Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Done that lots of times. Worked for the FAA for a while,
and been on lots of planes the FAA didn't oversee.
Been overseas a few times. In several countries.
Got along fine without the FDA. Sometimes wondered why
cats or dogs were missing from the neighborhood, tho...
Worked in places where OSHA didn't have any say, either.
Actually, that is a pretty good description of the government
When I worked on some ranchland, we decided the government was
like snakes. Without snakes, the rats would overrun us. But don't
ever get the idea that the snakes are your friends, either, and too
many snakes could be a serious problem (as they are opportunistic).
Well, we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this. All I know is every time a business gets itself unregulated, prices go up and service gets worse. All you have to do to see that is compare flying from 20 years ago to flying today.
And I shipped my dog three times and two cats once by air. I sure the heck would have been upset and furious if they had been lost. That was back in the 80s. Not sure I'd ship an animal by air today, though.
My dad was a pilot. I know more about plane crashes than I want to (especially since one of my dad's bosses died in one) and no, I wouldn't trust a plane in a country where the airlines were unregulated. I'm not saying you're going to crash every time, just that your chances are way higher.
The literature they send with things now is very generic. They don't want to print something up for every version.
Try YouTube or ask the question on Google.
What kind of phone is it?
I have an iPhone - to listen to the voice mail - you just go to the phone icon, on that page, hit the voicemail icon, see the number it came from, hit it and play it - either listen to it via speaker or the regular old way -put phone to ear.
I go to the providers site and find chat with help. If that doesn't help, they can do a remote adjustment. Somehow my phone got set to have the internet active, and I'm getting double copies of all the mail including the junk... and my phone just eats up the charge in no time. Time to find out how to shut it off.
And no thanks, but I don't want a 'newer' phone.
I moved from socal to a small Oklahoma town where friends lived, but the chief idea was to get out of the smog (lived in the worse area in the country) and to someplace quiet and cheap. No rent, utilities low, and a 720 sf house built in 1931. It's not been perfect, but the house is mine and the area affordable. I'm actually finding that a whole quarter of it isn't ever used.
As for the phone, the newest ones just have too much stuff. My old favorite had the features I like but wasn't overdone. Its my calculator, phone list,camera, picture collection and when needed alarm clock, but I don't think I'll ever try to watch a movie on it. I do make phone calls too....
I don't get a huge check from social security but I don't need it either. (at least without the medicare problem) But then even if mom and dad now had sufficent income to not worry, growing up in the Depression, Dad on a farm, they never spent just because they could.
I learned a long time ago to ask before buying. Why do I want this? What else do I have that does whatever. Especially if its not cheap, what else which was, or cheaper, would do the same thing. And if its not a defined need, you can even set up the cart, but you can't buy it for twenty four hours.
My parents were not 'rich' but didn't lack money to do most stuff. But both remembered and when I hit my time to manage life I remembered what they taught.
I feel for the kids who got everything and then suddenly ...thunk... reality came face to face. If they're lucky they'd had parents who did not aspire to have the most flash and didn't live on credit alone. You never know when that sort of knowledge can make a difference.
The government doesn't just support social programs, in case you've forgotten. What about the things that keep us ALL safe? What do you think would have happened if Ebola had gotten loose in Texas, with no CDC or state epidemiologists to catch it? What about forest fires? How would you like to volunteer to fight those because we have nobody to do that? What about hospitals, police, the FDA, OSHA, the people who keep our water clean?
What you describe is knee-jerk reaction typical of progressives. Please note that nowhere did I say there shouldn't be a federal government. There is most certainly a role for the federal government, a state government, and local governments. Disasters such as you describe are areas where governments at all level certainly have a role.
"Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society."
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser
The people who receive welfare almost all work - and anyone who works pays taxes, just like you.
They do not pay federal income tax.
They do not pay state income tax.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser
I was on food stamps, and every time I bought soap, paper towels, toilet paper, or kleenex, I paid taxes.
Thank you for providing exhibit 1 in why we should switch from a personal income tax to a progressive consumption tax.
You seem to believe, quite erroneously, that conservatives have no compassion. Just the opposite is true. It is about the strategy and tactics to achieve a better life for our poor.
Benjamin Franklin famously observed:
Quote:
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766
Houses price increases are outpacing salary increases. I am not saying salary should be increased higher but maybe housing price increases ought to be regulated. House is the single biggest expense of a household. It has come to a point that it has become unaffordable even for the middle class without having to enslave in a life journey of paying the mortgage.
Economists on the left, the right, and in the center all agree that Government is exceptionally good at creating shortages. If the government declared the maximum price of tomatoes was $.02 per pound, within a week there would be a shortage of tomatoes. You would be able to purchase as many tomatoes as you like at $.02 per pound, but you would find none for sale.
Similarly, regulating housing prices will result in a shortage of housing.
And the reason those loans were available to people who couldn't afford them was because of the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, "which took down that wall between the banks that made routine loans and the ones that did risky investments."
That act was, in effect, deregulation of the loan industry. It reversed the "Glass-Steagall act...(which) barred commercial banks from getting into the investment business. It raised barriers between commercial banks, securities firms and insurance companies."
You are partly correct -- but you need to go back even further than 1999 to find the root cause.
Starting in the early days of 1993, then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros, and his hand-picked lieutenant, the progressive social justice warrior Roberta Achtenberg who was Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, observed that individuals at the lowest end of the economic ladder were being left behind in wealth creation.
Two generations ago, the model was more straight-forward: Dad had a job which put food on the table, clothes on the family's backs, and a roof over their head.
By the early 90s, the model had changed. A home was a primary source of wealth for many, and dad's job existed to pay the mortgage while equity-based wealth drove the economic well-being of the family.
And Cisneros & Achtenberg, among many other progressive SJWs, saw this as a fundamental sustaining threat to low-income people and especially people-of-color (their words, not mine) as they were missing out on what was at the time the greatest generator of wealth in the country's history.
So they acted -- that's what progressives do, after all.
They convened government regulators from HUD, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Fed, and a few other minor federal entities to re-write the existing banking regulations affecting residential mortgages, and specifically they required mortgage originators to extend even more credit to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder and specifically to low-income people-of-color (again -- their words).
The new draft regulations were published, as all draft regulations are - and it was clear that any bank or thrift or mortgage originator who failed to comply with the regulations would be punished severely, all in the interest of social engineering via mortgage origination.
Banks responded to the draft regulations by saying, in essence, they were already extending credit to everyone who was a reasonable credit risk; by extending mortgage loans even farther down the economic ladder, they risked extreme losses. The only way banks could comply with these new regulations was by off-loading the assets in new and innovative ways...
... and the securitization of mortgages was born, as was the creation of derivatives of risk including the alphabet soup of CDOs, MBSs, ABSs, CDO-squareds, risk tranches, etc -- all in an effort to spread the risk of mortgages forced to be given to low-income people, which of course was an attempt at social engineering.
Mortgage originators then saw they could make money by the opening the Federal Government had created. So they pursued it with vigor. Some pursued it fraudulently.
The housing bubble was fueled by both real loans and sub-prime doctored loans that were being written - but they were being written precisely because of governmental regulations that had the perverse unintended consequence of promoting them to be written, and securitized because they were bogus.
The government created the moral hazard in the first place through its regulatory framework.
Then banks and everyone else discovered they could make a ton of money doing exactly what the government wanted them to do.
So they did.
And there is a special place in Hell reserved for Cisneros and Achtenberg for their well-intended actions that caused so much pain & suffering.
***
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser
Every single time the government had opted out of federal regulation for any group, the result has been disaster.
Putting aside your hyperbole of "every single time," the real problem of course is that well-intentioned laws & regulations sometimes have perverse and unintended consequences. Not always -- but sometimes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser
It would be wonderful if the government didn't have to get involved, but they're like the parent who has to keep control over his kids. When there are no federal rules and no punishment for misbehaving, there is nothing to keep the kids in control. Our systems without government control break down and they break down with a vengeance.
There most certainly is a role for government. We need a system of recognizing property rights, and a legal system to enforce them. No one wants polluted water or unsafe pharmaceutical drugs or tainted food. No one argues to eliminate government.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser
Groups like the FDA and OSHA are there for a reason. The FAA is there for a reason. We have anti-discriminatory laws for a reason. We didn't have any regulations for the banks and we had 2008.
No one argues to eliminate the government, so stop throwing up straw-man arguments so you can knock them down. We had plenty of regulations for banks in 2008, and it is clear the progressive social justice warriors were the root cause of 2008.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodentraiser
Let me ask you something: would you personally fly on any airline if the FAA didn't oversee them? Because God knows, I sure wouldn't.
No one advocates elimination of the FAA, so stop putting up straw-man arguments.
All I know is every time a business gets itself unregulated, prices go up and service gets worse. All you have to do to see that is compare flying from 20 years ago to flying today.
Actually, you do not know that because it is not true.
Prices are down, not up. The federal government's over-arching goal has been to get more people in the air because airline travel is safer than automobile travel. Young families who go see the grandparents are safer flying than driving, so the government does things to encourage it. That is why prices are down.
Airline travel was once quite comfortable:
But it was expensive. Now it is inexpensive because the government wants the less affluent to fly.
It was an idea that was not thought through, by the poster. They don't seem to realize that every time you invite government to interfere with the markets, you invite disaster. The housing bubble and crash of 2007 and 2008 was caused, not by lack of regulation, as many people believe, but by government attempting to change market forces and "make housing affordable" to those who could not afford houses.
I will disagree. It began as you said, with good intentions, then Wall Street discovered how they could profit from it, found the loopholes to exploit and the unfettered greed that followed the pigs at the trough mentality caused the collapse. You can't put pigs at the trough and tell them to stop when they're full, they'll never be full, as can be seen by the looting of the treasury going on by the current crop of 1%ers who are in charge.
Hardly. Bush is probably at least 90% responsible for the housing mess. His administration actually designed and implemented a plan.
Fortunately, HUD has not yet removed this historical document so let's hear from Bush himself. "The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so..."
Hardly. Bush is probably at least 90% responsible for the housing mess. His administration actually designed and implemented a plan.
Fortunately, HUD has not yet removed this historical document so let's hear from Bush himself. "The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so..."
Wow. It has been a while since I have seen such a remarkable and easily refutable distortion of the truth. All one has to do is read the link you posted followed by the two links I posted to see how deceptive you are being. Nice try.
Fourteen hundred miles! This sounds wacko to me. I kept thinking, "There are no temp jobs in Indiana, or adjacent states??"
My understanding of the article is that this couple is among a large group of retirees who buy RVs and basically travel around the country like migrant farmers to work in campgrounds, national parks, etc. during the tourist seasons which vary from region to region.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
