A fiscal black hole grows deeper

Thank you, I went from the paper to hear so did not see the link. After looking over the article what my teacher says rings loud. Cooks for example. Are these military cooks with 15-20 years of service? This would result in the large salary. Not saying that is the reason but too many people take a number and shout from the rooftops. All I know is, I am a 12 year firefighter with a promotion and paramedic incentive pay. My wife has been at her job for almost 2 years and makes 10% less than me. While not an easy job and it has a lot of resonsibility, it does not require a degree or unique skills. And she can do it till she’s 65 years old. Do you want a 65 yearl old firefighter? Police Officer? Some jobs can not be done till a ripe old retirement age. It is easy to sit at a desk and type articles. My 2 cents folk, ya’ll have fun repeating yourselves

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Glenn@4:11, This blog highlights the underfunded teacher pensions. I mentioned that part of the problem was the stock market where they are invested.
Americans invest our life savings, our futures, on Wall St., either directly &/or indirectly as tax payers. Wall St. is primarily corporations that are WE, the American people: stock holders, employees, creditors, customers & clients, & when they fail, we fail. It does not make any sense to flog them & wish them failure.
You said that not questioning corporations that donate to campaigns was ignorant, which had nothing to do with my comment.
My last comment was to point out that the heavy donors are not primarily corporations, but include associations & are primarily unions. If you feel the need to question corporations BECAUSE they donate & “purchase democracy,” they you should feel the need to question ALL the heavy donors including the assns. & unions.
My initial comment about corporations had absolutely nothing to do with unions. It does not matter whether a corporation is unionized, partially unionized or non-unionized. Corporations are not our enemies. We ARE the corporations.
You have a problem with AT&T. Mine is with GE. If either of them fail, you & I pay. The problem is not with corporations. The problem is you & I, who we vote for. The problem is not the campaign donor & how they “purchase democracy” but the campaign receiver & how they “sell democracy.”
I have noticed that this adm. uses a strategy for every agenda that creates a crisis, an urgency, victims & demons. The demons are always corporations, the life-blood of our economy, the largest employers, whose success all our futures are based on. They are in the business to make money FOR US, we the people.
Now, to your second question…..

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Let me remind everyone of a few basic facts:
* The banks got into the mess they’re in as a direct result of the deregulation pushed by republicans.
* It was Bush who bailed out the banks and who took us into an unnecessary war in Iraq and gave tax cut after tax cut to the wealthy, all of which created our currect deficit.
* Obama is responsible for the largest tax cut in history, a tax cut that benefitted the middle class not the wealthy.
* When the economy is in a recession and is approaching a depression, that is not the time to worry about deficits since without the government using our taxes to stimulate the economy, we would very likely end up in a depression. If a depression occurred, then the government, along with business, would suffer severe shortfalls and if you think the deficit is big now, it would be dwarfed by would occur in that situation.

All the people who think we should get rid of social security and medicare need to propose exactly what should be done to support retirees who no longer have any income.

Why is it no one ever mentions our out of control military budget when they express concern about the growing deficit? How come its more important for this country to fund the military (the U.S. spends more on military expenditures than all other countries in the world COMBINED) than it is to provide healthcare and an education for its citizens?

No one said “health insurance is a right, not a privilege” — the quote is “healthCARE is a right, not a privilege.” We need to REMOVE the health insurance industry from the picture totally. They bring nothing of any value to the table, they cause the cost of healthcare to be much higher than it should be and they’re going to run our country into the ground. A single-payer healthcare system, which eliminates the need for health insurance, would solve our current deficit while providing everyone with healthcare. Even if we had to pay higher taxes for such a system, we (businesses and individuals) would save so much money not having to pay for health insurance that that would more than offset any tax increase. The healthcare bill that was passed that all the Tea Baggers label as socialist is nothing of the sort. If anything, its a boon to the insurance industry since they’re going to be getting a lot of new business.

Lastly, public education, medicare, postal service, roads, bridges, emergency services — these are all publicly-funded services (i.e., socialist). This is not a bad thing at all — without publicly funded services, there would be no middle class but only a huge lower class and a small, but powerful and entrenched upper class (sort of like what we seem to be moving towards now thanks to deregulation). When something is publicly funded, that doesn’t necessarily mean the government is actually performing the service, it means the government is paying for it and thereby controlling the cost for all of us. All the anti-government rhetoric is spawned by the business world, which would like nothing more than to have everything provided by the private sector so they could over-charge us for everything and if we couldn’t afford their price, we would simply have to do without. A perfect example of this is in countries where water service has been privatized, placing it in the hands of corporations. Once they take over the water service, the price always goes through the ceiling, leaving many people without water. Some things do not belong in the realm of the private, for-profit sector, such as water and other utilities and healthcare since these services are a matter of life and death. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anything that’s a matter of life or death placed in the hands of the greed mongers.

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Glenn@4:11, Now to your 2nd question: “What do we do now to make sure Americans don’t have to borrow another 700 billion with interest…” The TARP program was the Toxic Assets Relief Program that NEVER bought a single toxic asset. It rather bought 2 of our 3 domestic car companies & has been used as a piggy bank for bandaiding (is that a word?) our economic crisis as it’s being repaid piecemeal. Sit down. The toxic assets that are still out there amounts to over $4 trillion dollars!!!!! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Even though my degree is in economics, I gauge the economy on our dog’s bout with fetching our newspaper. As long as he struggles more with the edition that includes the legal section (foreclosures) than with the Sunday edition that includes the advertising supplements, we will have a problem.
Banks have never specialized in originating residential mortgages. S&Ls haven’t specialized in residential loans since the ’80s. Mortgage companies specialize in residential mortgages & they have NO money to lend, no depositors. They sell their loans on the secondary market. The largest buyer of mortgages is Fannie Mae. Almost every residential loan for decades has been underwritten according to Fannie Mae guidelines, whether Fannie Mae actually bought the loan or not, because Fannie had the strictest policies, based on the history of default.
In the ’90’s, the Dems mandated that Fannie & Freddie (then government-sponsored entities: GSEs) relax their guidelines in the name of Affordable Housing/Social Justice. You’ve heard of jet-setters. The GSEs were the pace-setters of underwriting guidelines. They started the tsunami of subprime lending. They not only underwrote subprime loans but also bought them, bundled them up with prime loans & sold them on Wall St. & all over the world.

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Government pensions (federal, state, county, city) are a bigger problem right now thna social security and medicare. The actions that occur regularly to bump up final payouts before retirement is nothing short of criminal fraud. Unlike the federal government. the states, counties and cities can’t print money so get used to the fact that YOU will pay more taxes for someone else’s lavish retirement.

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Marcos
April 15th, 2010
4:39 pm

Why do you conservatives HATE education and intelligence so much you have to bash it at every turn? I guess the more stupid you are the more gullible you are as well. Explains a lot.

Seeing as how the subject has turned to labeling “conservatives” stupid and gullible, it seems in order, after the usual ad hominem attacks to ask some rather simply straightforward questions directed at these allegations in response.

Why is it that liberals, socialists, rant nearly to the point of insanity about the evils of corporate greed in the private sector; while ignoring, if not down right denying, that any similar evils of greed exist in the government public sector?

Rather strange, would you say Kyle? I mean, greed is truly universal among everyone us.

Therefore, it would stand to reason, contrary to liberal-socialist think that greed actually can and in very point of fact, “does”, exist in government.

Which brings to bear the question, is it acceptable to think government greed, public sector greed, is good at all points where corporate or private sector greed is bad at every point of consideration?

How is it then, when a monopoly frowned upon by all reasonable minds which is rightly viewed as anti-competitive, counter productive and oppressive where it exist in the private sector can be so vehemently sanctimoniously defended as a virtuous good only when it is founded in the public sector under the purvey of government?

A government monopoly of any kind of any form is no better than a capitalist’s monopoly. In very point of fact, a government monopoly of any kind in any form, whether it is education or nearly anything else – excluding the obligatory duty governance – is a far worse evil, in that government has the exclusive powers to confiscate and incarcerate under its’ laws.

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Government worker—an oxymoron.

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Linda :

*This economic crises was caused by, and will continue to be adversely influenced by, the deregulated commodities market, a market that dwarfs all other markets, and is basically where people/companies/banks with lots of money can bet on the success or failure of things like subprime mortgages. The investment banks pressured the mortgage lenders to make more and more risky subprime loans because they had hedged their bets on said loans in the commodities market and were set to gain more money if the loans failed than if they succeeded (evidence that this was the case was reported this evening on ABC World News since the government has filed charges against Goldman Sachs for this very thing). Fannie Mae was simply doing what all the investment banks were doing, not that that makes them any less culpable, but it certainly doesn’t make them more culpable than any of the investment banks. The mortgages that were granted to low income people as a result of the legislation passed by the democrats that you mentioned have not had a high failure rate like the subprime mortgages that were pushed by the investment banks. For someone who has a degree in economics, I’m sure you probably know all this — if you don’t, it must be because sometimes degreed people tend to think they already know everything.

*Obama did not nationalize the banks. Timothy Geithner gave them an open-ended ability to borrow at 0% interest from the FDIC no questions asked (something I don’t agree with), but they were NOT nationalized.

*Only a few select democrats and republicans reviewed the intelligence Bush used as the reason for attacking Iraq, and they were not told that the intelligence had been reviewed and discredited by intelligence agencies in Europe as coming from an unreliable source. When the State Department sent someone to the Middle East to verify the intelligence, he discovered that it was bogus and, not only did he inform the White House of this, he also sent a letter to the NYTimes saying so. The White House’s response to this was to expose his undercover wife, who had been working undercover to fight terrorism for years (someone should have gone to jail for that offense). So, the democrats, and all of us, were lied to about the reasons for attacking Iraq and the real reasons for doing so have never been divulged. Also, wars are never by executive order — only Congress has the power to declare and fund wars.

*Bush’s tax cuts benefitted only those (businesses or individuals) who made in excess of $250,000 annually.

*Obama’s Economic Stimulus Bill was for $787 billion. The cost of the war in Iraq for JUST 2008 ALONE was approximately $400 billion and that’s not including supplemental funding granted that year. The cost of the war varies from year to year, but is approximately that same amount FOR EACH YEAR, plus supplemental funding. The federal military budget is 65% of total U.S. discretionary spending. (Did I hear you say you have a degree in economics??? If so, did they teach you to add?)

* As of October 30, 2009, Obama’s Economic Stimulus Bill has saved or created 640,329 jobs. It has also kept a lot of hard-working, middle-class Americans from becoming homeless since $224 billion was for extending unemployment benefits (along with improving education and health care. The U.S. does not currently have jobs for all these unemployed people (I know — I’m one of them), and without this extension of unemployment benefits they (we) would surely be on the streets if it weren’t for the Stimulus Bill. We’re talking about middle-class families who have always worked and who owned their own homes being subjected to homelessness. Actually, there are already a large number of homeless families living in tent cities around the U.S. and in national parks, but once a worker ceases to be eligible to receive unemployment compensation, they are no longer counted or reflected in the unemployment projections.

*Tens of thousands of Americans die each year due to not being able to afford healthcare. This dwarfs the number of people killed by terrorists. But we shouldn’t have to spend 65% of our tax dollars on military expenditures and still not stop terroristic acts or even catch Bin Laden. And, we’ve lost so many constitutional protections due to terrorism that we virtually are becoming like Russia used to be (but they were COMMUNIST, not SOCIALIST).

*Healthcare is a right only if the prerequisite for obtaining it is not having to have enormous amounts of money. Otherwise, it’s a privilege. The healthCARE debate began as just that — a debate about providing healthcare to all Americans. But, once the republicans and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries got their greedy paws into the debate, it became health INSURANCE reform. The only reform we need for health insurance is the elimination of that industry. Your statement that the healthcare bill will be a burden to the health insurance industry because “they will have to cover sick people,” is a screaming example of why we basically don’t even have a healthcare system since we wouldn’t want the insurance industry to be burdened with covering sick people! What part of healthcare for all Americans do you not understand? Any one of us could become uninsurable due to a preexisting condition at any time, and you’re trying to tell me that we should allow insurance companies to get away with not selling insurance to anyone with a preexisting condition? Apparently, you must work in the health insurance industry. There are so many reasons why healthcare does not belong in the realm of the “for-profit” private sector that I can’t even begin to list them here, but use your imagination (doctors aren’t willing to perform preventative medicine as much since it will cut into their profits; pharmaceutical companies are subject to reap huge rewards during flu epidemics, so much so that an incentive to start a man-made epidemic is not unfeasible).

*There may be one aspect of the healthcare bill that you and I agree upon — the mandate that everyone must purchase health insurance. Most of the people who currently don’t have health insurance don’t have it because they can’t afford it (I’m one of them). If people can’t afford health insurance now, they won’t be able to afford it when the law requires it unless the government plans to lower premiums and put a cap on them. That’s what the public option was supposed to be for — to cover the people who can’t afford private health insurance and to help control the cost of premiums by forcing private insurance to compete with the government’s much lower public option premiums.

*Corporations are NOT people, they are collectives of people and they have extraordinary power that individuals cannot compete with. And they are, apparently, inherently evil since they could care less about whether people live or die. So, please don’t compare them with individuals since they can’t feel pain or die like people can. We are in an unsustainable system because we are depleting our natural resources faster than mother nature can replace them. So, I wouldn’t put too much faith in our current capitalist system as it is eventually going to self-destruct if we don’t make some serious changes to it.

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