Comments on: Trying to Shine Light into our National Money Hole

By: Mr. ToughMoneyLove

Mr. ToughMoneyLove — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:43:11 +0000

Andrea: Sad to say, the secrecy continues and now even Congress doesn’t care.

TStrump: I also read recently that the Canadian government is bailing out car companies as well. Welcome to the club.

Carl: The absolute power is about to be consolidated in the hands of the Democrats. Scary.

Robert: I’m afraid that my three sons will be paying for our money sins for a long time after I am gone.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:01:31 +0000

Unfortunately, I think TARP was a poorly thought out response to one thing that the government feared… Not the collapse of Wall Street firms (after all Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse) but the credit crunch spreading to the point that US Treasuries stopped selling.

The US Federal government is the world’s biggest deadbeat -er- debtor. The interest alone is closing in on half a trillion dollars per year, nearly five times what is spent in Afghanistan and Iraq every year. If credit flows dried up to the point that the Treasury couldn’t borrow money, the US Government would have been in serious trouble as inflation would go through the roof when the government had to resort to unlimited printing of cash to fund it’s overspending. For a comparison, look at Germany after WWI, when inflation ran over 100% per day!

Congress has painted itself into a corner with bloated programs that it doesn’t dare cut (due to the political fallout in the next elections) but it also cannot afford to pay for short of massive tax increases (which are only acceptable if they convince the public that “someone else” is going to pay the higher taxes).

We owe #35,000 in federal debt for every man, woman and child currently, yet there is no real effort to reduce or freeze this debt. All because the politicians are more concerned with getting re-elected in 2 years (House) or 6 years (Senate) than they are with balancing the budget without using tricks like counting Social Security income against the deficit (Clinton’s famous 1 year “surplus” was a huge deficit if you didn’t count Social Security as regular income that year).

Easy credit is the only thing propping up the US Federal Ponzi scheme, and they just blew an additional $700 Billion to buy themselves a few more election cycles before they have to fess up like Madoff.

By: Lurker Carl

Lurker Carl — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:57:30 +0000

The same “experts” who created this economic mess we’re currently in are now in charge of fixing it. You can be sure rewards and punishments will be served by how our tax dollars are administered, not to mention $2 trillion can purchase a lot of favors. No questions asked, that was the promise made for them to fix the crisis.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

By: TStrump

TStrump — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:26:48 +0000

It’s just part of our culture of complaint … nothing is our fault anymore and it’s politically incorrect to blame or hold someone responsible.
Honestly, I can barely read the news sometimes without wanting to scream.
It’s worse here in Canada as we have ‘social programs’ for just about everything.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:08:14 +0000

I posted something about this on my blog a while ago with much the same “are you kidding me” tone. We’re supposed to trust them, you see. If we don’t trust them, just like we should have trusted them before instead of making them disclose the actual market value of their positions. If we’d just believed in them, somehow they would have made everything all better.