to match the 7.5% they take from their employees wages for SSI and Medicare. End the income tax, end all unfair unappropriated direct taxes. If they need an income source to make up for the current income taxes (which make up 1/3ish of their income) than they can impliment something like the FairTax.

Related posts:

1. Bush signs $555 billion spending bill
2. Random bill roundup
3. Government subprime bailout