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US Scientific R&D Could Face Fiscal Cliff Doom
The tough economic times have had a huge effect on scientific research and development funding. The looming "fiscal cliff" may be the last straw for many programs. "The American science programs that landed the first man on the moon, found cures for deadly diseases and bred crops that feed the world now face the possibility of becoming relics in the story of human progress.
American scientific research and development stands to lose thousands of jobs and face a starvation diet of reduced funding if politicians fail to compromise and halt the United States' march towards the fiscal cliff's sequestration of federal funds."
into armed conflict by private banks, who, through their monetary policy are exerting undue political influence on the White House. It matters not which party sits in power, they have very little choice but to do what they are doing.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
From TFA: "1,082,370 U.S. citizens employed in the life sciences, such as biology and genetics, as well as physical and social sciences. Of these, approximately 31,000"
Wow, those are some massive cuts. An entire whopping 3% of the people may lose their jobs!
People just don't get it. The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely. It's not even about the $16 Trillion debt. If the government ran honest accounts, it's about the $200 Trillion debt.
Don't worry, citizens of America. That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
"The Wire is the story of the decline of western civilisation... disguised as a cop show" - David Simon
The Ascent of Man (credited as the inspiration for Carl Sagan's Cosmos) discusses this from a scientific perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYq4p3z_WXA
Civilisations rise and fall, it"s a sad fact, We must strive to preserve the light of knowledge for future generations who
might actually appreciate and choose to do good with it.
The problem is not the cut itself, but where the cut is being made. Remember news reports that the U.S. government spends more on air conditioning for troops in Afghanistan than the entire budget of NASA?
Does not that then suggests that the government should cut back on military spending? But no, they prefer to cut NASA's budget. After the priority is to blow people and clog the banksters with money.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Vital, down-and-dirty national spending and revenue decisions have been put off for GENERATIONS. We are staring doom in the face. Can salvation be found solely in science spending? Of course not. But does every single budget item and all tax policies and rates need to be on the table and without any sacred cows? HELL YES. And then the specific choices should be wise ones.
Without firm specifics at hand, I still feel very confident that there is 3% of utterly useless fat that could be trimmed from science funding. That's all we're talking about here.
P.S. - I admit that I see no sign whatsoever that seriously addressing the general situation is anywhere near the radar of the fools leading the nation - fools that WE installed. Profound differences over what needs to be done exist. FINE. OF COURSE they exist. But these losers won't even engage. That represents the most disgusting, reprehensible behavior which is possible to imagine.
The financial parasites that don't actually do anything or produce anything useful have recovered their massive bonuses already, but we are cutting back on people who actually produce thins that improve the quality of life.
"The German science programs that landed the first man on the moon" - Corrected
a D thing!
What we have to do is to reindustrialize America. That is, get the jobs back from overseas. How do we do that? First, we have to recognize that jobs did NOT go overseas because of work-for-peanuts foreign labor rates. No, no, no. They went overseas because of... taxes! Specifically, income taxes are toxic to industry in any amount. We should get rid of them.
_The_ answer is the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax calls for the complete repeal of all income taxes, every last one of them: individual, corporate, alternative minimum, self employment, estate, gift, social security / medicare, capital gains, etc. etc. Income taxes are essentially a tax on prosperity, and like RR said, "If you want less of something, tax it." Boy does that work great with income tax. We have waaaaaaay less prosperity than we could have.
The Fair Tax taxes consumption. That is, it is a sales tax. Stop with the knee-jerk "regressive" reaction, already, the income taxes are already incredibly regressive, with the Social Security / Medicare tax taking the first 15.3% of _every_ person's wages from the 1st dollar they make, it not mattering a whit that such person is only making $11,000 / yr. And if that isn't regressive enough, the Social Security / Medicare tax is capped in the $100K range, meaning the really rich people pay far LESS percentage than the poor person.
The Fair Tax taxes consumption, and "prebates" the amount of tax you pay on the amount of money you spend up to the poverty level. That is, if the poverty level is $11K per year for you if you are single, then the government sends you the amount of tax on $11K, in 12 equal monthly payments, so if you're poor you don't pay a penny of Fair Tax, it is paid for you.
What this does is make the USA the worlds newest, bestest tax shelter for industry to produce goods and services tax free. That is huge, since, according to Fair Tax researchers, approximately 22% of the selling price of everything produced in the USA is composed of industry expenses caused by income taxes. That is, a $40,000 SUV built in this country has about $8,800 of income tax expense in it. By contrast, it only takes about 30 - 33 labor hours to build the $40K SUV, and at the industry-stated rate of $78 / hr expense of labor to the the car companies, that is only $2,500 labor expenses to build the SUV.
Want to fix the economy permanently? Pass the Fair Tax, get unemployment down to 3% in about 2 years, killing about $100,000,000 of unemployment expenses and $70,000,000 of food stamp expenses to the gov't, and increase gov't revenues due to the huge expansion in the economy. Then, when full employment is achieved, wages start going up because of a labor shortage. That is when we can decide to let anyone that wants to immigrate to come here without restriction other than criminals and people with dread diseases, who we can also provide with good jobs and high wages, which.... generates more revenue from their spending. That, plus the fact that the Fair Tax broadens the tax base by including, for the 1st time, criminals that use the money stolen from the public via illegal means to buy their luxuries which will be taxed, as well as the idle rich that have no income but will be taxed heavily when they buy that $70M yacht, and, BTW, the rich contribute far more to the tax base than they do now simply because of their spending on luxury items.
We can do this, or continue with the income taxes sucking the lifeblood out of our economy, and be forced into austerity, and eventual 3rd-world existence because we'll be forced to lower wages to the work-for-peanuts foreign worker equivalent, while the gov't takes taxes from the wrong places, and forces jobs to continue to flee the USA and end up in places like India and Bangladesh.
A huge percentage of our spending is in maintaining the empire. Bring all of the troops home and cu all payments to foreign governments would solve this problem overnight.
If we could give up the $1T+ empire we would be fine.
If you then default in the debt we would be in great shape. You could even pass a law to make those bond losses count as earned income over the next 10 years to minimize the harm to citizens. Plus nobody would lend us money and we would automatically balance the budget.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I don't know if it's even possible for most people to be rational on this issue but I'll make a stab at it.
Is it scientific spending that is bankrupting the US government?
No it is not.
This is NOT where the cut should come. The cut should be everything else.
I won't state what should be cut because things are so ideological and people are so irrational on the subject that their eyes will roll back into their heads and start foaming at the mouth. But I think we can all agree that it isn't scientific spending that is generating the US debt.
Very well. Cut what is driving spending up.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The whole "fiscal cliff" doom the fox network is spreading (check who owns redneck eh discovery) just means that if congress digs in its heels and does nothing the President gets his way by default because tax breaks that the repubicans want to extend and increase for the rich will END!
Obama can just sit back and relax if he has the balls, he can get far more taxes by simply waiting out the republicans then trying to bargain with them. The smarter republicans know this (both of them) and are not at all please with their redneck counterparts trying to create a crisis that only exist in republican eyes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Woo Hoo!
Welcome back, former British colony of Virginia. :)
How about withdrawing tax benefits given to religious groups and instead tax Churches like any other business and use the money to fund tax breaks for science. As far as I can see science has done many things to make our lives better in recent years where as religion has just stood in the way of the progress of science.
Whoever makes the budget gets paid last.
It's just that simple.
If there's no money left, then Congress should get no pay until the situation is fixed.
Analysts are predicting that next year China will overtake the US as the leader in scientific output.
Wonder if that might be a big enough blow to the US ego to consider a reverse in funding cuts?
Good programs can always be rebuilt, if not by us, then by someone else. At least the fiscal cliff will cut military programs...and cutting them is far more important to me than any science program. Other countries can have science programs and educate their people....we need to stop being such warmongers first.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Personally, I'd rather see Financial Crisis Quake.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wow, human progress is becoming a relic of human progress. Those humans must be a bunch of oxymorons!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I mean, we're the electorate, and we consistently vote for representatives who are short-sighted, self-interested, and frankly, stupid.
I don't care WHICH side of the political fence you're on. Both parties have full rosters of idiots, and we seem to be listening more and more to the histrionic extremists and punishing the moderate centrists.
BOTH parties seem entirely focused on maintaining their own partisan grip on power and enriching their supporters, rather than actually doing their jobs.
Instead of having a reasonable cross-spectrum discussion about meaningful subjects like the role of government in the 21st century, we seem to be satisfied with an educational system that churns out 'citizens' with only a faint grasp on basic concepts of math or reading (to say nothing of civics, history, or art), and who are thereby easily swayed by entertaining but vapid emotionalist demagogues from both extremes.
To the OP: assume you have a budget planner who can't do basic math, and continues to budget your spending for far, far more than you make every year. Then, when things get tough, he does things like whine that "you need to just make more money" and cut off your long term investments instead of making the needed choices about maybe not buying a new gun this year, or cutting off some of the freeloading relatives who could probably get a job anyway (mainly because the guy you buy guns from takes him on junkets, and the freeloading relatives keep recommending that he's the guy for the job, respectively).
Wouldn't you FIRE him immediately for gross incompetence, if not have him outright prosecuted?
Some of us had the 'excessively sympathetic friend' in high school. The friend that, whenever something went wrong, they always 'helped us' by figuring out someone else to blame for everything. Didn't get the library book in on time? It was the LIBRARY's fault for being closed on Sunday (not you, for waiting until the very last moment to return it...). Girlfriend dumped you? She was a controlling harpy (it certainly had nothing to do with you cheating on her, that was just a mistake...). Failed calculus? Of course it was because the teacher hated you (and nothing to do with the fact that you got stoned instead of doing your homework). It was always someone else's fault.
Those are the talking heads on both sides.
They are entertainers. They are employed because they are entertaining blamers. Not because they're reasonable, not because they're wise. And we keep listening to them - the Limbaughs and Colters, the Maddows and Mahers. These are the people that make us feel better because everything is "someone else's fault".
WE are the ones who keep returning 95%+ of politicians to their seats.
WE are the ones who are ultimately responsible for putting them there.
WE have nobody to blame but ourselves.
-Styopa
For the last 12 years, they've pointed out over and over that the primary cause of our budget woes is Medicare/Medicaid and to a lesser extent Social Security.
Forgetting about a couple of unfunded wars are we? Or a military that outspends the combined budget of the next 15 largest militaries combined for no obvious reason? Medicare and Defense are the big budget problems. Social Security not so much.
Social Security is not funded like Medicare or Defense. It was only last year that expenses exceeded non-interest income and it won't be until 2021 at present funding that total expenses exceed total revenues. Social Security is fully funded and what funding problems it has are fairly easy to fix. Of the biggest government expenditures Social Security is quite literally the least of our problems. Extend the age to receive benefits and a few other simple tweaks to funding and it will be fine.
The financial parasites that don't actually do anything or produce anything useful have recovered their massive bonuses already,
We should let congress drive over the fiscal cliff so that republicans take the blame for their intransigence on perpetuating the untenable Bush tax cuts.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Stop declaring war and sending money overseas. You'd get back about $500-750bn a year instantly.
It's because there has been this perception that money on wars boosts economies. That may have been true when the countries were building production capacity and put every scrap of resources into doing so but now the production capacity exists governments take loans our to operate that capacity for political purposes.
Science and innovation is not as sexy to uninformed populations so even though it creates jobs by building industry all that science stuff is just confusing so people don't support it. It kinda sucks how once you let it go it's a downward spiral. War is more important than innovation, except when the innovation is killing.
Think about the entities who lobby your congress critters, do you think they want their business models disturbed by some disruptive technology created by *cough* scientists?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely.
The only programs that truly matter as far as the deficit is concerned are Medicare/Medicaid, Defense and Social Security. Those three together account for about two-thirds of the US budget. Get those programs under control and the problem is solved. All other discretionary spending combined accounts for less than 20% of the budget. Either we need to raise taxes to fully fund the programs we seem to want or we need to cut those programs to a level of taxation we are willing to accept. Either way will work but any argument about anything beyond Medicare and Defense (Social Security is easy to fix and self funding) is either naive or political pandering.
That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
A meaningless statistic. As big as the debt is as a percent of GDP, we've had larger debts in our past that have been dealt with just fine, most notably after WWII. That doesn't mean it isn't serious but your attempt to frame the issue doesn't really address how the debt would be dealt with. Corporations pay quite a lot of tax and can be made to pay more if need be. A relatively small percentage of the population has a vast portion of the nation's wealth. Furthermore all the debt the US government has is denominated in US dollars which can be created at will (with some fairly serious negative effects).
We jumped off this cliff in 1971 in order to pay for the the Vietnam war. We've been falling ever since. It just hasn't looked like we're falling because we're all boxed up inside a Fiat currency. Now that we're nearing the bottom and bouncing off a few jagged boulders, people are starting to realize we might be screwed. I love how this "Fiscal cliff" they've invented is designed to scare everyone, even scientists, into letting them raise taxes and reduce services even more. Hilarious.
Military spending is a red herring. Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy due to the above entitlements.
No it is most definitely NOT a red herring and your argument could apply equally to Medicare or Social Security which. Each of those three programs account for around 20% of the federal budget. You could apply your exact same argument to Medicare since it accounts for close to the same amount of cash as the Defense budget. If we accept your argument, even if we eliminated Medicare completely (ignoring the obvious devastation that would cause) it wouldn't balance the budget at current taxation levels. Some combination of cuts to Defense and Medicare are inevitable unless we significantly increase taxation. (I'm less worried about SS since it can easily be fixed and still is self funding)
The problem with the sequestration deal is that it was essentially a suicide pact: if Congress can't agree to a more-balanced budget, then savage austerity measures take effect, crippling government functioning across the board.
That's great as a motivator, except that one party is motivated by an ideology that actually wants that kind of austerity. In short: it's not a very good suicide pact if one side already has a death wish.
Also, don't worry about it being a mutual self-immolation: the Republicans will demand that only social spending (and not military) gets cut, and the Democrats will cave at the last minute in the name of compromise.
I suspect it isn't such a big deal, really. "Fiscal cliff" has started to sound like fingernails on a blackboard to me.
What would probably happen can be found here (caution - graphs with data).
Despite the rhetoric on both sides, there is no cut in federal spending coming any time soon. Even if Congress and the President do not come to an agreement (a not unlikely possibility) all that will happen is that spending will not increase by as much as projected. That is the situation at it stands is this. The law as passed last summer says that if Congress does not pass and the President sign (or Congress pass over the President's veto) some law changing things the amount that all parts of the Federal government will be allowed to spend next year will be 10% less than the amount that was projected to be spent in the last set of comprehensive "budget" documents passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. That is, they are not going to take how much Congress approved to be spent this year and reduce it by 10%. They are going to take the amount that Congress guesstimated they were going to spend next year (which includes a sizable increase from this year) and cut that by 10%.
Most people think that when they talk about cutting spending by 10% it means that if they spent $3 million this year on a program, next year they are going to spend $2.7 million. It doesn't. It means that they are going to spend $3.6 million rather than $4 million next year (numbers chosen for ease of calculation).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, there is not.
All the distribution and transmission facilities are owned by utility companies. Some of them (e.g. TVA,BPA) were created by the government, but they have independent lives, and have no taxing authority. There are government regulators of utilities (Generically Public Utility Commission (PUC)) as well as things like CAISO (California Independent System Operator.. the folks who provide the coordination of generation and transmission among the various entities in California). Much of the non-retail aspects of electricity is fully de-regulated (e.g. generation) and subject to the swings and roundabouts of market forces (for instance, Enron playing games)
Given that those home loans happened before Obama was President how does that possibly make it "Obama's fault"?
Given that the poor people weren't the ones offering the loans how does the offering of them make it "the poor ones who did it all"?
You do realize that the derivatives that you are speaking up consisted of mortgage-backed securities, which were created to monetize otherwise high risk loans, right? In turn these mortgages were pushed by certain loan programs to give mortgages to people who would not otherwise receive them.
Yes, actual foreclosures caused by the mortgages were a small amount of money compared to the derivatives, but those bad mortgages not only provided the basis for some of the worst of the derivatives, but foreclosures are an extremely demoralizing event, not only for the family itself, but for the whole market. When you see foreclosures, you see people losing their homes. That affects everyone, and that is why you want to keep them low, because when everyone feels poorer, everyone IS poorer. That's how the economy works these days.
Needless to say, blaming greed is always the right answer for issues like this, but having worked for one of the companies that did provide those securities, I saw that there was also another greed working as well, a greed for more popularity and votes by making people think that you were giving them something that they otherwise would not qualify for. I saw it in pretty, glossy, nearly tabloid sized literature that had company officers and various politicians shown handing keys to people. It was a nice warm fuzzy feeling, until you realized just how they were actually profiting from loans that they otherwise wouldn't be able to collect on.
If those people in those pamphlets were renting today, having never "owned" a house I can say they would have been objectively better off now than those who got to "own" a house they couldn't pay for, and then lost it. That's why you don't decree that you have to pay loans to people who can't afford them. You're not dealing with corporate greed, you're starting to fight against the smart people who use math and research to determine who is a reasonable risk for a loan. And when you stop listening to those people, corporations start turning to the sorts of people who promise they can turn straw into gold and create things like mortgage-backed securities based on garbage.
Don't forget all the greedy union teachers that crashed the economy. They're lauding all the way to the bank, as they drive by in their Tercels and Suburus.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Given that the poor people weren't the ones offering the loans how does the offering of them make it "the poor ones who did it all"?
The truth is, the poor were scammed by the rich. The banks had a win-win situation before the housing bubble burst. Talk poor Joe Sixpack who doesn't have an MBA into believing he can afford the house, and when gas prices quadruple as they did betwen 2000 and 2008 and he misses a single mortgage payment, the bank makes it nearly impossible for him to ever recover and finally forecloses, then sells the house at a tidy profit after collecting mortgage payments for a few years. And if the unthinkable happens and home prices sink, the bank has insurance to cover it. There's no possible way for the bank to lose money on a home loan under those conditions.
It was legalized theft, with the rich legally robbing the poor.
Free Martian Whores!
that if the budget cut is extreme that somehow the money just vanishes? That is not how it works. The problem is that the US Government combined with the states and various local governments, are taking too much money out of the economy as it is. Worse, they are wasting a good amount of it.
Plus, take away the standard scare tactic. Politicians abuse the poor all the time with such tactics as "they will take your food stamps". Why do you think so many were giddy over the ACA? Because they have a new fear tactic. After all, tell me what a politician threatens to cut first?
a) Education
b) Police
c) Fire
d) Research into fruit flies
e) A new library named after their mother.
f) a bridge to nowhere?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If you are the CEO of a company who is running a budget deficit (aka running at a loss), you do have two choices: raising revenue or cutting costs.
Often in larger companies there are many employees who are doing redundant tasks where doing a 50% reduction in staff (just to throw out a number) won't result in a 50% decline in productivity. In fact many businesses depend on that happening, as hopefully they get rid of the low-performing employees and those who are perennial screw ups. If you work and live in the real world, you know who those are... and sometimes they are you so it hurts even mentioning it. In that case, they are hoping that by firing 50% of the work force, the company may be able to provide about 75% of the services or products that they were able to provide earlier (to give an arbitrary number.... but that is the philosophy).
One problem with cutting staff is that a great deal of that "waste" is actually training people in the future to take over for the current cadre of experienced people. The hope for a well managed business is that you can get through the lean times with experienced people, so when times are better you can put them into a position to train those new recruits before they retire or simply die of old age. The other problem is that often it is hard to identify who you should cut or due to labor contracts of various kinds and some laws, you need to get rid of people who you should otherwise be hanging onto in such cuts of staff.
Raising revenue is the opposite side of things, where you hope that by increasing sales (or in the case of government you are raising tax revenue) that you can have your existing employee base simply be doing more things than they were in the past. That works to a point, assuming you haven't saturated your market or in the case of tax revenue you haven't taxes the citizens to the point they will stop working because they simply refuse to pay more taxes or can't afford to pay those taxes.
None of this is easy, and often managers of companies or government leaders choose the wrong path to go or at least would have been better off trying a different approach to the problem.
The ugly side is that a company which simply fails altogether to chart a reasonable path to balance its books will simply go bankrupt and stop being in business. A government, on the other hand, simply can't go bankrupt or when it does the results are a bit more catastrophic and result in civil war, inflation, or worse.
Whereas I read that as those offering the loans doing it, since the offering is what is being mentioned not the accepting.
Since when does having an MBA qualify you for anything? People know when they're overextended. I guess you could argue that poor people are so incompetent they need to be protected from themselves. Poor people do tend to have more of the instant gratification types in their ranks and they make poor decisions... as a rule that's why they're poor. I still find it a contemptable position to take but I guess I see where you're coming from.
There is no fiscal cliff. Moving on...
The point being that not everyone is going to be an expert in real estate and mortgages and all that stuff. That industry is an army of employees, all trained, doing this every fucking day, and they're going to understand it all way better than a person who might go through it once or twice in their entire lifetime.
The system is just plain stacked against the average person.
More Twoson than Cupertino
The obvious thing about economic subjects like this,
is that , allthough physics does not claim to be even analytically able to solve a three body dynamical evolution ,
when budgets are involved , everyone is suddenly the expert.
And the instrument everyone is using is the holy grail of all arguments .... : the percentage %
All talk boils down to this amount x percentage , compared to that percentage y
All the world is suddenly describable within a scale from 1 to 100
It's funny , but totally wrong.
Its the totem of finance ,
And everyone wants to weild that magic wand
%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Kind of silly is it not ?
Avoid your fears , or wonder at the past
One does have to remember the dollar is a farce and is inflating at high rates which they no longer report (but to be fair most the world is tracking along with it because we are their biggest consumers. ) So regular budget increases are necessary. While parent is generally correct, there is an impact just like a CUT but it is just not as big of a CUT in budget as it sounds. Ask anybody who understands their wage freeze knows it is actually a pay cut!
I want the crazies to drive us "off the cliff" and shutdown the government a few times. Obama needs to show some guts.... Gov shutdowns over budget fights have been going on more since the class war escalated in the 70s (and not coincidentally also the propaganda cover. A core issue in human history, now off limits.) Obama shouldn't fear having the 18-19th shutdown... and this "cliff" isn't as big of a deal but he can't even risk that... The echo chamber is making it a big deal; along with the unconstitutional debt ceiling fight (read the 14th and think how much more of a crisis that was.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
well they did manufacture the dumb people that took the loans sooo...
Funding has increased for Honey-Boo-Boo and Doomsday preparation.
America, the newest 3rd world country. Even Foxconn is looking to set up shop there.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Back in the sixties? seventies? It was noted in a lot of places in the mainstream media that the amount of money needed to create one job in the military would create 22 jobs in the civilian sector.
That's TWENTY-TWO civilian jobs. (Please insert all your stories of $722 toilet seats and $1024 hammers here, please.)
And do you really think that's gone down since then?
mark
“In 2007, the total volume of home sales in the United States was about $1.7 trillion—paltry when compared with the $40 trillion in stocks that are traded every year. But in contrast to the activity that was taking place on Main Street, Wall Street was making bets on housing at furious rates. In 2007, the total volume of trades in mortgage-backed securities was about $80 trillion. That meant that for every dollar that someone was willing to put in a mortgage, Wall Street was making almost $50 worth of bets on the side."
"Lehman Brothers had a leverage ratio of about 33 to 1, meaning that it had about $1 in capital for every $33 in financial positions that it held. This meant that if there was just a 3 to 4 percent decline in the value of its portfolio, Lehman Brothers would have negative equity and would potentially face bankruptcy."
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
Build derivatives and CDOs and trade at 50-to-1. Leverage those trades at 33-to-1. Get the rating companies to give those securities AAA ratings, despite having nothing on which to base those estimates. Then add in hedge funds and trades like Magnetar, where brokers deliberately packed tranches with toxic loans and then made money when securities deliberately setup to fail actually failed.
The housing industry was lead to slaughter not by government, but by Wall Street. It's hard to generate trillions in CDOs if you don't have enough of the loans on which those securities are based.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Isn't it time for the rest of the world to fund their own R and D. India's middle class is as large as the U.S.'s. China has a growing middle class and many billionaires. The Euro zone still has resources. Let all of them develop the next generation of advances. We can than ride their coat tails for a while and expand social programs for Americans with the savings. Or do you think Americans are much smarter than those foreigners?
It was legalized theft, with the rich legally robbing the poor.
Ignorance sure is expensive, isn't it? Maybe people shouldn't sign financial papers that they don't understand? Nah, that would be asking too much, right? If you're making a large purchase, like a home, isn't it worth a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars more to get the opinion of an attorney or a CPA that you pay directly and can trust to look over the paperwork on your behalf?
isn't it worth a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars more to get the opinion of an attorney or a CPA
The people who bought these houses couldn't afford attorneys or CPAs, nor did they know they needed them.
Free Martian Whores!