tagged w/ Debt
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It is self-evident that no sickness can be successfully cured without proper diagnosis of the illness. In their frantic efforts to remedy the plague of national debt and deficit, however, US policy makers tend to shy away from the root causes of the problem and focus, instead, on scapegoats.
What are the root causes of the national debt and deficit? They are, first and foremost, the multi-trillion dollar bailout packages that were bestowed upon Wall Street in order to rescue the financial gamblers, the constantly escalating costs of war and militarism, the huge tax giveaways to the wealthy, and the skyrocketing costs of healthcare, systematically jacked up by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
And what are the scapegoats? They are the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and non-military discretionary spending: health, education, housing, transportation, the environment, community development, science and energy, human services, and the like. I call these items scapegoats because they are not the sources of the continued escalation of debt and deficit.
Keep Reading:
http://www.politicalfailblog.com/2011/07/escalating-military-spending-and-debt.html?utm_source=BP_recentIt is self-evident that no sickness can be successfully cured without proper diagnosis... more
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Here's a leader who speaks my heart. Stop the wars, the subsidies, the living high on our money and giving it all to the banks that use it to give themselves bonuses! INVEST in real jobs of the future and our environment and stop this class warfare where the rich think THEY are owed something and CORPORATIONS RUN THIS COUNTRY. I haven't said much on this but I am getting damned tired of this petulant BS. Congress has a couple of true leaders in its ranks. It's time they were listened to.
And remember this Congress, you hurt the working people of this country at your peril. Oh, and social security is not an entitlement. I WORKED to put MY money into it, and I want it back.Here's a leader who speaks my heart. Stop the wars, the subsidies, the living... more
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The problem is the government's $14.3 trillion debt, the equivalent of $46,580 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
~ The threat is, not a debt ceiling, but the debt, at what point do we stop the excuses, and actually do something right, instead of more of the same of doing everything wrong?
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".
No one, absolutely no one has ever been able to coherently explain to me how ANY country can borrow and spend their way out of debt - - Can you?The problem is the government's $14.3 trillion debt, the equivalent of $46,580... more
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"One courageous civil servant just won a battle to hold war profiteers accountable. Her name is Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse. She blew the whistle when her employer, the US Army Corps of Engineers, gave a no-bid $7bn contract to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) as the US was about to invade Iraq. She was doing her job, trying to ensure a competitive bidding process would save the US government money. For that, she was forced out of her senior position, demoted and harassed.
Just this week, after waging a legal battle for more than half a decade, Bunny Greenhouse won. The US Army Corps of Engineers settled with Greenhouse for $970,000, representing full restitution for lost wages, compensatory damages and attorneys' fees."
How much of our $7 billion went back to U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's executives? You can be certain we incurred big debt to enrich those executives and Halliburton's executives. This is why the National Debt is not our debt, your debt, or my debt. The debt all belongs to the criminal war profiteers those government officials who facilitated the theft and fraud!
http://current.com/1efaukc"One courageous civil servant just won a battle to hold war profiteers... more
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Fellow citizens, now is the time to take to the streets and stop the very thought of increasing taxes on the poor and middle classes which Democrats & Republicans are now planning to do! Any and every dollar cut from prepaid public services is a backdoor tax increase. Not only are they seeking to increase our taxes, but they're striving to continue giving our money to the already rich and to the corporations and banks. This debt is NOT OUR DEBT! The debt is that of war and military manufacturers and suppliers, along with Big Oil because the military efforts were made to secure their profits. It's time to distinguish us, THE PEOPLE and this country from the criminally militant businesses which have been raping us by stealing and defrauding our national treasury!
We must stop it here and now, or they will continue their march and assault on us until they have marched us into the ovens and gas chambers with our own cooperation. This is an insidious, palpable, and bloody war they are waging, and we must TAKE TO THE STREETS now and stop them!
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=23d554d6-dd0c-41a5-8b80-a95eb72be82aFellow citizens, now is the time to take to the streets and stop the very thought of... more
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Government is not the problem, the people who elect those to run the government are the problem. — The Omnipotent PoobahGovernment is not the problem, the people who elect those to run the government are... more
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U.S. and European leaders must act urgently to address their sovereign-debt problems to avoid putting a fragile global recovery into a tailspin, the new head of the International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday.
Christine Lagarde reiterated her warning to U.S. authorities that a deal on raising the debt ceiling must be resolved "immediately" to prevent damaging and serious spillovers to the rest of the world.
Lagarde said that while the U.S. needed to promptly draft a credible plan to tighten its budget and raise revenue to counter its bloated finances, lawmakers should take care not to be "unduly hasty" by front-loading cuts. That's especially true given the likelihood the U.S. is facing another jobless recovery, she told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Crafting a credible plan would likely have only modest contractionary ramifications on demand and maybe more positive effects, the IMF chief said.
Europe, meanwhile, needs to quickly implement measures promised by leaders last week. Heads of state there agreed to a new EUR109 billion financing deal for Greece, including significant private bondholder participation. In exchange, Athens vowed to deliver a fundamental restructuring of the country's economy and state finances, including an ambitious privatization plan. Euro-zone leaders also promised to strengthen the bloc's economic governance.
"They don't have the luxury of time, I think there is an expectation that things now have to happen and have to be delivered," Lagarde said.
The deal showed that leaders are committed to the euro, however, Lagarde said.
"It's possibly a major shift in the European construction, leading the way to fixing this monetary union that was only half-constructed, not completely defined," France's former finance minister said. The sovereign-debt crisis "revealed the risks posed by an incomplete economic and monetary union." The IMF says Europe needs to move toward fiscal federalism, even if that means its members' must yield sovereignty.
For Greece, the combination of newly relaxed financing terms and private bondholder participation "improves significantly" the sustainability of the country's debt, a key tenet of fund loan support. Some IMF executive directors have expressed concern that Athens' debt is too large and some economists fear that even with the new program, Greece will struggle to grow out of its financial bondage.
The IMF chief said she was encouraged after a meeting Monday with Greece' finance minister that the country is progressing with a key program to privatize the country's public assets. The fund estimates the country has around EUR300 billion that could be sold to help retire its mountain of debt.
Whether the governments can deliver is one of the biggest risks, and markets are watching closely.
"Turbulence could easily resurface," Lagarde warned. "Even the tough fiscal and structural measures adopted by the affected countries have not convinced markets that a lasting solution is in place," she added in her prepared remarks.
"Whether that will be sufficient to convince the markets remains to be seen because markets are always in trepidation and they expect the worst rather than the best...clearly they don't like uncertainty," Lagarde warned.
Underlining her point, Italy and Spain continued to come under attack by markets uneasy over the countries' financial and fiscal health.
Biagio Lapolla, a strategist at RBS, said, "Only a satisfactory systemic response to prevent contagion to Italy and Spain will bring back yields." Although European leaders gave the EUR440 billion euro-zone bailout fund more flexibility for dousing sovereign debt fires, markets have criticized officials for not boosting the size of the fund to prepare for larger economies to need external financing.
Lagarde said the IMF, a vital partner in the euro-zone bailouts, would soon have to address whether the fund will need more resources to tackle growing debt crises.
"Maybe it could do with more," she said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110726-713262.htmlU.S. and European leaders must act urgently to address their sovereign-debt problems... more
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Congress is at a stalemate over raising the federal debt ceiling, and Americans need to pressure their elected representatives to work out a compromise that will avoid a potentially devastating default, President Barack Obama told the nation Monday night.
Link : http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/07/25/debt.talks/index.htmlCongress is at a stalemate over raising the federal debt ceiling, and Americans need... more
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sitsi
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It's this one, from yesterday's New York Times. Click for a more detailed view, though it's pretty clear as is.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/assets_c/2011/07/24editorial_graph2-popup-58477.php
It's based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.
An additional significance of the chart: it identifies policy changes, the things over which Congress and Administration have some control, as opposed to largely external shocks -- like the repercussions of the 9/11 attacks or the deep worldwide recession following the 2008 financial crisis. Those external events make a big difference in the deficit, and they are the major reason why deficits have increased faster in absolute terms during Obama's first two years that during the last two under Bush. (In a recession, tax revenues plunge, and government spending goes up - partly because of automatic programs like unemployment insurance, and partly in a deliberate attempt to keep the recession from getting worse.) If you want, you could even put the spending for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this category: those were policy choices, but right or wrong they came in response to an external shock.
The point is that governments can respond to but not control external shocks. That's why we call them "shocks." Governments can control their policies. And the policy that did the most to magnify future deficits is the Bush-era tax cuts. You could argue that the stimulative effect of those cuts is worth it ("deficits don't matter" etc). But you cannot logically argue that we absolutely must reduce deficits, but that we absolutely must also preserve every penny of those tax cuts. Which I believe precisely describes the House Republican position.
After the jump, from a previous "The Chart That Should..." positing, an illustration of the respective roles of external shock and deliberate policy change in creating the deficit.
http://t.co/KErphYUIt's this one, from yesterday's New York Times. Click for a more detailed... more
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Why should we the PEOPLE, the legitimate owners of everything in the United States, pay for a debt that banking and commerce ran up for their own personal financial gain?
We know that everything about the Iraq War and the subsequent international financial collapse was due to the direct and indirect action of the military industrial complex.
We don't have to accept their terms and conditions. We can write and impose our own. Let's reject the debt and extract a tax from banking and commerce and force them to pay off the debt owed to themselves. It's their debt and it's owed to them, so let's make them pay themselves in a way that says: "Don't fuck with us boys, this isn't our first time at the rodeo!"
http://current.com/community/93358346_are-we-broke-yet.htmWhy should we the PEOPLE, the legitimate owners of everything in the United States,... more
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"Bipartisan talks falter; Boehner, Reid work on separate proposals"
Excuse the four letters, but FUCK our corrupt Congress! Kick them to the curb!
OPEN LETTER:
Mr. President,
There is no time and the People have no more patience. We will not accept cuts to social security or medicare at all! We will STORM Washington to prevent it, if necessary. Get it? Particularly while you are still permitting the Pentagon to loose and steal our money. Particularly while you are tolerating the subsidizing of Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Military, and Wall Street, in countless insidious ways. If you need money to balance the budget, get it from them. They have trillions of it, and it's all our money. We demand that they balance the budget and pay off the debt! The 14 trillion dollars spent on the bailouts equals the debt. Get the money back with interest and we're done. Do not deceive yourself, we are no longer ignorant and oblivious to the fraud tha government has perpetrated against the People for centuries. You write the budget and present it to congress for approval. If they don't approve it as you present it, unilaterally raise the ceiling and then get our money back from the thieving corporations which have been stealing it for decades and decades. Period!
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/173159-reid-pelosi-to-meet-obama-gop-source-says-no-boehner-deal"Bipartisan talks falter; Boehner, Reid work on separate proposals"... more
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WASHINGTON -- Debt ceiling negotiators think they've hit on a solution to address the debt ceiling impasse and the public's unwillingness to let go of benefits such as Medicare and Social Security that have been earned over a lifetime of work: Create a new Congress.
This "Super Congress," composed of members of both chambers and both parties, isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but would be granted extraordinary new powers. Under a plan put forth by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his counterpart Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), legislation to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by the creation of a 12-member panel made up of 12 lawmakers -- six from each chamber and six from each party.
Legislation approved by the Super Congress -- which some on Capitol Hill are calling the "super committee" -- would then be fast-tracked through both chambers, where it couldn't be amended by simple, regular lawmakers, who'd have the ability only to cast an up or down vote. With the weight of both leaderships behind it, a product originated by the Super Congress would have a strong chance of moving through the little Congress and quickly becoming law.
A Super Congress would be less accountable than the system that exists today, and would find it easier to strip the public of popular benefits. Negotiators are currently considering cutting the mortgage deduction and tax credits for retirement savings, for instance, extremely popular policies that would be difficult to slice up using the traditional legislative process.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/23/super-congress-debt-ceiling_n_907887.htmlWASHINGTON -- Debt ceiling negotiators think they've hit on a solution to address... more
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With The nations faith hanging in the balance Republicans are still playing partisan games. Are they willing to let the country crash and burn just to try and demean the Obama Administration.
http://www.waneenterprises.com/news/735With The nations faith hanging in the balance Republicans are still playing partisan... more
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Great analysis on what the Debt Crisis means to the Super Rich and Banksters
We've been told that defaulting on our debt will be a catastrophe, and indeed it would. This is why a routine raise to the debt ceiling is the right thing for Congress to do. So why the "grand deal"? Arguably, the Tea Party caucus could be peeled off and a clean vote achieved with Democrats joining to raise it. Even with Joe Walsh's "stonewall letter" now gaining traction in the House, it could be done.
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/why-oligarchs-dont-want-dealGreat analysis on what the Debt Crisis means to the Super Rich and Banksters... more
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The House Republican strategy to link a normally routine increase in the nation’s debt limit with a crusade to slash spending has already had a high cost, threatening the nation’s credit rating and making the United States look dysfunctional and incompetent to the rest of the world.
But that’s not the most awful thing about it.
What’s even worse is that this entirely artificial, politician-created crisis has kept government from doing what taxpayers expect it to do: Solve the problems citizens care about.
The most obvious problem is unemployment. The best way, short term, to drive the deficit down is to spur growth and get Americans back to work. ..by EJDIONNE read more.
http://tinyurl.com/3qhokjsThe House Republican strategy to link a normally routine increase in the... more
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LOrion
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Why aren’t banks lending to local businesses? The Fed’s decision to pay interest on $1.6 trillion in “excess” reserves is a chief suspect.
Where did all the jobs go? Small and medium-sized businesses are the major source of new job creation, and they are not hiring. Startup businesses, which contribute a fifth of the nation’s new jobs, often can’t even get off the ground. Why?
In a June 30 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Smaller Businesses Seeking Loans Still Come Up Empty,” Emily Maltby reported that business owners rank access to capital as the most important issue facing them today; and only 17% of smaller businesses said they were able to land needed bank financing. Businesses have to pay for workers and materials before they can get paid for the products they produce, and for that they need bank credit; but they are reporting that their credit lines are being cut. They are being pushed instead into credit card accounts that average 16 percent interest, more than double the rate of the average business loan. It is one of many changes in banking trends that have been very lucrative for Wall Street banks but are killing local businesses.
Why banks aren’t lending is a matter of debate, but the Fed’s decision to pay interest on bank reserves is high on the list of suspects. Bruce Bartlett, writing in the Fiscal Times in July 2010, observed:
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Economists are divided on why banks are not lending, but increasingly are focusing on a Fed policy of paying interest on reserves — a policy that began, interestingly enough, on October 9, 2008, at almost exactly the moment when the financial crisis became acute. . .
Historically, the Fed paid banks nothing on required reserves. This was like a tax equivalent to the interest rate banks could have earned if they had been allowed to lend such funds. But in 2006, the Fed requested permission to pay interest on reserves because it believes that it would help control the money supply should inflation reappear.
. . . [M]any economists believe that the Fed has unwittingly encouraged banks to sit on their cash and not lend it by paying interest on reserves.
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At one time, banks collected deposits from their own customers and stored them for their own liquidity needs, using them to back loans and clear outgoing checks. But today banks typically borrow (or “buy”) liquidity, either from other banks, from the money market, or from the commercial paper market. The Fed’s payment of interest on reserves competes with all of these markets for ready-access short-term funds, creating a shortage of the liquidity that banks need to make loans.
By inhibiting interbank lending, the Fed appears to be creating a silent “liquidity squeeze” -- the same sort of thing that brought on the banking crisis of September 2008. According to Jeff Hummel, associate professor of economics at San Jose State University, it could happen again. He warns that paying interest on reserves “may eventually rank with the Fed's doubling of reserve requirements in the 1930s and bringing on the recession of 1937 within the midst of the Great Depression.”
The Travesty of the $1.6 Trillion in “Excess Reserves”......
Continue Reading at:
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/why_banks.phpWhy aren’t banks lending to local businesses? The Fed’s decision to pay... more
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Yes, the rest of the world is watching this embarrassing debt ceiling nonsense, and it is growing dismayed.
Der Spiegel has a roundup of commentary in German newspapers about the fight, and the universal message is this:
The US is holding the entire world hostage, and it's the Republicans that are playing with fire.
Hard to accuse the Germans (who are no fans of fiscal profligacy) of being motivated by politics, or of having some inherent reason to attack Republicans.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/its-official-the-whole-world-thinks-republicans-are-dangerous-maniacs-2011-7#ixzz1SHM0wRZ4Yes, the rest of the world is watching this embarrassing debt ceiling nonsense, and it... more
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LOrion
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