Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Give me a $1 and I will make it easy for you to borrow it back!


CNN has the full details but it hardly matters, I suppose. Nothing has mattered to this point... the 700 Billion Dollar bailout plan is now it's fourth incarnation. This time, Paulson has set his sites on consumer lending. The theory is real simple-- make it easier for Americans to borrow money on their cars, colleges, and credit cards. When it's easy to borrow, it's easier to spend. The hope is to jump start the GDP which just saw it's biggest quarterly decline in 27 years. Americans just don't have any more money to spend, disposable income is down, debt is up. So what do you do when disposable income is down? Make it easier to borrow. Funny how it never occurred to Paulson that maybe putting more money in the hands of consumers would be better than putting more debt in their laps. Nah, that's be too simplistic. The answer -- take money away from consumers with taxes. Then offer to give them more debt in exchange for it. That makes good sense, doesn't it. I mean if I offered to take $1 from you, then promised to make it very easy to borrow that dollar right back from me-- you'd go for it wouldn't you? Awww, come on. It's me!



Stupid is as stupid does, and Paulson must be jockeying for an award. Taking money from our children and our children's children to fund our drunk-lust spending spree as Americans is just plain stupid. Not only are we left with the taxation credit card bill (which we owe to China no less), we're also making sure that the plastic can keep flowing, both through the credit card machines and that the National Shopping Bag Workers Union stays in business.



So, buckle up folks. Just in time for the holidays, Secretary Paulson has unleashed a new plan to stimulate consumer borrowing. Get in line early, folks because your friendly neighborhood slavers have never offered prices this low!!!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Slaver Bailout Plan of 2008

So the Dow hit a record low for the decade just a few moments ago, taking us back to numbers which haven't been seen since the Clinton era. Personally, I think we are near the bottom, but jeez... who can really tell?

Of course, this crash is happening in the middle of the largest bailout of corrupt businesses and corporate greed in the history of the United States. Having already spent almost half that 700 billion in two months, Americans still haven't seen anything. Jobs are not being created; they are being lost. Credit isn't being freed up, or at least if it is, very few are getting sucked in. Rates are the lowest they've ever been, but Americans are too in debt to take on more debt.

Once again, wisdom is proved by all her children. The solution to America's credit crisis was never more credit, cheaper credit, and easier to attain credit. You don't fix credit with credit. Ask anyone who is busy rolling around card debt from lender to lender to squeeze out an extra $20 bucks per month. It's a miserable place to be, I know from experience.

Tennessee is suffering. Because we don't have an income tax, we depend on sales tax revenue. Other states are hurting too because much of their budget is based on sales tax revenue. But what can you do when there are no sales? Free up credit? Further strangle our nation in a choke-hold of debt? Print more money?

Your government's solution was to bail out the slavers, not the slaves. To reward corruption and greed with billions of your children's tax dollars, ensuring that your children will also be slaves. Since passing the slaver bailout plan, the United States government has experimented with three different ways to spend it. None of that has your best interest in mind because it doesn't add a penny to your pocket; it just makes it easier for you borrow a penny from theirs.

Once again, all this money that is going to banks to erase invisible debt would have been better placed in the hands of working Americans with real debt. They sold invisible money; Americans acquired real debt. The slavers got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

We are running out of both time and choices. If you subtract the illegal immigrants and the population of Americans under the age of 18, then remove all non-working and un-taxable Americans, you'd be left with well under 200 million people. Divide out that 700 billion dollars (which by the way is ours) and you'd have a stimulus package totaling around $13,000 for my family of two working adults. That's a bailout ladies and gentlemen!

$13,000 of additional income to liquidate debt, to pump into the economy, to boost the Tennessee sales tax revenue, to invest in the markets.... the possibilities are endless. The government could have put requirements on the money-- forcing all working Americans with debt to put their full stimulus package toward their debt. And non-working Americans and illegals? Well they should have never been given credit to begin with. Let the slavers suffer. This action would have created liquidity-- and given real capital for the slavers who were responsible in their lending as their working slaves climbed out from under their clutches toward financial freedom.

Instead they chose to keep us slaves. And the ones that hurt the most? Working Americans. It's time for action, people. Are GM and Ford going to fail whether we bail them out or not because they have demonstrated the failure to make wise choices. We don't have to go softly into that goodnight. Write your congressman. Tell them they've rewarded quite enough stupidity, ignorance, and greed for this lifetime, and the next.