Postmaster General John Potter says the massive deficits facing the post office could force the agency to cut out one day of mail delivery per week. Read More
UPDATE 30 JAN
You won’t believe what’s in that stimulus bill.
We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it. There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.
In selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make “dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy.” Well, you be the judge. Read More
Getting kind of bad when the government thats trying to make more jobs is cutting work hours itself! Obama you are one big laugh!
I have a better idea! How about all of these companies who send out solicitations I never requested pay full postage! Most of my mail is junk I don’t even want, so our current postal fee schedule subsidizes solicitors.
p.s. Do you really think that Pres. Obama personally put this idea into the Postmaster General’s head? Yup, that postmaster is hanging at the Oval office every day, a deficit at the postal service is top item on the agenda ….. *rolls eyes* Oh, it actually says it was testimony before a congressional panel — well, don’t let any facts get in the way of a good ‘bama slam, right?
Hey if Obama can’t keep the jobs going in government how in the heck is he going to make jobs outside government… the man is a flop and thats a fact jack! He rather spend your tax money on abortions in Mexico!
As a mail carrier, I am definitely not in favor of cutting delivery days, this is a bad idea- period!
Yeah, goodtime, it is amazing how much Obama did and did not do in the 7 days before this post. Apparently, he managed to bankrupt the government in a single week. Amazing accomplishment. Not only that, but after a whole 7 days in office (now up to 9 days) you’d think our economy would be booming again. After all, it took only a little over 6 years to destroy it and then another year of pretending nothing was wrong before things got really bad.
The sad part is, I recognize you: “Democrat = bad, Republican = good, no matter what they actually do.” I’d imagine you are a great neighbor and a stand-up guy; however, you drank the partisan koolaid and can’t see for looking anymore. Turn off Rush, he’s lying at least half the time anyway, and turn on CSPAN so you can see what people are actually saying and doing. If you care to know.
As for the issue at hand, I’d prefer to have mail 6 days per week, and cutting back on this ridiculous amount of junk mail would help a lot. Why can’t we have a “do not mail” list? I’ve signed up on two lists that were supposed to reduce the amount of junk I get, but it didn’t. And NOBODY should be allowed to mail something I will have to shred unless I ask them to.
Didn’t take long after the democrats took control of congress before everything started falling apart did it?
I can remember back when the democrats raised the fed min wages that many of the small businesses said that they would have to lay off workers and some said that they would have to go out of business. I predicted at that time the prices would go up and the economy would have problems! I was posting on a discussion board at that time and the others were telling me that I was nuts!
I’m not going to reinvent the wheel — here’s my response to such silliness making the email rounds back before the election last year:
A few people reasserted the tired claim that Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and much of the economic problems we face are their fault. First, they were elected in 2006 and took office in 2007, so let’s give credit where it is due — our economic woes were apparent by 2006, as clearly stated by John McCain himself (who then didn’t follow through when deciding his policy positions): “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”
How laws are made in this country: It takes two houses of Congress as well as the President to make a law, which then must stand up to judicial review. Right now the Democrats have clear control of one house of Congress. That is all. Furthermore, it is entirely the job of the Executive Branch, where the President runs the show, to enforce laws. So if there is a law that says not to spit in public, but the police refuse to ticket for it — whose fault is it if there is spitting in public? It boggles my mind how anyone could seriously believe that the Democrats have brought about this disaster with a narrow majority in the House for less than 2 years. That would make this House of Representatives the most effective elected body in the history of the United States, possibly in the whole history of the world.
A basic review of how Congress works shows that Democrats did not, in fact, take control of Congress when they were elected in Nov 2006, or even in January 2007 when they were actually sworn in. Congress consists of two chambers, the House and Senate. To “take control,” the Democrats require a clear majority in the Senate as well as the House. Both the House and the Senate must pass a bill in order for it to become law. Since there is a virtual tie between parties in the Senate, legislation is essentially halted by the supposedly “out-of-power” party if they do not like it. Furthermore, the Vice President (for nearly 8 years, Cheney) gets to cast the tie breaking vote on any Senate bill. The Democrats do not have, and have not had in the 21st century, the numbers in Congress to change the course of the Bush administration’s policies. They have some control over rules and procedures in Congress, but lack the numbers to effect any real policy change. Face it, even if they finagle something through the Senate, without enough votes to override a veto, legislation is dead before it reaches the White House. Bush has vetoed 12 bills, 11 have been since Jan 2007. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_vetoes#George_W._Bush) The single veto in Summer 2006, when Republicans still controlled Congress, was so that some of the embattled Republicans could vote for stem cell research in order to show off their moderate credentials before the election. The bill was largely symbolic since everyone knew that Bush would veto it. The gimmick failed to work for the most part.
So let’s look at what the Democrats have done since Jan 2007. The first thing they did in the House was implement a PAYGO rule (http://www.majorityleader.gov/docUploads/CRSPAYGO.pdf). Looks like financial responsibility to me. The notion that Barney Franks somehow engineered this crisis is half-baked, here he is less than 2 months after assuming the chair of his committee, http://www.necn.com/category/32/4079. He asserts that “monetary policy alone won’t be enough;” that we must deal with the “structural problem, caused by the deregulation more than anything else, and caused by excesses in the private sector;” that “when enough bad loans are put into the system because of the absence of the lender-borrower discipline, ie, ‘I’m not lending you the money unless I know you’re gonna pay me back,’ that some of these techniques (risk management, quantitative models, and other strategies to replace lender-borrower discipline) did not contain the damage, they spread it;” that “the consequence has been a very serious world-wide problem;” and that it reflects “a failure for regulation to keep up with innovation.” Sounds like a man who sees the arrow coming. And he actually got a regulatory bill out of committee and through the House in just 2 months, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1427). This bill, which attempts to re-regulate mortgage entities that had been running wild for the last 9 years, was read twice and sent to committee in the Senate, where it died. I will not play the could-a-would-a-should-a game, but we may be looking at a very different economy today if that bill had kept going. In January 2008, Franks tried to jump start Senate action by appealing to Paulson. In 2008 they tried a different tack and put forward the FHA Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008 (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-5830) this May, still before the meltdown, it might have made a difference. Despite support from Paulson, it was dead on arrival when the Bush Administration promised to veto it, http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/07/news/economy/frank_omnibus_housing_bill/. The irony is that it is remarkably similar to what McCain suddenly proposed last month, right down to the dollar amount of $300 billion.
Make no mistake, anyone who wanted to know what was going on with the U.S. economy knew that there was a problem (http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/03/regulation_of_m.html); economists explained in painfully boring detail what was happening, but given a choice between holding fast to an ideology or addressing the real world, most Republicans held fast to an ideology (free-market=good, regulation=bad) and a knee-jerk formula (cut taxes at the top and let the market sort it out). By the way, the last effort to regulate the mortgage industry was in 1994, the last year Democrats controlled the House, The Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/1639.shtml). It was supposed to address concerns about sub-prime lending.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear, I am not saying that ALL Republicans abhor regulation. In my experience, the old-school bunch were pragmatic enough to recognize that it is necessary. These are the guys I actually voted for who have pretty much retired, the ones who could discuss ideas rather than yell and call people names. Government regulation is to financial hygeine sort of like flossing is to dental hygeine — nobody really wants to do it, but it is necessary if you want to keep your teeth. What we have now is a bit of a financial root canal.
intellectualhick: These are the guys I actually voted for who have pretty much retired, the ones who could discuss ideas rather than yell and call people names.
goodtimepolitics: Then if thats the case you would not have voted for not one of the liberal name calling nuts!
Hate to break it to you, but this whole economy meltdown started back during the last two years of the Clinton term! I’m not going to waste my time hunting for the information again just to prove to a bunch of left nuts that they are wrong, we conservatives know who is cause the melt down and thats all that matter!
Now that I got that above out of the way! How do you spin this to suit your agenda intellectualhick?
The Times’ article ignored a wealth of its own reporting, dating back to the era of Bill Clinton, whom the article mentioned only once, in passing.
For example, in September 1999, the Times noted that, “Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stockholders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.”
The 1999 piece went even further:
“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times,” the Times noted presciently. “But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.”
Likewise, the Times made no mention over the weekend of President Clinton’s aggressive deregulation of the financial services industry, which empowered banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies to engage in some of the very practices — such as credit default swaps — that contributed most to the current fiscal crisis.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, head of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; President-elect Barack Obama; and Bush’s 2004 opponent John Kerry all benefited from Fannie and Freddie. Read More
I’d say that has absolutely no bearing on the assertion that the Democrats slim margin in the house after Jan 2007 somehow instigated the problem. My purpose is not to cast blame, but to show that there is no merit in the blame that was cast. If you ever do decide to follow up on any of the links, some of which didn’t link up when I pasted this from an old email, you will find they are to primary sources, ie, actual legislation, government documents, documentary film footage, etc. I don’t base my opinions on opinions.
From where I sit, there is plenty of blame to go around and our time is better spent fixing it than throwing mud pies. The only blame I hold for the Republicans who just went out of power is that their unwavering faith in market fundamentalism made them powerless to act until it was long past time to take action. Even now, I am reading right wing opinions saying that we should do nothing and let the market sort itself out.
Market fundamentalism isn’t new, it was refined by Friedman and the Chicago school some 50 years ago and was a major plank in the Reagan platform. Reagan and Thatcher are pretty much where the path begins, which isn’t trying to toss blame either. (Let me nip that in the bud.) At the time, markets needed some deregulating. Things started going hinky later when people got the idea that if a little bit was good, then a lot would be great.
I hope I am not disappointing you by not springing to Clinton’s defense, but what’s to defend? The myth and magic of the free market caught flies on both sides of the aisle. Greenspan was the oracle, the oracle who actually testified recently that he was utterly wrong and totally mystified how that happened. I felt sorry for him.
… their [Republicans'] unwavering faith in market fundamentalism made them powerless to act until it was long past time to take action.
At what point would you say it was “past time to take action”?
… their unwavering faith in market fundamentalism made them powerless to act until it was long past time to take action.
At what point was it “long past time to take action”?
First, I’ll point out that hindsight is 20/20. I, like most Americans, am vaguely aware of fiscal policy but not particularly informed. I know what I know because I started researching it when things got bad last year, not because I am some sort of armchair economist with my finger on the nation’s fiscal pulse every day. You see, we expect the people we’ve elected to take care of this stuff, to do all the research and watch for signs of trouble. That’s why we feel betrayed when it becomes apparent that our country’s best interests were set aside in the name of politics. And, again, there is plenty of blame to be shared by both parties, but the party in power was the GOP. The GOP had both Congress and the White House, so even if the Democratic party was completely organized in opposing regulation (which sounds as likely as my kids refusing ice cream), the GOP could have moved forward anyway. Republicans certainly had no trouble steamrolling the Democrats on other vital issues, like not allowing people to negotiate medicare drug prices or permanently repealing the estate tax. Cheney even toddled over to be sure that dividend income would not be taxed. It’s a matter of priorities, right? We’ll see what the Democrats do with this same measure of power.
But to answer the question –
From what I’ve read since last summer, I’d say that 2003 was a critical point for noticing red flags, and by 2005 it should have been hard for people in Congress to miss them. I actually think maybe the problems became inevitable when derivatives were removed from oversight in 2000, but few would’ve guessed that at the time. No, the inevitable mess didn’t start showing until 2003 with the Fannie/Freddie scandals. Congress commissioned the OFHEO to look into things and the report was sobering (http://www.ofheo.gov/Media/Archive/docs/reports/sysrisk.pdf). To their credit, both chambers of Congress put together bills designed to address the issues outlined in that report. The Senate defeated their own bill and the House’s bill was refused by Bush. Not to their credit, Congress did not infer the broader implications of what was occurring at Fannie/Freddie. Further, they turned a deaf ear to economists who were alarmed by the size of our deficit and Greenspan’s call to reinstitute PAYGO. By 2005, the economy was code red. I think at that point it was inevitable that something bad was going to happen, it was just a question of how bad it was going to be.
The two-party system has become completely dysfunctional. If we don’t stop playing tit-for-tat and start working together there won’t be any spoils left to squabble over. Neither party has a stranglehold on the truth and neither has all of the best ideas. Maybe if they do a better job of talking instead posturing some better ideas will emerge.