Community Reinvestment Act

[Crotalus]

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

FRANKLIN RAINES?
Raines works for the Obama Campaign as his Chief Economic Advisor.

TIM HOWARD?
Howard is a Chief Economic Advisor to Obama under Franklin Raines.

JIM JOHNSON?
Johnson was hired as a Senior Obama Finance Advisor and was selected to
run Obama's Vice Presidential Search Committee.

Kinda makes you sick to your stomach.

Our government seems to be rotten to the core !

[gugi]

Our government seems to be rotten to the core !

No, just the democrats, the republicans are the ones trying to fix everything that's wrong, but they can only fight the good fight and can't really win by controlling just one chamber of congress.
It is an election year though, time to test how the great democracy system works.

[decraew]

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

FRANKLIN RAINES?
Raines works for the Obama Campaign as his Chief Economic Advisor.

TIM HOWARD?
Howard is a Chief Economic Advisor to Obama under Franklin Raines.

JIM JOHNSON?
Johnson was hired as a Senior Obama Finance Advisor and was selected to
run Obama's Vice Presidential Search Committee.

Kinda makes you sick to your stomach.

Our government seems to be rotten to the core !

Well, yes I agree. Those naughty democrats.
But luckily there's still the GOP, with noooooo ties to the finance industry whatsoever.

That being said, both democrats and republicans are to blame for the financial crisis, because both parties supported financial deregulation. Said deregulation and greed by Goldman Sachs & the like are for me to blame.

@LX: I don't wholly agree with your blaming only those people borrowing too much. But don't forget that it's part of the US culture to live on credit. On average they don't save as much as in the eg the Netherlands or Belgium. I don't agree with it but that's the way it seems to be. I know that in practice the crisis started with the CDOs (can someone please explain to me how you can repackage correlated risks and then claim that by combining them the risk is reduced ?) but it could have been another financial product. As I said above: deregulation and greed.

Oh, an interesting read: The Great American Bubble Machine | Politics News | Rolling Stone

[LX_Emergency]

Oh I know it's in general more complex. But it all comes down to: "Don't spend it if you can't afford it"

Governments get into trouble because they spend more than they have, companies get into trouble because of this and people get into trouble because of this.

[U2Bono269]

I've been thinking a lot about similar things lately, what with my own family's financial and employment situation. I guess I should put it out there that I consider myself a moderate, I'm registered as an independent, but I find myself siding with Democrats 80% of the time. I don't think you can trace the issues to any one thing or any one person or any one party. It's a fundamental issue that lies beneath the politics and goes down to the people, to us. We don't hold our politicians accountable for their awful decisions, and we in turn make awful decisions ourselves and expect the awful politicians to rescue us and it's a vicious downward spiral. It's a monster that we allowed to exist. And what's scary is that no one will ever do anything about it because we've become so entrenched in this web of crap that it's almost invisible.

It really makes me upset sometimes to think about it. I'm still in my 20s, and I feel like my opportunity to be successful was gone before I even left college. When Romney's tax returns came out I was flabbergasted. The man makes $15,000 more in one day that my wife and I made last year combined. I work my ass off, sometimes putting in 60 hour weeks as a special ed teacher in a special ed school. My wife is also a teacher who is unable to find a position and tutors about 8 hours a week, at the most. I try to imagine what's going to happen to us in the long term and I can't help but think that the attitudes we and our lawmakers have at this point in time is counterproductive to any sort of real positive growth. I'm coming to accept that there are no real opportunities for us out there and we're going to spend the next decade slogging along in a big swamp of mortgage and student debt.

I agree that we need to throw them all out of washington and start over...I'm not saying with a new government structure or a new constitution (though that could stand some updating), but the people at the center of it are corrupt and our government needs a fresh start. If people and corporations (I don't believe they are the same thing at all, and I think the idea is ludicrous) can declare bankruptcy and start over, then we need to declare that our government is fundamentally "bankrupt" and needs to start over too.

[decraew]

I've been thinking a lot about similar things lately, what with my own family's financial and employment situation. I guess I should put it out there that I consider myself a moderate, I'm registered as an independent, but I find myself siding with Democrats 80% of the time. I don't think you can trace the issues to any one thing or any one person or any one party. It's a fundamental issue that lies beneath the politics and goes down to the people, to us. We don't hold our politicians accountable for their awful decisions, and we in turn make awful decisions ourselves and expect the awful politicians to rescue us and it's a vicious downward spiral. It's a monster that we allowed to exist. And what's scary is that no one will ever do anything about it because we've become so entrenched in this web of crap that it's almost invisible.

It really makes me upset sometimes to think about it. I'm still in my 20s, and I feel like my opportunity to be successful was gone before I even left college. When Romney's tax returns came out I was flabbergasted. The man makes $15,000 more in one day that my wife and I made last year combined. I work my ass off, sometimes putting in 60 hour weeks as a special ed teacher in a special ed school. My wife is also a teacher who is unable to find a position and tutors about 8 hours a week, at the most. I try to imagine what's going to happen to us in the long term and I can't help but think that the attitudes we and our lawmakers have at this point in time is counterproductive to any sort of real positive growth. I'm coming to accept that there are no real opportunities for us out there and we're going to spend the next decade slogging along in a big swamp of mortgage and student debt.

I agree that we need to throw them all out of washington and start over...I'm not saying with a new government structure or a new constitution (though that could stand some updating), but the people at the center of it are corrupt and our government needs a fresh start. If people and corporations (I don't believe they are the same thing at all, and I think the idea is ludicrous) can declare bankruptcy and start over, then we need to declare that our government is fundamentally "bankrupt" and needs to start over too.

I really sympathise with those sentiments.

The game, if I can call it that, is heavily stacked against common people, even more so after Citizens United.

[thebigspendur]

Oh I know it's in general more complex. But it all comes down to: "Don't spend it if you can't afford it"

Governments get into trouble because they spend more than they have, companies get into trouble because of this and people get into trouble because of this.

It's not that simple.

The housing mess goes back to the 1970s. People were flipping houses and making very big money on that and a whole industry employing 10s of millions of people depended on housing prices going only one way. Markets were manipulated and schemes devised to keep it going and more people got even richer and it kept going until even the flimsiest of schemes didn't work any more. These days we only here about all the folks at the end of the cycle who lost everything. We don't hear about all the people who made a mint and laughed all the way to the bank.

I know many think the Govt is the root of all evil and it's too big and over-regulating but the fact is if the Govt had stepped in and said "you want to buy a house you need 10% down minimum and meet minimum income guidelines and proof of income or no house for you" this housing mess would have stopped dead in it's tracks.

So it's really a lesson to be learned about our economic system and what happens when markets are allowed to self regulate and the resultant boom bust cycles.

[decraew]

I know many think the Govt is the root of all evil and it's too big and over-regulating but the fact is if the Govt had stepped in and said "you want to buy a house you need 10% down minimum and meet minimum income guidelines and proof of income or no house for you" this housing mess would have stopped dead in it's tracks.

So it's really a lesson to be learned about our economic system and what happens when markets are allowed to self regulate and the resultant boom bust cycles.

Yeah, but regulation of financial markets is Un American !
And dontcha ferget it !!

[gssixgun]

Rather Timely


Are You Kidding Me

[Kantian Pragmatist]

I can totally sympathize with the guy in that video. He, and most of the rest of us, are quite right to feel like we're getting screwed with no lube. The middle two quintiles, of the population by income pay greater than 50% of that income in taxes and government fees, once all state and local taxes and fees are accounted for. The vast majority of small-business owners live in those middle quintiles, and they have it even worse because of mandatory insurance and reporting and safety requirements. The average Republican is right to feel like the government is too big in just this sense: they contribute too much to it and don't get nearly enough in return.

But he's quite wrong to suggest that the problem can't be solved by raising taxes on those who make over $250 thousand a year. First of all, I get the sense that this guy, like way too many American citizens, doesn't know the difference between income and revenue. Many, probably most small businesses have revenue greater than $250 thousand a year. Very very few of them post that much as profit. And that's what income is for a business: profit. It's what you get when you subtract out of your revenue all the money you spent and are continuing to spend on getting that revenue in the first place.

He's also quite wrong to suggest that there's not enough money being made by the wealthiest incomes to plug up the deficit and begin paying down the debt. The wealthiest 6 and a third percent of income makers capture 1/3 of all income generated in the country. The total amount of income generated in the country in 2010 was $14.58 trillion, one third of which is $4.86 trillion. A 50% tax on these 6.36% would generate $2.43 trillion. The total Federal Budget in 2011 (which is bigger than the 2010 budget), excluding Social Security and Medicare, which have their own funding streams and neither of which are currently contributing to the deficit, is $2.038 trillion, a difference of almost $400 billion on the surplus side. And that's without taxing anybody else anything except for their State and local taxes and the payroll taxes that pay for SS and Medicare, which in most states and locales combine to be less than 25% of income.

Economists have been warning for quite some time, since the 70's at least, that the US was going to be entering a period of slower or flat growth. They knew that it was going to be impossible to both maintain a middle class lifestyle for the bulk of the American population as well as the vast fortunes generated by the very wealthiest capitalists and investors. They knew that someone was going to have to take a haircut, and the very wealthiest Americans made damn sure it wasn't going to be them. They bought politicians and dispersed propaganda that enabled them to shift their tax burden onto others (the middle-class, the poor, and the government budgets), while changing the rules to insure that they kept their money or made money no matter what.

You want a fast, easy, and relatively painless way out of our current economic malaise? Have the Feds buy up all the outstanding mortgage, student loan and credit card debt from the banks that currently hold it, forgive that debt, monetize the Federal Debt and raise taxes on the wealthiest 10% to the rates they were at during Eisenhower's administration. Do this at the same time you put in place effective rules and police in the market and the problem is largely solved. The poor people who took out loans they couldn't afford to pay back are victims in this too, because they were told and convinced that they could afford that debt by the people who should have known better: the banks.