Guess the whole change thing wasn't just rhetoric

[Bill Shaw]

Originally Posted by P562045

How could I forget this is the kind of change we can and should believe in.

Not only has his "change" been exposed for what it is...

"These Americans are counting on us, all of us in Washington. We have to remember that we're here to work for them. If we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis will turn into a catastrophe. We'll continue to get devastating job reports like today's month after month, year after year," Obama said grimly.

Maybe employing folks to remove the "Hope" posters would avert the catastrophe.

[rich76]

The Dems have overloaded this package with even more useless Than I ever expected. I guess after not getting their way for so long they're like kids in candy stores....who knows. Some Dems and Reps are being prudent in trying to make them trim the fat and get down to business with a stimulus package that means something. I'm rooting for our President to do good by God but from what I'm seeing and hearing lately I'm not that optimistic. The worst one IMHO is appointing someone to head up the IRS that has a history of unpaid taxes. Are you freaking kidding me?

Where is Andrew through all of this? No posts worthy of this rocky 100 day road?

[hork]

Originally Posted by rich76

The worst one IMHO is appointing someone to head up the IRS that has a history of unpaid taxes. Are you freaking kidding me?

on that i can't agree more. and the worst part is daschle had to withdraw his name because of unpaid taxes. so in this country it's bad to have a tax evader running the health care system but it's ok to have one running the tax department????? i'm a bit confused on the logic here myself

[P562045]

So sorry for discussing what I think this stimulus bill is really about in a very frank way I must admit I know now I should never question what the real purpose of this bill is.

I will just accept whatever motives Obama has and not question them at all even if I think he is making a very poor decision on any matter really.

I will just have to accept whatever decision Obama makes about anything for that matter because no matter what he does it will always be the right decision.

[Bill Shaw]

Something just batted around on a Sunday Morning gabfest...

Apparently there is substantial bipartisan support for a payroll tax amnesty as a form of stimulus. However, for some unexplained reason, it was/is not included in any of the current or proposed packages.

The reason I mention this is because it is one of the few methods I have heard that would seem to do what people are saying they want done.

Just wondering if anyone knows more about pros or cons regarding something like this.

[P562045]

Originally Posted by hork

ok so you've been going on now for about three months about how obama shouldn't bother to jump start the economy, so what you're saying is to hell with those half a million folks and their families.

So how exactly is this stimulus package going to help these families in the first place.

So is giving them temporary assistance or even better yet a temporary job really helping these people for the long term?

I must ask this question because if we are only going to temporarily "fix" a problem that needs a much longer term solution what will the next solution to the problem down the road that we must have be?

And don't forget that a portion of these people that we so need to assist now took on housing mortgages that they had no business having in the first place.

Just as an example how about for this portion of people actually go out and finding some housing they can actually afford instead of either directly or indirectly having the government essentially pay the bills for their poor decisions in the first place.

I must ask a question. This is actually out of the stimulus bill but it took public scrutiny to get it out. How exactly does spending whatever the darn number is to come up with a new design for an new polar icebreaker actually supposed to help these families that desperately need this help?

And we are now turning to the very people in Washington that let this economic situation spiral out of control in the first place and just to make it fair I will say in the last four years. I guess all of sudden this stimulus package is the cure to all of our ills. In fact I think this is going to make the situation even worse. There is much in this stimulus package and I have already given one example that does absolutely nothing to help these people that really need help in the first place.

I have zero doubt there are probably dozens more examples like the one I gave that I just gave that are still in this stimulus bill. I think two things need to happen either get them out of the bill completely or spend the money on something that is much more needed. And as people can well imagine I don't think the congress could spend the money more wisely.

I am all for helping the people that really need the help but it must also be done in a very responsible way as well.

I would love for someone to explain how a new polar icebreaker will help these people get the assistance they so desperately need even as congress for over two years now just ignored part of the problem in the first place. I am talking about Fannie Mae.

What was the original intent of Fannie Mac in the first place. It was to assist people in getting lower housing costs and also to assist people to get home financing.

So let's see we have a federal program that has been around since the late 1960's and it is part of the problem we face even now because they assisted at least some people in acquiring home financing and some of these people had no business getting this assistance in the first place.

Fannie Mac is a very good example of the feds wanting to assist people and as we all should know they actually created part of the economic problem we face now.

No wonder earlier I said we better be assisting people in a responsible way.

[P562045]

Originally Posted by rich76

The Dems have overloaded this package with even more useless Than I ever expected.

This should not really surprise anyone. Just last fall how did the "bailout" for financial institutions get passed through the congress eventually?

A bunch of useless crap was added so that the number of people needed to pass it got some "goodies" to bring back to their district or state that is what is happening with at least a part of this stimulus bill we are trying to work through now.

Two extremely important questions about the "bailout" we had last fall.

How is that working out? Did it do what it was supposed to do?

Just remember if the two questions I just asked are very hard to answer why should I just trust these very same people in congress that gave us this "bailout" to do the responsible thing when it comes to this stimulus package.

[P562045]

So let's answer a few question from my long post about helping people that really need help.

I would not want these questions to get "lost" in that post.

How will this stimulus package help people that really need help right now?
Is this stimulus package a short or long term solution to some of the problems we face?
What was the original intent of the federal program Fannie Mae in the first place?
Did Fannie Mae which I must repeat again is a federal program contribute to the current financial mess we find ourselves in now?

I will just add one last question that I did not even really mention in my last post.
How are we as a people going to make sure there are no Freddie Macs in this stimulus package.

I ask this last question because there is zero doubt in my mind that portions of this stimulus package and to be frank about it I don't even know what they are will cause some unintended consequences latter on. This is part of the reason why I mentioned Fannie Mae as one example of good intentions causing problems down the line in my previous post.

[rich76]

I have only one question.....











how is this package going to help






















ME?

[P562045]

Let's just give the 600,000 that are hurting the most $600,000,000,000.

Well actually there would be several costs involved including about a billion to figure out who the most hurting are and another billion to send out the checks as well. But these two costs would just come out of the tax cuts part of the stimulus package.

This would be really good though we could create 600,000 millionaires with the spending part of the stimulus package.

This is an absurd example of how much money we are really talking about and almost as absurd as what we are spending a portion of this money on.

[Bill Shaw]

Originally Posted by P562045

Let's just give the 600,000 that are hurting the most $600,000,000,000.

{snip}

This is an absurd example of how much money we are really talking about and almost as absurd as what we are spending a portion of this money on.

Dude. You should get the Nobel in economics for this one.

Honestly, it is a beautiful illustration of how-

a) this legislation does not do what it is purported to do. and...
b) how little congress (and our new President) care about the people in question.

[P562045]

I am trying to give examples of how much money this really is we are talking about here.

And I do find it rather interesting that no one has said one word when I made the comparison about how much money is in the stimulus package and the total amount we have spent for the war in Iraq which my numbers included enough money for another sixteen months of us being there.

I have come across several examples of how much money a trillion dollars is. It keeps getting reported much more often that the stimulus package is around 800 billion or so but that does not include the amount of money that will be needed to be pay the interest of the debt which will be in the neighborhood of 400 billion. These are not the exact numbers though. I rounded the numbers.

And don't forget that other 350 billion dollars for the Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP for short.

No more discussion is needed about that though because very few people could actually explain TARP in easy to understand terms what that is really supposed to do anyway.

[P562045]

Originally Posted by Bill Shaw

b) how little congress (and our new President) care about the people in question.

Well actually both of them do care. But that is only for two days until December 2012. The two days are November 2, 2010; and November 6, 2012.

[P562045]

Originally Posted by hork

ok so you've been going on now for about three months about how obama shouldn't bother to jump start the economy, so what you're saying is to hell with those half a million folks and their families.

So several questions about this.

Where has the congress been since this whole economic crisis started and where has the help been for these people?

These people have not gotten any assistance at all from the federal government?

If my last question is true why would that be the case?

Well in the next few days we will be finding out the answer to why these very people have not been getting enough assistance in the first place.

[P562045]

Well how interesting no one wants to even think or talk about that the U.S. congress first priority is themselves and not the group of people hork was mentioning that need assistance in various ways. Well the only way we are going to be able to solve any problem we face really is to talk about it.

Well I have a story from Newsweek and it talks about Bush nationalizing banks which is very true. I thought Obama was going to be so different from Bush but Obama wants the other half of the "bailout" money as well. Now this article points something else out as well.

"We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly."

So how is this prescription program for the elderly even doing. How many people are helped by this program? Do the people that really need help get it? It could well be I am so out of it that I have just not heard much about this program and it has been discussed a lot in the last few years. I only ask about this because it is an example of trying to assist people.

This is very interesting the democrats just last year ran around saying change is so needed.

But I must ask the question is this stimulus bill trying to expand certain parts of the welfare state even further.

I would not want to shock anyone to much but the ideas of democrats are part of the reason we are in this financial mess we have now. And of course we should not forget Fannie Mae which was very much a democrat idea back in the late 1960's.

One last question. How many things did Bush veto in the last two years of a democrat run congress? I can only think of one example and that was Bush said no to expanding the SCHIPS program.

Now of course many things the congress run by democrats was usually stopped in the senate by the minority and never reached the president.

This article also points out why we are going to be having to nationalize many different sectors of the economy like they do in western Europe eventually. As I have been saying for a while now we have a large portion of the population that is going to be getting Social Security in the next five to ten years. This means we will have less money for other things we need.

This article by Newsweek is a very interesting read for several reasons.

Newsweek article