patrick.net

How about creating taxpayers for revenue instead of reinflating the housing bubble?

In another thread glad we came to the conclusion Zombies are real and are running Washington D.C.

Brainless, dead flesh, incapable of any real thought.

My financial advisor said to take out a reverse mortgage on my home and invest in life insurance, but only the really expensive policy sold by his company.

sbh says

from Washington's perspective, if you don't want to see housing values rise you're just a taker

"Communist pedophile" is the proper term for such people.

sbh says

one of the 47% who sees himself as a looser in life

Complete with people who get off on rubbing that fallacy in your face...even on this site. LOL!

The Heritage Foundation is a known far-right think-tank & propaganda mill.

If a person gets most of their information from such sources, they are going to have a warped view of reality.

Cic,

*BOTH* parties spend huge amounts of money. Dick Cheney famously said "deficits don't matter."

To say deficits are mainly Obama's fault is absurd!

There's plenty wrong with Obama and all other politicians. But blaming him for most of the national debt is ridiculous.

The problems still exist; just different players. The so called "cash buyers" are investors that have "borrowed" money at very low rates. If the house investment/portfolios do not produce a profit; if they cannot hold long enough to produce a profit; we have the same problem as before 2008. Also, many of the foreclosures happened in 2008 because many, many people lost their jobs. Today, we need 2 incomes to pay most mortgages. When just one income is lost, the house is lost.

Again, I do not know if this will crash. I am still looking for our home at a good price within our budget and plan to live there until we cannot anymore...hopefully a long time.

But it remains to be seen...there unfortunately, are so many "shoes that could drop" ....

Call it Crazy says

You wonder why this country is so f*cked!!!!

If the country is f*cked, it's because of the lies and misinformation being spread around by far-right and libertarian "think-tanks" and propaganda outlets. Examples: Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, the CATO institute, and others.

Yeah, the far-left has it's kooks but they don't have a whole network of "news" outlets promoting their ideas.

The country is turning into an aristocracy. 400 individuals have *half* of the net-worth of the entire nation!

Money buys politicians. Therefore money buys laws that can totally screw everyone else. What's to stop the top 0.1% from buying a law that reduces their tax rate to zero? Heck, they could buy a law that turns the 99.9% into slaves. But of course a significant part of the 99.9% slave population will still believe that the wealth will eventually "trickle down" to them. Idiots.

bgamall4 says

There is more customer service at dollar stores. My wife is an addict.

I worry about what she buys there. I hope the shampoo doesn't turn me China green.

The shampoo I buy at the Dollar store is made in USA, and I don't worry about any bad side effects.

1000 is only 1/8th of it's mortgage finance division employee numbers. No biggy, the buying season is over. Two people in my family are waiting until spring to list their homes, one will be a relist since it's over priced.

HydroCabron says

But they're not entrepreneurs. They didn't work hard. They haven't earned it.

If you speculate in derivatives, run a bank or hedge fund, sell real estate, or just import goods from China to sell to people here, you are a wealth creator.

Of course. People who actually do the work don't make a damn thing. They're just lazy bums who deserve their miserable lot in life. The people who collect the fruits of their labor are the true producers of this country. The real American heros.

Wouldn't a tax cut on top earners reduce the debt?

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mMU

shows Bush took spending from $2T to $3.2T, a 60% rise.

and Obama has taken it from $3.2T to $3.8T, a 20% rise (over 5 years)

As for the $43,000 per debt per household, the simple answer is that this money should have been taxed or tariffed, not borrowed.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP

lot of fat piggies in this country

Our politicians are bought and paid for. The only way to effect change is to pay them more. If you want political change you must start a PAC and raise money to bribe politicians. Any other activity won't accomplish anything much.

Over 40% of RE is sold during the months of May-August, so pending sales should be falling, don't deny that the RE market is hot right now, and will be come springtime as well.

It's not just Republican policies, it's conservatism in general.

Reagan's cold war expansion took DOD from $400B to $600B per year:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mMW

(2009 dollars)

Clinton held the line and got that down to $500B then Bush and the neocons jacked it back up to $800B.

NAFTA and free trade in general has raped the economy.

Rising Gini is raping the middle-class:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GINIALLRH

Corporations, same thing:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP

conservatives defend all of these trends. They are entirely wrong on everything.

Call it Crazy says

I love how you and that duck person keeping blaming the Repubs, as if the Dems NEVER have had any part in out of control spending...

That's a straw-man argument. Nobody suggested that the Dems don't spend lots of money. What many are suggesting is the following:

The Democrats are *less* fiscally irresponsible than the Republicans.

HydroCabron says

Wouldn't a tax cut on top earners reduce the debt?

Bueller...Bueller...Bueller...Bueller...

Quigley says

Our politicians are bought and paid for. The only way to effect change is to pay them more. If you want political change you must start a PAC and raise money to bribe politicians. Any other activity won't accomplish anything much.

Exactly my point. The far-right / libertanian folks don't seem to get that *money* is what runs government. It always has & always will. They have this quaint idealistic belief that politicians will always do the "right thing" for the "greater good" or "fair play."

Anarcho-capitalism leads to extreme concentration of wealth which leads to aristocracy/plutocracy.

Some kind of wealth redistribution is the only way to avoid a society based on the exploitation of the many by the fiew. Historically, civilization has always worked that way, including the USA. We like to think the USA is exceptional in that regard, but it isn't. Slavery didn't end here until the 1860s, and de-facto wage-slavery didn't end here until the progressive era starting of the 1890s.

Since 1980 we've been steadily heading back to the "normal" system of exploitation of the many by the few. And with every recession, it gets worse.

I appreciate your response but I do not agree. On your first statement you cannot be sure that the investors got the $5 million "in cash" and they did not borrow; most according to articles I have read in Bloomberg and WSJ are borrowing this money.

Also, in the same publications they have been noting that these investment portfolios are only being rented a little over 50%. If they cannot rent all or most of the properties or get other investors to buy the portfolio, we may see a sell off.

The difference is that I believe this run up in 'home prices' was due to these large investors with these large firms. And again, I am reading this from Bloomberg, WSJ and Fortune.

But I do respect that you may be correct; I just think that the other option may be valid as well. Time will tell.

Call it Crazy says

What???? The duck man ONLY keeps blaming the repubs....

Ok, so maybe he's wrong. That's not the point.

The point is, in recent history the national debt has increased much faster under Republican presidents than Democrat presidents.

sbh says

I deeply admire the tough-as-nails ranchers of the American southwest. I have nothing in common with them politically

it's easy being a conservative if you've got hundreds of acres to create wealth from each year.

There are 400 million acres of cropland; it takes 100 or more to have the scale to make a living from farming, so that's employment for at most 4% of the population.

Socialism got its start in the US soon after the last good land was claimed.

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

freak80 says

The Democrats are *less* fiscally irresponsible than the Republicans.

Democrats raised taxes in 1991 and 1993 without a single Republican vote ( to his credit and political damage among conservatives, Bush Sr didn't veto these tax raises).

When the electorate threw out the Dems for this in 1994, it didn't take long for Republicans to want to start cutting taxes again, but Clinton prevented that.

Once the idiot Bush was elected by the idiots in our electorate (and SCOTUS), tax cuts arrived in short order and the deficits returned.

Though the $6T housing bubble hid the actual cancer in the economy 2003-2007. When the housing bubble failed, everything was fucked.

Thanks, conservatives.

Call it Crazy says

What happened the last time Congress raised the debt ceiling? Did they
accomplish any meaningful spending cuts before increasing the debt limit? In
a word, no:

Congress and the President last suspended the debt ceiling from February
4, 2013, through May 18, 2013, adding $300 billion to the national debt in less
than four months. Their only request was that the Senate produce a budget for
the first time in four years, which it did. No savings were
accomplished.

No savings.

This is unacceptable.

They paid the bill for things that congress deemed necsessary to buy/fund.

sbh says

But if you put a gun to my head and said "choose who you would become if you had
only two choices" I wouldn't opt to live in the city as a liberal.

Hmmmm...a thoughtful and interesting post...

Are you a "self-hating" liberal? ;-)

Hey crazy, you've got some cuts you want to propose?

The alternative is tax raises, mostly on the rich, who are making most of the money now.

sbh says

They are sole proprietors: capitalism at its finest.

No, wealth creation that does not require land as an input is 'capitalism at its finest', since if you need land, you're very limited in scaling, and so much of our land usage in ag is non-renewable, really.

Over 100 years ago the economics profession was essentially bribed to conflate land with capital, and this has been the source of a lot of our difficulties since.

Call it Crazy says

Take the blinders off.... Where did it say in the article it was Obama;s
fault... It just referenced how many times it's been raised during his
term...

Then why did the article even mention Obama, considering the fact that congress decides where, and when,/ how to spend the money, and they also are the same group that will/will not vote to raise the debt limit?

BTW, how many times has the debt limit been raised while Wayne LaPierre has been at the helm of the NRA?

>It just referenced how many times it's been raised during his
term...

this is Congress' fault too!

Just raise it to $100 trillion and we won't have to deal with the debt limit in our lifetime.

50% of this country is too stupid to understand that the "debt limit" is a bs creation of Congress in the first place.

Bellingham Bill says

There are 400 million acres of cropland; it takes 100 or more to have the
scale to make a living from farming, so that's employment for at most 4% of the
population.

LOL, add in the government backstops and cash(direct payments are no longer....supposedly for most commodity grains) and the overwhelming FACT that most of those fortunate people that will lead you to believe that "they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" INHERITED the land that provides tthe majority of their wealth, well besides the government!!

The problem is not that we have too many rich people. The problem is we have too many lazy unproductive rich people who float along with rent/interest seeking activities that maximize gain and minimize risk while contributing nothing except debt to the economy. These are the shareholders who get a hard-on for a brash new CEO whose strategy is "close plants, move production to china." They do nothing.

The solution is to give them economic incentives to put their money to real work, and economic penalties for simple rent seeking behavior. The smart and wealthy will prosper further under this model, and the economy will boom. The stupid and lazy wealthy will lose their wealth as is only proper. There's no reason to keep an aristocracy around that is nothing but a burden on society.

But none of this can ever happen until either money is taken out of politics (impossible) or the regular people build a PAC of their own to lobby for real change. This PAC should seek to ally itself with others to build a coalition.

All I know is that among many leading economists they disagree like we do regarding what did, is and will happen.

The difference is they do not call each other names...and I will continue to refrain from that as well.

As a matter of fact, there is still very educated disagreement as to what caused the crash in 2008. And for that matter, the Great Depression.

I enjoy a lively discussion with many ideas and debate. I only "cherry pick" as you term, as that pretty much is the nature of a "blog" as this is.

So as I said, you could be right, I could be right or we all could be wrong...only time will tell.

Call it Crazy says

MSNBC

True, MSNBC markets to the far-left "sexual politics" and angry woman crowd.

Call it Crazy says

CNBC

A business and stock market channel is liberal?? Maybe on social issues, but otherwise it's a tough case to make!

Call it Crazy says

sbh says

.......and this never gets old:

Now, let's overlay your chart of who was president with who controlled congress at that time. As we all know, spending has to come from congress, the president just signs (or doesn't sign) the bills presented to him...

This chart looks a little different...
*

facts are not welcome in Libville

sbh says

I am an unabashed blue collar moderate liberal

You'd probably fit in pretty well here in the Rust Belt where I live.

Sadly, much of the blue-collar moderate economic liberalism has been wiped out by a steady stream of far-right propaganda telling us that Democrats want to take our guns away. Deer hunting is a very popular activity around here.

Bap33 says

facts are not welcome in Libville

The facts you post show that the national debt increases fastest during Republican presidencies.

Both parties are "big spenders," but at least the Democrats are occaisonally willing to increase taxes to pay for the spending.

This is an excellent idea.
"Congress should implement spending cuts and entitlement reforms.."

Starting immediately, Members of Congress receive minimum wage,it's an honor to serve America. They purchase health insurance with their money on the free market. If they want a pension,an IRA,401k,etc.should suffice.Oh,we're not paying for that either.

This also applies to the POTUS,SCOTUS & other govt. Peons.

freak80 says

sbh says

I am an unabashed blue collar moderate liberal

You'd probably fit in pretty well here in the Rust Belt where I live.

Sadly, much of the blue-collar moderate economic liberalism has been wiped out by a steady stream of far-right propaganda telling us that Democrats want to take our guns away. Deer hunting is a very popular activity around here.

George Carlin:" Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you."

HEY YOU says

Starting immediately, Members of Congress receive minimum wage

Agree. All of the bribe money is more than enough to live on all by itself. :-)

George Carlin was one of the few willing to stand up and tell it like it is.

"America: it's a big club...and you ain't in it."