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People think that this housing crash was dumb. People bought too much house with credit and should've used their brains...and they wouldn't be in such a bad spot.
We're buying too much America with credit, aren't we? Party's gotta end sometime.
WASHINGTON -- Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- Social Security is the most solvable.Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett's check gets redirected to a senior in need.
The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration's Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.
This claim is a breathtaking fraud.
The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction.
If you don't believe me, listen to the OMB's own explanation (in the Clinton administration budget for fiscal year 2000 under then-director Jack Lew, the very same). The OMB explained that these trust fund "balances" are nothing more than a "bookkeeping" device. "They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits." In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains -- nothing.
Here's why. When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it's kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury -- and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever -- spent, gone.In return for that $100, the Treasury sends the Social Security Administration a piece of paper that says: IOU $100. There are countless such pieces of paper in the lockbox. They are called "special issue" bonds.
Liberals don't care. They want "social services" for the "underprivileged". To pay for it, they want to tax the rich to death. To them "the rich" have a net worth of $250,000 and above.
The fact that the Federal balance sheet is permanently impaired and that America is doomed is of no interest to the left.
Hey what's a lost decade here and there? That's nothing ask Japan, and their tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, suicide victims as a result
And to think the Bamaster said he was going to run the WH like the people of America run their households, on a budget.
Where did he learn to budget his money anyway?
Always in he negative, always in the hole.
Seems he works backwards on a lot of stuff, money, jobs, etc.
Obama is piling up the debt like a madman and we have nothing to show for it.
Hasn't anyone realized it yet? Bammer runs up the credit card and the libs excuse him for it, and brush the problems under the rug. Bush racks up the credit card, and the neo-conservatives (aka mainstream conservatives aka the Patriot Act loving kind of conservative) brush the problems under the rug and excuse him for it.
The USA has not had an economy since NAFTA was signed, the housing bubble was a false economy from the get-go. Jobless Americans and dirt-wage immigrants could not afford the houses and the banks handed out mortgages readily but the real estate developers made out like bandits.
Americans aren't unemployed because the economy is bad, the economy is bad because Americans are unemployed.
The USA has not had an economy since NAFTA was signed, the housing bubble was a false economy from the get-go. Jobless Americans and dirt-wage immigrants could not afford the houses and the banks handed out mortgages readily but the real estate developers made out like bandits.
Americans aren't unemployed because the economy is bad, the economy is bad because Americans are unemployed.
NAFTA didn't have much effect on our economy. How many jobs have been lost to Mexico or Canada? The bulk of manufacturing and I.T. jobs have been lost to China and India during the last 10 years - namely the Bush regime. He also gave us the real estate bubble and the useless costly wars.
You'd best back-up and recalculate. You owe about $108 TRILLION and growing every day for your unfunded liabilities.
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ask Japan, and their tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, suicide victims as a result
