"If you've got a business, you didn't build that."

[BOfH]

MOO: Given that one of his primary mentors(Frank Marshall Davis) was a card carrying, dyed in the cloth Marxist, I would say that BHO leans more towards Marxism than European style soft socialism. What makes him come across as less extreme are things like the Constitution, Bill of Rights, checks and balances and of course both the House and the Senate. The other thing to consider is the fact that he comes across as a narcissist, which probably lends to his appearing opportunistic, as opposed to the rigid ideologue which he so wants to be: meaning he does care about what people think of him, from time to time, hence adjusting his message so that they approve, making him feel better about himself. Ultimately, he knows that he is just the water boy for the liberal, progressive forces in this country hell-bent on utterly transforming America.

Despair and governmental chains are more like it...

My .002

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by Hand

Yes sir, I understand, but I don't see this this as an unavoidable eventuality. We put a man on the moon and a satellite outside the solar system. We pioneered the automobile, the personal computer. Are we really not smart enough to reign in our excessive spending before we completely ruin our economy for good?

I remember the debate leading up to TARP, I absolutely disagree with that decision. But then, since you brought that up, are you suggesting that it tipped some balance and sent the national debt into a free fall? By pointing at a Bush Jr bad policy, does that somehow remove Obama from any responsibility for his own mistakes or bad policies? Obama has his very own TARP and his is bigger, he also has this abortion of a health care bill. Can we say these are Obama's fault? Or are they also the result of previous administrations decisions?

Debt has actually fallen during Reagan and surprisingly Clinton's administrations. It can be done. I referenced not only debt, but unemployment, cities failing financially and the number of those on entitlement programs because there is no argument that previous administrations can be blamed for the current state of the country given those factors in consideration.

Our success as a nation rests squarely on the shoulders of free enterprise and personal liberty. These two things have been grossly restricted by this administration. There are countless examples scattered through out this forum of this happening. These cannot be blamed on Bush Jr.

While I disagree with what I'm about to say, for the sake of debate - Ill give you that responsibility for the debt isn't Obama's fault. Is there anything that he CAN be blamed for?

Bush is just another current example other than the prey of favor, I am not picking on him.

Bush's mistake with TARP is he buckled to the Banks and bailed their asses out of a sling when he should have let sit in the nest they made. He set a precedent that the banks are Too Big Too Fail and the Government can save the day. He also covered the lawmakers and overseers asses as well. But there is far more to it than that, I liken it to the current Sheriff Joe 'conspiracy in that if the depth of real truth were known it would show how bad the system has failed. On one hand he F-kd up and on another he had a gun to his head in a manner of speaking.

What he did was similar to bailing your kids ass out of trouble and in turn the kid learns little more than I can get away with it....my parents will always be there.

From there Obama has up the ante with his programs......and he has examples from Bush and Romney (and a many others) for a basis like the Patriot Act, TARP and Romney Care. They did it, so can I and I can do it better!

The overall point I was making was, for this cycle to stop someone has to man up and say NO and no one has been willing to do it. While Obama is tool, he is far from being the only tool and in most instances it takes more than one tool to create a mess like we have.

Obama and many others are responsible for allowing things that should be stopped to continue. IMO the only things Obama can be specifically blamed for are the things he dictates, like through Executive Order.....all the others crimes run through both houses before they hit his desk....or Bush's desk, etc..etc. and in that case if he signed it he is only partially to blame.


It has gone on for so long there is no way to gain control of it

The folks in DC are like crack addicts, they will lie, cheat and steal by any means necessary to maintain the status quo and they will rob and pillage the private coffers to get their fix until it runs dry......unless some stand up and say NO MORE, NOT ON MY WATCH!

Our success as a nation rests squarely on the shoulders of free enterprise and personal liberty. These two things have been grossly restricted by this administration. There are countless examples scattered through out this forum of this happening. These cannot be blamed on Bush Jr.

Ahhhh....but a nation without responsibility and of good moral character is not a place they will flourish

[alelks]

You guys need to get off your ass and help me expand my business. Lord knows (OOPS, I meant to say "Obama knows") I can't do it by myself.

You're all slackers.

[Paslode]

IMO, they were too big to fail though. That was the problem. If allowed to fail and the financial system had gone under, credit could have frozen and the economy completely frozen up. That couldn't be allowed to happen. Ben Bernanke, a very accomplished scholar on the causes of the Great Depression, went and said to President Bush that if he didn't bail out the financial system, then we'd have a depression worse then the Great Depression. So I think Bush acted responsibly there.

And you have to ask yourself who allowed the banking system to get so enormous and out of control? The Lawmakers and the Overseers.

What should be done is to make it where the financial system doesn't require a bailout in the future. The question here is how to structure the big financial institutions where they are not too big to fail, but are still large enough to provide aid to America's largest businesses.

That should be what we push towards. In the 80's and 90's we had a wide variety of banks dotting the landscape. Then Nations Bank and others began gobbling up smaller banks, that unto itself limited the playing field for the consumer and created monopolies that essentially put all our eggs in one giant basket.....a basket so big you could lose everything if it fell.

And who allowed that? The Lawmakers and Overseers.

Well the Obama administration has sought to regulate the financial sector (Dodd-Frank), but the problems here are does this regulation really address the problems, and also, is a nasty side effect of this regulation that the financial system is being hit with uncertainty right now because a lot of the actual rules and regulations have yet to be written?

Weren't Frank-en-Dodd involved in the sub-prime fiasco...Fannie May/Freddie Mac and a sweetheart deal from Countrywide. And Bill Clinton toughened anti-redlining rules and launched a federal assault on mortgage underwriting standards.

That's like the fox guarding the chickens...

I agree on RomneyCare, TARP as said I think was a necessary evil, the Patriot Act I think is a good thing. It was to allow the intelligence agencies to be able to communicate with each other. Since then it has been revised, with certain parts of it removed, other parts modified, other parts continued. The legal system has done a whole lot of scrutinizing of it. It isn't just a big bill that was written and that's that, no changing of it

TARP good or bad, right or wrong.....the end result is crime and poor business practice pays. The Patriot Act good or bad, right or wrong overlapped other law we already had on the books....and now we have NDAA. And with each and every new addition we increase the size of government which cost money.

What we need is a conservative who will govern to conservatism as Obama has governed to liberalism. We had Reagan who changed us towards limited-government, but he had to gun up defense spending and also had a deficit due to the Federal Reserve reducing inflation and also the ensuing recession which also slashed tax revenues. However, afterwards, President Bush Sr. should have continued the limited government mindset, but he was a more big government conservative. Then we had Clinton and a period of limited government with the Republicans in control of Congress, but Clinton at heart is a big-government guy, he pivoted after the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994. Then President Bush, Jr. who while a good guy was a big-government conservative. The Republican leadership also decided to try adopting a "compassionate conservatism" philosophy, i.e. that the Republican party could do big government better than the Democratic party. Then in 2008, in the name of "Change" we get Obama, who basically just engages us in more of the same big government, but gunned up to a wholly new level.

Real change would be things like adopting a long-term plan to limit the growth of and reduce the size of the government (government doesn't even need to physically shrink to become smaller as a percentage of the economy, it's growth just needs to be controlled and we need healthy economic growth). In addition, we need to go back to having Congress regularly discuss debt management, which is something that used to be discussed regularly by Congress, but which has since been forgotten. And then we need to stick to those principles year-after-year. Even when the Treasury is flush with revenue, we need to have a constant focus on keeping spending controlled.

You might remember this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joDjwtjIQS8

Now just imagine the left and rights most notable villains....George Soros is manipulating the Blue Robot and the Koch Brothers are manipulating the Red Robot. And we get watch and cheer our team on.

That's current day politics and the game we play as I see it.

Jesus! Charlie Rangel and Ted Stevens can screw The People and still run for office!!!


We need a team of individuals with high moral standards, who are responsible and who aren't easily manipulated.....that would be real change.

[Dusty]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

I think what America needs is the regulations that create the incentives for the prudence and banking conservatism we see with the Canadian banks, but keeping the system decentralized could probably keep the system more flexible.

Nailed. And instituted quickly.

[tonyz]

Originally Posted by Dusty

Nailed. And instituted quickly.

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

I think what America needs is the regulations that create the incentives for the prudence and banking conservatism we see with the Canadian banks, but keeping the system decentralized could probably keep the system more flexible. Canada's banks are not subject to the politicism of America's banks regarding trying to get everyone a home as well.

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

[Dusty]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

Madcap, eh?

[Hand]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

NO! That would be racists. hehe

Sorry - I do appreciate the thoughtful conversation in this thread. Thank you gentlemen for your time and clear thoughts.

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by tonyz

Wow, you guys are harsh. You mean that potential borrowers should have verifiable, stable incomes, sound creditworthiness and appropriate down payments?

Exactly.

[Stargazer]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...eck=0&denied=1

Once again, I think Charles spells out the"fallacies" of this President and his administration.

And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective....

The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives....

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure...

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived....

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.

Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.

[tonyz]

IMO, this particular paragraph (in bold cited above) is worthy of repeating, so as to not be missed.

Thank you Stargazer (and Charles, of course).

"Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations."

[Flagg]

I'm blatantly stealing this analogy/metaphor from another, but here goes:

Imagine society as a conveyor belt.

We either place the results of our labor onto it, or we take the results of others' labor off of it.

Some place more onto the conveyor belt than others.

Some take more off the conveyor belt than others.

What matters is the net difference of whether you contribute to or require support from society.

What also matters is that entrepreneurs are probably the only group in society who are able to make money while concurrently solving societies problems.

Entrepreneurs actually create wealth.

"Giving back to society" is based on the assumption that wealth is finite and cannot be created......it assumes wealth was taken rather than created.

So if entrepreneurs actually create wealth where it previously didn't exist.....then it's unfair to demand they "give back" what wouldn't have existed without their efforts.

[tonyz]

Whittle makes his case.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/QXEoQJ7...yer_detailpage