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Frankly, aside from toys, there is not a lot of disparity in the USA and I am getting real tired of people continually saying so.
This statement really has me befuddled. You really believe this? You really think that CEO's of businesses and teachers are on equitable pay scales? You think that management should make 10 times more than the workers (and that's a very generous estimate). You can like a system that promotes extravagant wealth to those that takes risks and exploit it. But don't act like the disparity doesn't exist.
Why do you think our housing bubble burst in markets all across America. It was GREED. Mortgage brokers were turning tricked up loans over? Why would they do this? Because people could not afford the payments on standard loans. And the brokers get commissions on those sales. People were purchasing houses as investments with these tricked up loans. Why? Because they knew that the value of the house would go up and they could sell the house before the loans became an issue. But the values of these houses were false. It was based on the demand. And the demand was fake because of the loans. Did we learn nothing from the stock market crash in 1929 that was the result of stocks being bought on credit and then their value increasing based on those purchases? Anyone with 1/2 a brain could see the fallout that was going to come from this. I saw it 10 years ago and told people what was going to happen. And I'm not even in real estate. But no one bothered to see what was obvious. What could have blinded people so much? GREED, plain and simple.
I just don't believe that bigger is always better. I wish the American Dream was to have a nice house and financial security. The problem is that the extremely wealthy in this country are looked at like Royalty and people strive to have what they have. THAT becomes the American Dream.
Dude,
Don't waste your time on someone who gets their info from Glenn Limbaugh's lobotomy emporium.
He/She's already played the "global warming is a conspiracy" card. All the scientific community is in on the take......Don't know know! They're all in on it! They are scared to death of the truth. The whole world is constructed just to please god-fearing, undereducated, overfed, self-satisfied, proudly independent, yet consistently victimized white Americans! Want some Hannity-Select kool aid too? It's delicious, and will turn your attention back to protecting your marriage from all those pinko pagan ecofeminists!
Dude,
Don't waste your time on someone who gets their info from Glenn Limbaugh's lobotomy emporium.
He/She's already played the "global warming is a conspiracy" card. All the scientific community is in on the take......Don't know know! They're all in on it! They are scared to death of the truth. The whole world is constructed just to please god-fearing, undereducated, overfed, self-satisfied, proudly independent, yet consistently victimized white Americans! Want some Hannity-Select kool aid too? It's delicious, and will turn your attention back to protecting your marriage from all those pinko pagan ecofeminists!
As with most of the gov't know best mindset; there is a lot more Koolaid being drunk by you and your folks, than the thinking people of the state/country.
As for the Foxnews comment - listen to them the same as I tune in to NPR, CNN, MSNBC and others. One needs to know all angles to be cognizant on a topic.
Stop with the simplistic arguement that all who disagree with you are mindless blobs following some media messiah.
You guys need to look at yourselves with a little more critical eye because it is you who instead of actually using your mind to think; blindly follow your leaders such as Gore, Kerry, Obama, MSNBC, the now defunct air amerca et al.
I wonder if people like you ever tune in to a media outlet that may offer views you disagree with. - Just to listen and think.
Just am waiting for the days when you folks can come up with something, ANYTHING new to say.
Last edited by ccjarider; 12-27-2010 at 07:45 AM..
You really believe this? You really think that CEO's of businesses and teachers are on equitable pay scales? You think that management should make 10 times more than the workers (and that's a very generous estimate). You can like a system that promotes extravagant wealth to those that takes risks and exploit it. But don't act like the disparity doesn't exist.
Why do you think our housing bubble burst in markets all across America. It was GREED. Mortgage brokers were turning tricked up loans over?
2 replies:
The housing crash is not do to blatant greed on the part of banks.
The housing crash is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. Do gooder, gov't bureacrats starting with Carter and perpetuated by both Dems and Repubs, wanted low income type to own homes. They pressured banks to change loan models to allow people who are too poor or too dumb to borrow to own a home.
To further exacerbate the issue, the feds removed risk to banks by growing Fannie and Freddie to take over financial risks of bad mortgages.
For bankers of course, it became win - win. Make $ with no risk.
My point is the seeds were planted by do gooder gov't bureacrats not the banks themslelves.
Socialist types continue to look to gov't to solve perceived ills.
When gov't is involved, most times the solution is worse than the problem.
second comment:
If a teacher wants to earn what a CEO earns, they can. They go out and can become a CEO. What is your problem??
The reason you seem to me to be such a drone is that you keep throwing out single sources causes to complex problems. Example, housing is due to liberals who wanted to put low income people in homes. Yea, right. Admittedly, many wanted home ownership for the masses, including George W. Bush, with his "ownership society" thinking. But fair enough, plenty shared it. What noone anticipated was that an industry with over a century of experience with making home loans would begin selling, repackaging and selling, insuring loans that had no prospect for being paid back. The poor would-be homeowners were naive, and probably unethical. However, you cannot blame most of them (the flippers excluded) with clear-eyed deceit and fraud. Corporate leaders knew what they were doing. They were cannibalizing our own economy and selling poison. Now in that example there was plenty of blame to go around, but when it gets boiled down to a single slogan, and hackneyed finger-pointing, that sounds like talk radio sound bites to me.
I am very passionate about challenging the anti-government mindset, because the relatively unregulated capitalism we saw under Bush will be absolutely disastrous to my child's future. Government is very flawed, but it has demonstrated a better ability to build infrastructure for the future than a laissez-faire system which protects the wealthiest in society now. For example, as out deficit was going through the roof, Bush was cutting taxes on oil companies, so that they have had record profits, while the rest of the country goes down the tubes. I'll repeat government is flawed, but we need a balance.
As with most of the gov't know best mindset; there is a lot more Koolaid being drunk by you and your folks, than the thinking people of the state/country.
As for the Foxnews comment - listen to them the same as I tune in to NPR, CNN, MSNBC and others. One needs to know all angles to be cognizant on a topic.
Stop with the simplistic arguement that all who disagree with you are mindless blobs following some media messiah.
You guys need to look at yourselves with a little more critical eye because it is you who instead of actually using your mind to think; blindly follow your leaders such as Gore, Kerry, Obama, MSNBC, the now defunct air amerca et al.
I wonder if people like you ever tune in to a media outlet that may offer views you disagree with. - Just to listen and think.
Just am waiting for the days when you folks can come up with something, ANYTHING new to say.
Gotta love how this guy just whined about progressives for being big meanies who stereotype everyone who disagrees with them as easily-led sheeple, then proceeds to do the exact same thing in the very same post!
The left blindly follows Obama... is that why they've been calling him a turncoat and a traitor for the better part of the past year? I don't even know how Gore and Kerry are even in this conversation. No ones paid attention to Gore since An Inconvenient Truth was in theaters and Kerry hasn't been relevant in more than half a decade. You probably just pulled the last 3 democratic nominees for president out of your arse when you realized that your Lim-Beck induced coma dream where progressives are as misinformed and easily led as conservatives didn't have any basis in reality.
Although I find it interesting that you bring up Air America because it seems to me that if progressives/liberals were really as impressionable as you claim that it would still be on the air. Same thing with MSNBC, which doesn't have anywhere near the ratings that Fox News does. Could it be that maybe, just maybe, the reason progressive mass-media ventures don't do so well is because progressives don't like, need or want to be told what to think and actually are more capable of forming their own opinions? Hmmm....
Socialism is controlling people. You have no freedom when you have socialism. It's the most unChristian and inhumane thing there is. There are areas in certain fields of government Wisconsin that are like this and these people are on "power trips".They don't care how much they are destroying others. Sad.
Socialism is controlling people. You have no freedom when you have socialism. It's the most unChristian and inhumane thing there is. There are areas in certain fields of government Wisconsin that are like this and these people are on "power trips".They don't care how much they are destroying others. Sad.
This is the funniest post I've read all week. Socialism is "controlling people" which is unChristian and inhumane? Then what is religion? Religion is all about controlling people. Socialism is controlling the economy not the people. Read a little and you'll find that Socialism is not what is found in North Korea and Cuba. Just because many socialist economies have been developed by authoritarian regimes, does not mean that IS Socialism. To put it simply Socialism is forcing people to behave economically like the Bible tells to behave in the first place. We have already seen what happens if we let the corporations make all the money and then have it trickle down to the rest of the people. It trickles from the business bank account to the personal bank accounts of the owners. It happened in the 1800's, 1900's and continues to happen today.
The housing crash is not do to blatant greed on the part of banks.
The housing crash is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. Do gooder, gov't bureacrats starting with Carter and perpetuated by both Dems and Repubs, wanted low income type to own homes. They pressured banks to change loan models to allow people who are too poor or too dumb to borrow to own a home.
To further exacerbate the issue, the feds removed risk to banks by growing Fannie and Freddie to take over financial risks of bad mortgages.
For bankers of course, it became win - win. Make $ with no risk.
My point is the seeds were planted by do gooder gov't bureacrats not the banks themslelves.
Socialist types continue to look to gov't to solve perceived ills.
When gov't is involved, most times the solution is worse than the problem.
second comment:
If a teacher wants to earn what a CEO earns, they can. They go out and can become a CEO. What is your problem??
Explain to me why then it took so many years for the fallout to occur? Housing prices shot up overnight in several markets around the country. This was not a slow steady progression. It was O.K. to relax some of the restrictions early on to get low-income people into houses. But it was the ridiculous interest-only loans, and other types that created the real mess. What do low-income loans have to do with banks offering re-fi's to people at ridiculous rates to lower their payments? They are already in the house. Programs to help people were not the problem. The problem was taking advantage of those programs by the GREEDY. If you can't see that then your blindness does not allow for further intelligent banter.
second comment:
I enjoy making a difference in a kids life. If I were a CEO I would operate ethically and I would run my business so that I provided a needed service. I would sell things to those that needed or wanted my product. I would not train my salesmen to take advantage of the elderly and easy targets. And within a year I'd get fired because I would not be keeping up with the other businesses that were operating based on profit motive. I worked in the business world. I realized that the only way to keep up was to be as greasy and underhanded as the other guys. Turned my stomach, so I quit and went back to school and became a teacher. Have not regretted the decision for a second. I can look myself in the mirror everyday and know that what I do is way more important that what people do that are making 10-50 times my salary. I'm o.k. with my decision, but I don't have to like the environment that has created that situation. My point is not that people don't have the opportunity to do those things. My point is that our society financially rewards the wrong deeds. The more useless crap you can sell to people the more money you make. The more you can use your skills of deceit to convince people that they need something that they don't the more money you can make.
I don't want to rely on government to regulate business. But there is no one else to rely on. It's not like the business has any incentive to do it themselves.
Explain to me why then it took so many years for the fallout to occur? Housing prices shot up overnight in several markets around the country. This was not a slow steady progression. It was O.K. to relax some of the restrictions early on to get low-income people into houses. But it was the ridiculous interest-only loans, and other types that created the real mess. What do low-income loans have to do with banks offering re-fi's to people at ridiculous rates to lower their payments? They are already in the house. Programs to help people were not the problem. The problem was taking advantage of those programs by the GREEDY. If you can't see that then your blindness does not allow for further intelligent banter.
second comment:
I enjoy making a difference in a kids life. If I were a CEO I would operate ethically and I would run my business so that I provided a needed service. I would sell things to those that needed or wanted my product. I would not train my salesmen to take advantage of the elderly and easy targets. And within a year I'd get fired because I would not be keeping up with the other businesses that were operating based on profit motive. I worked in the business world. I realized that the only way to keep up was to be as greasy and underhanded as the other guys. Turned my stomach, so I quit and went back to school and became a teacher. Have not regretted the decision for a second. I can look myself in the mirror everyday and know that what I do is way more important that what people do that are making 10-50 times my salary. I'm o.k. with my decision, but I don't have to like the environment that has created that situation. My point is not that people don't have the opportunity to do those things. My point is that our society financially rewards the wrong deeds. The more useless crap you can sell to people the more money you make. The more you can use your skills of deceit to convince people that they need something that they don't the more money you can make.
I don't want to rely on government to regulate business. But there is no one else to rely on. It's not like the business has any incentive to do it themselves.
Good point. Noone wants to pay the government to regulate. But the latest global boondoggle is ample evidence of what happens when we leave those benevolent capitalist wolves to care for the flock. Many of our original market regulations date from the 1930s, right after the last market meltdown/sleazefest when about 1/3 of the country had no food to eat.
I agree about the senselessness of most of the garbage we are sold, second mortgages, George Forman grills, chia pets..far better to be helping kids grow their minds. God Bless you and the rest of the teachers for doing what you do.
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