Tainted Saints

In the tens of BILLIONS, folks. Because the only people still making money hand over fist are the people who gamed the system and engineered the collapse…

“Every generation of Americans should live better than its predecessor. That’s Americans’ core definition of economic “progress.”

But for today’s young, it may be a mirage. Higher health spending, increasing energy prices and stretched governments at all levels may squeeze future disposable incomes—what people have to spend—and public services. Are we condemning our children to downward mobility?…”

Demand from first-time buyers will plummet if the tax credit isn’t renewed, and “…massive losses in commercial real estate loans will add to the problem, forcing banks to raise more capital.”

Roubini knows of what he speaks, since he was in the small minority of economists who predicted the dramatic bursting of the housing bubble to begin with…

What always, always, always happens in a severe (and not-so-severe) economic downturn is that mindless white people born without the ability to see beyond the ends of their noses (or look in the mirror) start blaming non-white people  and anyone else who is different from them for their own, as well as the rest of the country’s, problems.

And that, children, is how the suburbs were born…

For all the naysayers who are convinced that spending money now and increasing the budget deficit will cause negative repercussions down the road when “the bill comes due,” I say that you’re either:

1. Someone who is still making a lot of money, is not being impacted much by the recession, and doesn’t want to pay higher taxes to pay for more federal spending because you’re in the bracket that would; OR,
2. Not in the first group, but you listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, etc. religiously, and believe every bogus, alarmist thing they say to increase their ratings.

The reality is that the market got us into this mess, and isn’t going to get us out of it, so the federal government must spend to get people back to work, and to keep state governments from collapsing altogether.  Once the economy improves, the deficit will be paid back down again (at least to the point it was when George W. left office…) Don’t believe me? Robert Reich explained this really well in his column on 10/1/2009:  

“When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grand-kids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II…

My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR’s debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing.”

Leonard and others do question HOW the money is being spent in some areas, but I’ll leave that to the experts.

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/10/06/time_for_a_second_stimulus/index.html

Unfortunately, the service sector includes the lowest paid workers in the country. Third World, here we come…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091005/ap_on_bi_ge/us_economy