Democrats defeat GOP plan on mortgage rates

NewsBot · Feb 5, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A plan by Republicans in the Senate aimed at pushing mortgage rates lower has gone down to defeat at the hands of Democrats....

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ImWithStupid · Feb 5, 2009

...and had this been switched around and the GOP blocked a Dem plan to help people stay in their homes, we would be hearing about how the Republicans hate the poor, hate the "victims" of evil predatory lenders, don't care about the people, and eat kittens alive.

eddo · Feb 6, 2009

kittens are pretty tasty...

BrotherMan · Feb 6, 2009

The newsbot is becoming quite the conservative...

Bender · Feb 7, 2009

ImWithStupid said:

...and had this been switched around and the GOP blocked a Dem plan to help people stay in their homes, we would be hearing about how the Republicans hate the poor, hate the "victims" of evil predatory lenders, don't care about the people, and eat kittens alive.
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You mean something like this?

[ame= - Kerry rips Republicans' new-found love for housing[/ame]
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Bender · Feb 7, 2009

For a more indepth version, check out this: C-SPAN Video Library
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hugo · Feb 7, 2009

What we do not need to do is artificially maintain current housing prices with artificially low interest rates. Our best hope is the Dems and Republicans keep killing each others plans.

RoyalOrleans · Feb 9, 2009

Bender said:

You mean something like this?

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Kerry is such a pompous douchebag. I can't take anything he says seriously and I'm not sure if he believes anything he says either.

He just likes to hear himself speak.

ImWithStupid · Feb 9, 2009

I could get behind this plan...

12 American Solutions

Payroll Tax Stimulus.
With a temporary new tax credit to offset 50% of the payroll tax, every small business would have more money, and all Americans would take home more of what they earn.
A tax credit that offsets 50% of the payroll tax would put close to $1,500 in the pocket of the typical worker making $50,000, with the same amount going to the employer.
This would mean an increase in take-home pay for every American worker, and it would put more money into the hands of small businesses.

Real Middle-Income Tax Relief.
Reduce the marginal tax rate of 25% down to 15%, in effect establishing a flat-rate tax of 15% for close to 9 out of 10 American workers.
Marginal tax rates for middle-income families in the 25% tax bracket are too high. Add in effective payroll tax rates of 15% and state income taxes, and these workers are laboring under marginal tax rates of close to 50%. No wonder middle-income wage growth has slowed sharply.
Reducing the marginal tax rates for these middle-income earners would lead to income increases for middle-income workers, just as reducing excessive marginal tax rates for higher-income workers did, going all the way back to the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s.

Reduce the Business Tax Rate.
Match Ireland?s rate of 12.5% to keep more jobs in America.
America has the second-highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, with a federal rate of 35 percent--rising to 40 percent on average with income taxes. The average corporate tax rate in the European Union countries is 24 percent. Even India and China have lower corporate tax rates. Ireland adopted a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate 20 years ago. Since then per capita income has soared from the second-lowest in the EU to the second-highest.
Small businesses are responsible for the overwhelming majority of jobs created in America. A reduction in the corporate tax rate would allow them to keep more of their money and hire more employees.
Owning or operating a business is hard and expensive. Our government should not make it harder and more expensive. Lowering the business tax rate would create and keep more jobs in America, instead of exporting them to other countries.

Homeowner?s Assistance.
Provide tax credit incentives to responsible home buyers so they can keep their homes.
The housing crisis stems from the fact that there is an excess supply of housing. This abundance of houses on the market significantly decreased demand for housing and caused defaults to rise sharply.
Reducing the existing supply of housing by providing a tax credit to responsible home buyers, reduces defaults by slowing price decline.
As a result, increased housing demand will work to stabilize prices and brings nearer the time when home building increases.

Control Spending So We Can Move to a Balanced Budget.
This begins with eliminating Congressional earmarks and wasteful pork-barrel spending.
A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is one that is responsible with the people's money. The most effective way to allow American wealth to be harnessed for the benefit of society is to put it in the hands of the people who will put it back in the economy.
As the federal budget has only been balanced for four years out of the last twenty five, some of the critical building blocks to a successful and prosperous economy have been absent.
Restoring fiscal sanity and accountability to Washington also means eliminating wasteful pork-barrel spending. The budget process must be both honest and transparent, and spending should never be a result of insider connections in Washington.

No State Aid Without Protection From Fraud.
Require state governments to adopt anti-fraud and anti-theft policies before giving them more money.
The Government Accountability Office recently released a report that shows over 10 percent of Medicaid payments were improper in 2007, or $32.7 billion in one year. In just New York along, over $5 billion a year is wasted as a result of fraud.
Such fraud and abuse in our entitlement programs drives up costs, and it will only get worse as more Baby Boomers retire and enter the system.
When government decides to spend our tax-dollars, we must demand honesty, transparency and accountability. Therefore, states must be required to adopt best practices, such as moving to electronic records, if they are to receive any tax-payer money.

More American Energy Now.
Explore for more American oil and gas and invest in affordable energy for the future, including clean coal, ethanol, nuclear power and renewable fuels.
We have more energy resources than any country in the world, yet we are sending billions of dollars every year to foreign dictators to meet our energy needs. That is bad for both our economy and our national security.
We can begin to solve this problem by drilling for more of our own oil and gas.
By making the transition to clean coal technology, we can utilize our vast resources of coal (27 percent of the world?s reserves), dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and become a worldwide leader in green technology.
France currently gets the majority of its electrical power from nuclear plants. While it is essential that the government establish safety standards, we should work to reduce the barriers to nuclear investment so we can take advantage of this clean, reliable energy source.
We have the ability to replace a meaningful percentage of our gasoline consumption with ethanol if we aggressively develop the millions of tons of biomass in America.
A Manhattan project to stimulate advances in renewable fuels and alternative energies will allow us to eventually produce safe, clean, efficient and inexpensive fuels here at home.
Developing more American energy will translate into more money and jobs staying in America.

Abolish Taxes on Capital Gains.
Match China, Singapore and many other competitors. More investment in America means more jobs in America.
The current tax on capital gains constitutes double taxation, to which no American should be subjected. Already taxed on income, if an individual decides to save or invest his or her money then the government taxes it again.
Eliminating the tax on both personal and corporate capital gains would encourage saving and investment, boosting the economy by empowering the taxpayer rather than the Internal Revenue Service.

Protect Our Right to Vote in the Workplace.
We must protect a worker?s right to decide by secret ballot whether to join a union.
Workers have had the right to a secret ballot since 1935, to ensure that they would have a vote free of coercive pressure.
The Employee Free Choice Act would replace the secret ballot with a card-check system that would make workers' votes public and subject to intimidation by union organizers.
Forced unionism will kill jobs and drive them out of America, at a time when we cannot afford to lose them.

Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley.
This failed law is crippling entrepreneurial startups. Replace it with affordable rules that help create jobs, not destroy them.
It has been six years since Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the devastating accounting irregularities of Enron and WorldCom. While the intent of the law was to prevent corporate fraud, there is growing evidence that it has done more harm than good, and is undermining the venture-capital industry in Silicon Valley.
Economic growth in a sound market economy requires smart regulation, not destructive regulation that hurts economic growth.

Abolish the Death Tax.
Americans should work for their families, not for Washington.
The ?Death Tax? is an unfair double taxation that hurts working families. The assets that working Americans earn or produce over their lifetime have already been taxed once.
Not only does the ?Death Tax? undermine savings and investment needed for small business growth, these taxes undermine the promise that hard, honest work will be rewarded.

Invest in Energy and Transportation Infrastructure.
This includes a new, expanded electric power grid and a 21st century air traffic control system that will reduce delays in air travel and save passengers, employees and airlines billions of dollars per year.
Though we often take modern transportation systems for granted, the development of effective transportation technology and infrastructure is one of the prime factors behind our individual and national prosperity.
Transportation systems have dramatically reduced economic transactions costs, increased the speed and reliability of trade and communication, and brought enhanced quality and convenience to the lives of individuals across the country.
The future of American prosperity will at least partially depend on our ability to meet modern transportation demands with innovation and effectiveness.
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American Solutions - Learn More: 12 American Solutions

BrotherMan · Feb 9, 2009

ImWithStupid said:

I could get behind this plan...

American Solutions - Learn More: 12 American Solutions
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I breezed through them, but i didn't find much to disagree with.

ImWithStupid · Feb 9, 2009

ImWithStupid · Feb 10, 2009

Economist Who Don't Agree With The Stimulus Despite What President Obama Says

ImWithStupid · Feb 11, 2009

They passed the biggest spending bill in earths history and they got awy with it! In fact the press is claiming "a huge victory for Oboma"......Where in this spending bill is it going to help my company stay open this year. Tax allowances for my company or my employees...no way. The following is what our leaders feel in the answer to our problems...they did not hear the 64% of the country that was against it. We must rise up and protest this shameful spending!!!!

- $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (Stimulus?)

-- $380 million for the Women, Infants & Children welfare program

-- $300 million in grants to combat violence against women

-- $1.2 billion to provide "youth" with summer jobs

-- $2.4 billion for "neighborhood stabilization" activities

-- $650 million for digital TV coupons (For the procrastinators who either didn't get off their arses in the last three years or let their other coupons expire because they are lazy.)

-- $150 million for the Smithsonian

-- $34 million to renovate the Dept. of Commerce headquarters (Must be a payoff for taking the census from them.)

-- $500 million for improvements to the National Institute of Health facility (gotta get ready for that Universal Healthcare that will decide if you get healthcare or not.}

-- $44 million for repairs to the Dept. of Agriculture's headquarters

-- $350 million for agriculture department computers

-- $88 million to move (that's right, move) the Public Health Service into a new building.

-- $1 billion for the Census Bureau (Which by the way will be controlled by Rahm Emanuel)

-- $89 billionfor Medicaid

-- $30 billion for COBRA extensions

-- $36 billion for expanded unemployment

-- $20 billion for food stamps

-- $850 million for Amtrak (Has never made money while under government control)

-- $87 million for a "polar ice breaking ship" (What about the ice caps melting because of global warming?)

-- $1.7 million for the National Park Service

-- $55 million for the Historic Preservation Fund

-- $7.6 million for the Rural Advancement Program

-- $150 million for "agricultural commodity purchases"

-- $150 million for producers of livestock, farm-raised fish and honey bees

-- $160 million for paid volunteers (what is a "paid volunteer"?) at the Corporation for National and Community Service

Are we really to believe Obama that we may not be able to reverse our country's slide if he and Congress are prevented from ramming all this pork down our throats? And, by the way, what happened to Obama's pledge to end pork barrel spending?

Another interesting tidbit: Obama said that one of the reasons Congress must pass the stimulus bill, and must pass it NOW, is to end our dependence on foreign oil. What is astonishing is that he made this proclamation about energy independence less than 24 hours after his new interior secretary canceled the oil and gas leases on 77 parcels of federal land.

We are only two weeks into this guy's term and already he and his party are out of control.

Bender · Feb 11, 2009

This calls for a celebration then.

EAT THAT GOP, money that is going to fix America, not fight a needless war.
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ImWithStupid · Feb 11, 2009

Bender said:

This calls for a celebration then.

EAT THAT GOP, money that is going to fix America, not fight a needless war.
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Spoken like a true, big government, spend more liberal.

Too bad none of it will do what the bill is supposed to do. Help the economy.

Bender · Feb 11, 2009

You know, I'm actually pretty complacent about what Obama and Congress have done so far.

I by pass the skeptics and worry warts who proclaim they know that "IT'S NOT GONNA WORK".

Tax cuts don't build roads. Tax cuts don't create jobs. They haven't for the last 8 years so there is no point of following the same experiment twice and expecting a different result.

Republicans WANT the guy to fail, they want it just so they can laugh in the face of 365 electoral votes worth of support for not only the President, but the Senate and House as well.

A power trip senseless moan by the obstructionist party of America.

You complain about a stimulus but have no complaints on a congress passing trillions out the door for a BS war.

Not seeing the problem here... let the "PORK" ride, beats building more M-16's.
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ImWithStupid · Feb 11, 2009

Bender said:

You know, I'm actually pretty complacent about what Obama and Congress have done so far.

I by pass the skeptics and worry warts who proclaim they know that "IT'S NOT GONNA WORK".

Tax cuts don't build roads. Tax cuts don't create jobs. They haven't for the last 8 years so there is no point of following the same experiment twice and expecting a different result.

Republicans WANT the guy to fail, they want it just so they can laugh in the face of 365 electoral votes worth of support for not only the President, but the Senate and House as well.

A power trip senseless moan by the obstructionist party of America.

You complain about a stimulus but have no complaints on a congress passing trillions out the door for a BS war.

Not seeing the problem here... let the "PORK" ride, beats building more M-16's.
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Really? Because until the last year 6 million jobs were created under the tax break status, costing the government nothing. Even with the 1.5 million lost in the last year, is a net gain of 4.5 million jobs. My math may be off but that's still half a million jobs Obama "thinks" he can "save" (just a joke because nobody can measure it) or create in the next two years with over a trillion dollars of spending.

May I suggest some reading.

Obama's Stimulus Scam

February 10, 2009 - 12:00

Most of us have probably heard just about all the arguments we can take in favor of the so-called stimulus package Barack Obama urges upon us. They boil down to this: if the government seizes resources from individuals (whether by direct taxation, borrowing, or inflation) and devotes them to arbitrary projects, we will prosper.

Japan has been through countless "stimulus" packages over the past 18 years, none of which has accomplished a thing apart from driving that country deeply into debt. And after years and years of government attempts to give artificial stimulus to the stock market and the real estate sector, the Japanese stock market is now about where it was in the mid-1980s, and real estate is selling, on average, for the same prices it was in 1975.

The same is true of the American economy of the 1930s, the decade in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt was supposedly lifting the country out of the Great Depression. Far from restoring prosperity, Roosevelt did everything he could to interfere with the economy's adjustment from depression to health. Thus instead of letting prices and wages move freely so the economy could reallocate resources rationally, he kept wages artificially high (and workers artificially unemployable) and propped up consumer prices.

More pertinent to our situation, FDR's make-work programs dwarfed even Herbert Hoover's public-works spending, which had allocated more funds for that purpose in four years than had been spent in the previous 20. Billions of dollars later, what FDR had succeeded in doing was to divert resources from a private sector starved for capital, and thereby weaken the forces of recovery. When genuine wealth generators have to compete with government for labor and resources, the productive sector is weakened at the hands of the parasitic sector.

>From 1933 to 1940, the unemployment rate averaged 18 percent. As the 1930s ended, FDR's Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his diary: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.... We have never made good on our promises.... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enormous debt to boot!"

What a perfect summary of the stimulus scam: it doesn't deliver what it promises, and it saddles the people with more debt. You'd think we would have learned this simple lesson, but instead our children have been taught that FDR -- as big an economic ignoramus as has ever occupied the White House -- was a genius who saved the American economy. The economic and historical research debunking this view is all over the professional journals, but the New York Times professes to be horrified to learn that dissent exists over the legacy of FDR.

It is impossible to devise a plan for economic recovery without knowing what caused the downturn in the first place. FDR didn't have the slightest idea.

As the great free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek (who won the Nobel Prize in 1974) showed, when a government-established central bank, such as the Federal Reserve, forces interest rates below the level at which the free market would have set them, it sets off an unsustainable investment boom, particularly in time-consuming projects far removed from finished consumer goods (mining, construction, etc.).

Now if interest rates had come down because the public was saving more, then the public's saved resources would have provided the material wherewithal to see all the new investment through to completion. But if interest rates come down because the central bank forces them down artificially, as in the case we're examining here, then the investment boom cannot persist because insufficient resources have been saved to fund them. The passage of time will reveal that they cannot all be completed. Many of these investments turn out to be malinvestments -- that is, investments that should never have been undertaken in the first place, but that investors were misled by artificially low interest rates into thinking were profitable. They have to be abandoned. The bust comes.

In other words, it isn't the "free market" that causes the boom-bust cycle. It's the central bank's interference with the free market.

It's essential that government not interfere in the economy during the bust. Malinvestments need to be liquidated, not propped up with emergency loans. The economy's structure of production needs to be reorganized, with resources moving out of firms and sectors that were artificially and uneconomically expanded during the boom, and into genuinely profitable lines of production that cater to real consumer wants. Prices and wages need to be flexible in order to effect this rearrangement.

FDR interfered in this healthy process every step of the way. Not surprisingly, recovery eluded him. (And as I show in Meltdown, my new book, even the common claim that "World War II got us out of the Depression" is false and yields unnecessary ground to the stimulus-mongers.)

That's why the depression of 1920, whose first year was worse than that of the 1929 depression, was so short lived. Instead of a "stimulus" package, the federal government cut its budget. The Federal Reserve didn't try to inflate the boom back into existence. The economy sorted out the sound investments from the malinvestments, and before long the United States was back to setting production records once again.

Where is Warren G. Harding when you need him?

____________________________________________________________________________
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and, most recently, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Read a free chapter at MeltdownTheBook.com and visit Tom at ThomasEWoods.com.
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Obama and you can say what you want. Tax cuts have been proven time and again to be a way to prosper, spending has never, ever worked. I don't know why you think it will work now.

By the way, have you ever read about the Depression of 1920? Probably not, because in 1920 the economy looked worse than it did in 1929. The difference is, in 1920 President Harding decided to cut spending, not increase it. This lead to a quick rebound and a period of growth and prosperity known as the "Roaring 20's".

Something to think about.

ImWithStupid · Feb 11, 2009

Bender said:

Republicans WANT the guy to fail, they want it just so they can laugh in the face of 365 electoral votes worth of support for not only the President, but the Senate and House as well.

A power trip senseless moan by the obstructionist party of America.
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You keep bragging how the Dems don't need the Repubs, and can pass this if they want to, so tell me why would Obama push so hard for the Repubs to be involved.

Only one reason. The Dems and especially Obama know that this is just one big wish list and won't help the economy and they want Repub fingerprints on this scam that they are perpetrating on the American people.

Bender · Feb 11, 2009

What if it works?
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ImWithStupid · Feb 11, 2009

Bender said:

What if it works?
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I'll be the happiest, most surprised MF on the planet. It would be a miracle and the first time.

I know, there is a first time for everything.

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