We, as taxpayers, have been robbed but most people don't seem to notice.

[winsomesoon1007]

I can't believe that there hasn't been more outcry on this.  The bailout of many of the big banks has resulted in only the linings of the pockets of those at the very top economically.  Why hasn't more been done to stop this.  The disparity of money is flying towards the super wealthy.  Even the Government won't be able to write a check for much longer.

[ss944]

That's an interesting way of looking at it.  I'm seeing it more from this perspective though:

1. All that bail-out money had strings attached... those strings involved allowing government control over banks, who themselves hold the capital that most small businesses need to function, and those small businesses are responsible for 70% of the jobs in this country.  Thus, by accepting the money (and in fact *forcing* many banks to accept money they did not want and did not ask for) the federal government now has their hands directly on the jugular of 70% of the jobs in this country.  Why?  Control.

2. It wasn't banks but hedgefunds and bad mortgages that were largely responsible for the financial mess last October, and those bad mortgages were the result of legislation dating back from 1994 *forcing* banks into that practice.  One result is that currently over 50% of all mortgages in this country are owned by the federal government a la Freddie and Fanny. (Tell me that's not scary.)

3. And speaking of hedgefunds, George Soros is the single largest name in them and is the single largest source of cash behind the most prominent political figures in this country (from Obama to the DNC), not to mention possessing controlling interests in a great number of media outlets in this country from TV to print.

4. In the process of *printing* over $1200 billion dollars to federalize banks and car companies, when there had only been around $800 billion on the open market previously creating a situation where the value of the dollar would drop by more than *half* if it were to be released on the market.

5. Currently all tax receipts in this country just barely pay for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Welfare and interest on the debt (combined nearly 60% of the budget), we're lumping an additional trillion dollars on the debt just in the past year necessitating the printing of more money, and yet we're looking at saddling ourselves with another program that would eclipse Social Security, itself the most expensive program in the whole of ever?

With all this in mind, I'm not as concerned with those whom Washington is trying to make look like their profiting as I am with: why are they blatantly destroying the value of the dollar???  Doing that hurts people far more than anything else they could do.

[ss944]

Don't get me wrong though... I'm highly pissed about how they're abusing all the money that they rape from me in taxes....

[kronos5]

Very interesting points ss

[winsomesoon1007]

Maybe it's a ponzi scheme to leave China holding the bag if we dump the dollar and create a new currency.  But where does that leave us normal people in the transfer.  We will lose at least half of our wealth or net worth.  As a service economy we can't have people not buying things.  In many cases it seems that the small businesses have been frozen out of many of the funds that the bank used to make available to them.

[ss944]

Dumping the dollar kind of gets to point #2 above.  Back in the mid-1920's the Weimar Republic tossed their worthless inflated currency for a new one, but they had to base it on something to give it value.  So all the property that people couldn't pay, because well, their money was worthless, was taken by the government and used to back the new currency.  There are those in the current administration that have already proposed that if people can't make payments on their Freddie or Fanny held mortgages that the government might just take possession of it and "rent" the property back to the homeowner so that nobody loses their home.  Back to rebasing a new currency, the problem is, most new currency standards being discussed involve a common international currency, like the Euro,  and international currencies open dangerous windows into a country's sovereignty.

This and the point about small business capital (thus certain control over 70% of the workforce if successful) makes this all to me about control and power.  I have no idea what they're building, but somebody does, and it frightens the heck out of me.

[kronos5]

Wow, you have obviously put some thought into this SS

[winsomesoon1007]

Good stuff.  I don't think that what has been done can be undone, even though the media seems to think otherwise.  We may see this all play out very soon, and I doubt that it will be pretty.

[ss944]

I tripped over something recently that made me think of winsomesoon's comment about screwing China with our debt.  What I read was that the second and third highest holders of our debt are Japan and China at between $700 and $800 billion apiece.  I was surprised because I thought that China held the most US debt, but nope... that prize goes to the US Fed at $5.1 trillion dollars, or $5100 billion to keep the units on parity for comparison purposes.

Typically, money borrowed from somebody is backed with some kind of a$$et.  Take China for instance, that $700 billion is easily backed because, well the government *owns* the whole blasted country.  But what, pray tell, is the Fed backing it's loan with?  They're not a government entity, they're a private business and as such you can't say that the $5.1 trillion is backed by say Yosemite National Park real estate.  It's pretty much backed by, well, thin air and the ignorance of the electorate that we've loaned a ginormous chunk of money to ourselves.  But just how much money is this vapor-valued $5.1 trillion?  Well, the US GDP (ie. the sum total worth of *everything* produced in the US for a whole year) was $14.1 trillion in 2009.

Anybody see the problem yet in the now $1+ trillion we added starting last year in additional debt that we're going to add to that vapor $5.1 trillion?  Holy freakin crap.

On top of that, the tax revenues last year were just barely able to pay for "mandatory" spending items... virtually *every* "discretionary" item in the budget was unfunded (ie. added to the debt).  Now you might think that "mandatory" items would be the stuff our government was established for like: defense, interstate commerce and, well, defense.  But since the mid-1930's that's changed.  "Mandatory" programs are now considered: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Welfare and interest on the national debt.  The only one of those that could ever get smaller is the debt payment (currently 8% of the budget) if we could ever figure out how to reduce the debt.  All the others are growing with the population, and last year was the first year Social Security taxes did not fully pay for the program.  BTW, "mandatory" spending is now nearly 60% of the federal budget.  What I'm getting at, is that if we dissolved the military, closed the government, closed the schools, closed NASA, closed the FDA... basically killed all "discretionary" spending, we'd still be running a deficit within the next year.

Since we hold a great majority of our own debt we're slowly going to die of fiscal exsanguination if we don't drastically change and/or kill some of these "mandatory" programs.

[winsomesoon1007]

I think that it will not go slowly.  The rest of the world has really pa$$ed on picking up our debt.  I think that China realized this and started dumping as much of the U.S. treasuries as it could.  No one else is going to jump on our financial windfall.   The government can not afford to stop their programs yet, lest they court an unruly dependent cla$$ riot.  They will spend us into no return, or maybe they already have.  (While the top has gobbled up all of the wealth that they can before going into hiding, until everything quiets down again.)  The fact that we have spent the last 25 or so years becoming a dominant service economy has left us nowhere to go but down.  Maybe I am just thinking the worst, but there doesn't seem to be many $ positives lately. (At least not real ones.)  Good friends however can not be beat.