Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan.
Sure — I agree with you... Actual income and the amount of savings are just parts of the picture — banks have spent decades figuring out their formulas. They already want to give mortgages, because it is profitable (in a Capitalist society anyway), so the bank, that overestimates the risk (and thus turns away some good customers) loses to competitors. In a free society, though anyone ought to be able to set their own standards and thresholds...
What the article was talking about was that lowering the requirements: ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''
See, "many borrowers" are "a notch below", our standards, so let's lower our standards. This was not done to make money (a properly Capitalist mind would've rejected it in a heartbeat), but to "help people"... And, hey, it worked against soo well, one may suspect Clinton and the rest of the people pushing this in 1999 to have done this on purpose. Oh, and then — the masterminding brilliance of hanging this catastrophe around McCain and Republicans! Evil anti-Capitalist geniuses...
Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage.
$100k per annum is not poor. Average salary in the US was just over $42k (gross) in 2005. Your using this number suggests, you don't really have a grasp of facts...
there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores
Of course, there was, even if nobody said so outright. You don't need to explicitly demand lowering standards — it is much easier to simply accuse the lender of racism... Since the CRA's inception in 1977, it is estimated, the banks have given at least $10bln to the non-profit groups (such as ACORN) — to keep the pressure at tolerable levels. But $10bln is nothing — just "the cost of doing business", passed onto the rest of us.
The banks were paying these assholes off, resisted suicidal changes to their risk-assessment and remained profitable. Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load crappier mortgages to the Fannie Mae. When this happened, the banks caved in, because their risk went down dramatically — they no longer had to keep the crappy mortgage, which they wouldn't have given without undue pressure in the first place, on their own books...
And thus the bubble began to inflate. There were suddenly fewer homes, than people able to buy them, which increased the prices. Our efficient Capitalist economy responded immediately with feverish construction activity. There were some early warning signs, but they were ignored. People unable to keep up with payments could refinance for a while (because the market values of their homes kept increasing), but that's not indefinite either. Banks' attempts to foreclose were met with the same resistance from the same non-profits — including the brilliant idea of littering the lawns of bank-executives with plastic sharks, and more of the same race-
As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets.
Oh, yes, of course, if somebody named Barry Ritholts rants about it on his blog, then it must all be true. Sure...
Community Reinvestment Act and similar legislation allowed pressure-groups (such as ACORN and affiliates) to pressure the banks into lowering their standards. On the other hand, the government-controlled mortgage-underwriters — to whom all banks resell most of their mortgages — were arm-twisted by Clinton's government to lower their lending standards. So, pressured by crazy Lefties on the streets on one side to give mortgages to people, who can't afford them, and allowed to do that by the "respectable" Lefties in government, the banks complied...
Really? Pressure to lend to low-income people caused financial institutions to repackage this debt as dubious collateralized debt obligations?
Yes. On the one hand, the law allowed ACORN and other pressure-groups to force banks to give mortgages to people, who didn't qualify for them. On the other hand, the pressure on the Fannie Mae (and Freddie Mac) forced them to lower the requirements on the mortgages, which they would buy from the banks. It is no surprise, that the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac were the first to experience major problems — long before the rest of the market.
And what the banks could not sell to the government-controlled (if not outright owned) FMs, they did try to sell to others in various forms.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are definitely a cause, but as to the cause? You're dreaming.
The bottom line is this — if the government (and government-allied pressure groups) didn't try to arm-twist the banks into giving mortgages to people not qualified to receive them, none of this would've happened. It was a wrong thing to do in the first place, and how exactly it damaged the economy is rather secondary.
[...] with pretty much everyone to blame, across the board
When a partisan states, that "we are all to blame", he is admitting, that the bulk of the responsibility is on his side... I'll accept that.
Blaming a worldwide financial crisis on poor people? What a crock of shit.
That's a nice strawman you got there. Wow! No, the politicians I'm blaming are all very well off. It is not the poor, whom I blame, but the attempts to help them: "oh, if only they could get a mortgage, they'd be fine". No, they wouldn't be — in a Capitalist economy home loans bring profit — banks want to give them to everyone already, so if there is someone, who can't get it, the problem is not with the bank, but with that someone: "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required". No shit...
I mean, you don't need Einstein to tell you than when you offload real risk from the lending institution to investors
The first and foremost such "investors" were Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac — then-quasi (and now fully) government owned corporations, pressured by the government to lower the requirements on the mortgages that could be off-loaded to them by the private banks.
That pressure to buy ever-riskier loans was what caused these "investors" to allow the banks sell ever-riskier mortgages. The Democrats were doing it "help the poor" of course — in their attempts to make the poor richer, they made the rich poorer...
you want to blame the Community Reinvestment Act or other similar legislation to kickstart lending to low-income areas
What we blame — with figures, dates, and names — are the misguided attempts by the government to "do good" (such as "kickstarting" something for the "low income"). It never works, and it always makes things worse. That it is also anti-Constitutional bothers some of as as well...
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."James Madison
And here is the 1999 New York Times article matter-of-factly reporting on Fannie Mae easing credit to aid mortgage lending:
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 stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
Civilization existed several thousand years ago, but I don't particularly want to return to the stone age...
The difference between my point and your counter example is that while the Stone Age is countless generations behind us, the pre-Internet era was experienced by most of people still living today... Thus there is nothing particularly cruel about depriving a person of this aspect of modern life — assuming, of course, that what they've done should, indeed, be punished at all...
And if you don't share that assumption, well, then it is rather insincere of you (and of Doctorow, BTW), to pretend, that it is just the punishment you find disagreeable...
Yes, but the problem is that many of our government's communication and services ONLY run through Internet nowadays, due to modernism and budget cuttings.
1. (2) mercenary, soldier of fortune -- (a person hired to fight for another country than their own)
Overview of adj mercenary
The adj mercenary has 3 senses (no senses from tagged texts)
materialistic, mercenary, worldly-minded -- (marked by materialism)
mercenary, free-lance, freelance -- (serving for wages in a foreign army; "mercenary killers")
mercantile, mercenary, moneymaking -- (profit oriented; "a commercial book"; "preached a mercantile and militant patriotism"- John Buchan; "a mercenary enterprise"; "a moneymaking business")
I don't think, you used the term in its second sense, but there is certainly nothing lamentable, that people work for money and are thus "profit oriented" (1st and 3rd senses). It has always been like that and works out pretty well...
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages."
'The internet is an integral part of our children's education; it's critical to our employment; it's how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It's how we engage with government. It's the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.
Yes, it is amazing, that the Internet has become all this — and more — but civilization did exist before 1990ies, and all of the freedoms mentioned were there — some of them even more so than today, perhaps.
made their fortunes on stock picks, or on commissions, to which he immediately replied "commissions." That told me all I needed to know about paying for their advice.
This is not entirely fair, because people are often advised against investing in a company (or even industry), where they themselves work. Doing so could, some day, result in a "double whammy" if/when your company goes down (or the entire industry gets into turmoil): you lose both your job and your investment.
Similarly, a broker following his own (or his co-workers') stock-picks is exposing himself to both risks. Whereas the client risks only their investment, should the advice be poor, the broker also risks his job — even though the reward is the same.
Expecting people to bet their own farm on the advice they charge you money for is unrealistic — and their not doing so is not, in itself, a reflection of the quality of the advice.
"It's human nature that people always want what they can't have -- which is why there's so much interest around the world in accessing the US-only Hulu site."
Is it really just human nature, or could it — just possibly — be, that the American entertainment is, really and truly, the most entertaining, for whatever reasons? There really is so much of it — with something for everyone: from Michale Moore to South Park, from zombies to healthy families...
But no, let's not acknowledge, American-made can be good for anything — let's pretend, all interest is only there because of access limits...
An economy which has the wealth concentrated in the few is going to suffer because it has a poorer middle class.
Most of your rant is about equality being a good thing — and I absolutely agree with it. What I disapprove, however, is the government's pursuit of artificial equality. The difference is that of between healthy green grass, and not-so-healthy painted grass.
In other words, it is great, if citizens are equally rich naturally, but any attempts to make them equal by the government only make them equally poor. This is because you can not make people more productive, if they don't pursue that themselves. But you can confiscate from the productive — and this is your only instrument towards equality...
But you don't see the effective tax rate they are paying in the end. Turns out they get taxed much less than someone in the middle class like me.
It is patently obvious, that "the rich" pay a lot more in both absolute ($$) and relative (%%) terms in taxes. Both on income and on property. If your point is about something else, you don't articulate it...
If the public school system didn't exist, then some would get no education at all which would have an extremely negative impact on society.
We have a public school system, and some still don't get education "at all". As recently as in 2003 — decades after public school system was created — New York (of all places) was still blamed for school children "not receiving the constitutionally-mandated opportunity for a sound basic education". We are at the very top of spenders per pupil world-wide (and New York is at the top among the States), but there are still major gaps in educations with kids barely learning, how to put on a condom — forget adding fractions...
Government-provided health-care will be no different...
Record profits for people who tell you you can't have insurance because you are pregnant or you were raped.
That's right — you can not buy insurance for a car after the accident either. You can still get treatment (and repair your car) — you'll just have to pay for it yourself. And if you "can't afford it", then what you are asking for is charity. We, Americans, are very charitable on average, but we don't like it, when we are forced to help the poor at gunpoint (i.g. via the IRS).
As for their "record profits" — that's simply irrelevant. Oh, and it is also not true...
Capitalism and socialism are not inherently good or evil.
Socialism is inherently evil. First of all, by taking from work to console the idle it is patently unfair. And second — as Socialist countries world-wide demonstrate — it is also ineffective. At best, a Socialist country can survive economically. But it has no money to defend itself. Capitalism, on the other hand, not gives fair opportunities, but also provides enormous economic benefits even to the least successful of its participants. Forcing Socialism on a Capitalist society — using a temporary crisis, whenever convenient — is evil.
We don't want to cut off Phelps arm to make him slower. We want to make sure that if there is some minority kid out there that is faster than him, that he gets that same chance to compete.
Michael Phelps is a son of a policeman and a school principal. His parents divorced, when he was 9. He has an arrest record... And yet, he achieve
Obama believes that the federal gov (not free market supply/demand) has all the answers. He believes that people like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and all of his Tsars are the all-knowing solution providers that know what's best for the rest of us. Yes, even smarter than everyone here on Slashdot.
It is not only that, but also the belief (sincere or not) that equality ought to trump quality... Government-provided schools, clinics, roads, subways, postal service, inevitably suck, but they suck equally for all — rich and poor — except, maybe, for the superrich like the politicians, who view themselves as more equal than others and send their own children to very expensive private schools.
To the holders of this opinion, the fact that parts of the country can get an ultra-fast optical connection (without government's subsidy), and that there is not a person any more, who can't get a high-speed dial-up (without government's subsidy), is nothing compared to the inequality between the two extremes.
The trouble with this attitude is that it is impossible to make things equally good for all people. So all attempts to do so end up making things equally bad. Equality is achieved, and quality was secondary anyway.
It is this crusaders for equality, who keep bringing up "growing income disparity" — and advocate taxation and regulation to make things "fair". Why they haven't yet thought of amputating a limb of Michael Phelps — to "level the playing field" between him and other swimmers — is beyond me... Clearly, his 8 Olympic gold medals is grossly unfair towards the rest of the swimmers, who swam the same distance at nearly the same times, but got no or one gold medal only.
Private market — despite occasional flaws — is the best there can be. And when there is a problem, it is usually traced to the government's filthy little fingers. In this case, it is the "genius" decision to grant telecoms a mono- or, at best, duopoly over a market...
They [Fox -mi] don't deal in news, but rather in propaganda.
Good to see more brave Americans joining the President in his War on Fox News! The enemy will be crushed!
That said, I fail to see, how their being news or not is relevant to the issue. DeBeers and Ralph Loren most certainly aren't news organizations, but they do have their listings anyway.
[...] a pathetic, lost-looking pack of redneck cretins?
That's right, comrade!.. That's a bit of objective fact-delivery, that all true news organizations must try to emulate...
Microsoft relies on Washington law and its underfunded courts [emphasis mine -mi] to defend its contract
Why are Washington's courts underfunded despite the State having the additional taxes compared to Nevada? I mean, even if Microsoft does not pay their "fair share", at least some other companies in the State do. And yet, the courts remain "underfunded".
Could it be, that the tax revenue is being used for something else, and that even if Microsoft did pay as kdawson would want them to, the courts would've remained underfunded anyway?
How many cases occur where even with social engineering will someone run ldd but not run the executable?
Actually, this is one scenario:
send a user (perhaps, via spam) the evil binary (dancing_bunnies);
they'll save it, try to run it, and it will (bogusly) complain about a missing library or two;
the user might then ask their admin for assistance — forwarding him the error message even;
there is a good chance, that the admin will try to use ldd to resolve the missing-library problem.
it is very likely, the admin will be root at the time, for otherwise he may be unable to access the user-owned executable due to the strict permissions, that mail-clients impose on the saved attachments...
depending on the payload in the executable, root executing it will mean...
Profit!
This may not work against all users-admins combinations, but it does not have to — just against even a small percentage of them...
Conservative writers have piss poor coordination with other nations
Neah, I don't think, this is a big problem. And even if it were, it is orthogonal to the one I was talking about — the public schools are currently a stronghold of the Left and children are being brainwashed there. Not all of them are able to shake it off later in life... You lose your hard-reared children's mind to the Illiberals, who thus manage to protract the existence of their ideology way beyond, what their own birthrate would afford...
I mean, conservatives in America might be more sympathetic to the French when they decry mcdonalds overtaking local restaurants, or when writers in the eastern bloc protest how globalization threatens long standing traditions.
This is, where we split — my favorite Conservatism is Libertarianism... To me the spread of McDonald's and globalization in general (and, even more generally, Capitalism itself) are derived not from their being economically beneficial, but from everyone's freedom to Pursue their Happiness: including founding a corporation and expanding it wherever one wants to, as well as going to any restaurant one likes, even if its mere presence offends a high-brow minority ("Starbucks was bad enough but McDonald's is worse").
But how many unsuccessful attempts have there been?
(No, seriously, I have no idea and am curious.)
If you truly are interested, then do your own research. The point being made by abortion-opponents (a majority in this country, BTW), is that they are being unfairly vilified. Whereas terrorist acts by fanatics of other religion(s) (and they too have plenty of little-reported failures) are immediately followed by calls to not consider all adherents of the religion terrorists, the anti-abortion Christians are never defended in this manner. Worse — as this very thread has shown — they are being openly accused of sharing each terrorist's views and thus their guilt.
If we can then privatize schools and do the other things so that your input to our culture can be blocked
This will be much harder to do, than to simply have children... Your opponents have recognized this attack vector long ago — and spared no effort to entrench themselves at the "public" education front. (Their strong positions in popular culture is, likely, natural — having fewer children leads one more time to pursue other interests.)
But, at the end of the day, your way of life is doomed, simply because, for better or for worse, our religious culture has been evolved by hundreds of generations of human cultural evolution, and your culture will fall by the wayside as much as your genes will perish forever in the dust.
As long as they can convert your children to their mentality — and they aren't going to stop trying — they don't need to outbreed you. Worse — by seeding your children's minds with their ideas, they make their ideology (if not their genes) come out ahead. You get to go through pain and expense of birth and child-rearing, and then struggle to win your kid's mind from the State's "educators".
This is not meant to discourage you — while this recent immigrant finds both of the main sides of America's culture-wars unpleasant, I'd rather the conservatives win — but to point out, that taking back the schools and the popular culture should be the primary target, rather than a mere afterthought.
If you don't think the first thing people think about when they see a headline with the words "human embryo" is the abortion debate
People do think of that, and these people are wrong. That was the point of my response...
And those are the ones not busy cutting crosses into their wadcutters hoping to get a shot at the doctor who would perform that pap smear.
As evidenced by, what, a whopping five abortion-providers killed since 1993? Although each death is one too many, you are still overly concerned with this particular injustice.
Slashdot Mirror
Asterisk supports Skype. As does FreeSWITCH.
Sure — I agree with you... Actual income and the amount of savings are just parts of the picture — banks have spent decades figuring out their formulas. They already want to give mortgages, because it is profitable (in a Capitalist society anyway), so the bank, that overestimates the risk (and thus turns away some good customers) loses to competitors. In a free society, though anyone ought to be able to set their own standards and thresholds...
What the article was talking about was that lowering the requirements: ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''
See, "many borrowers" are "a notch below", our standards, so let's lower our standards. This was not done to make money (a properly Capitalist mind would've rejected it in a heartbeat), but to "help people"... And, hey, it worked against soo well, one may suspect Clinton and the rest of the people pushing this in 1999 to have done this on purpose. Oh, and then — the masterminding brilliance of hanging this catastrophe around McCain and Republicans! Evil anti-Capitalist geniuses...
$100k per annum is not poor. Average salary in the US was just over $42k (gross) in 2005. Your using this number suggests, you don't really have a grasp of facts...
Of course, there was, even if nobody said so outright. You don't need to explicitly demand lowering standards — it is much easier to simply accuse the lender of racism... Since the CRA's inception in 1977, it is estimated, the banks have given at least $10bln to the non-profit groups (such as ACORN) — to keep the pressure at tolerable levels. But $10bln is nothing — just "the cost of doing business", passed onto the rest of us.
The banks were paying these assholes off, resisted suicidal changes to their risk-assessment and remained profitable. Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load crappier mortgages to the Fannie Mae. When this happened, the banks caved in, because their risk went down dramatically — they no longer had to keep the crappy mortgage, which they wouldn't have given without undue pressure in the first place, on their own books...
And thus the bubble began to inflate. There were suddenly fewer homes, than people able to buy them, which increased the prices. Our efficient Capitalist economy responded immediately with feverish construction activity. There were some early warning signs, but they were ignored. People unable to keep up with payments could refinance for a while (because the market values of their homes kept increasing), but that's not indefinite either. Banks' attempts to foreclose were met with the same resistance from the same non-profits — including the brilliant idea of littering the lawns of bank-executives with plastic sharks, and more of the same race-
Oh, yes, of course, if somebody named Barry Ritholts rants about it on his blog, then it must all be true. Sure...
Community Reinvestment Act and similar legislation allowed pressure-groups (such as ACORN and affiliates) to pressure the banks into lowering their standards. On the other hand, the government-controlled mortgage-underwriters — to whom all banks resell most of their mortgages — were arm-twisted by Clinton's government to lower their lending standards. So, pressured by crazy Lefties on the streets on one side to give mortgages to people, who can't afford them, and allowed to do that by the "respectable" Lefties in government, the banks complied...
Yes. On the one hand, the law allowed ACORN and other pressure-groups to force banks to give mortgages to people, who didn't qualify for them. On the other hand, the pressure on the Fannie Mae (and Freddie Mac) forced them to lower the requirements on the mortgages, which they would buy from the banks. It is no surprise, that the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac were the first to experience major problems — long before the rest of the market.
And what the banks could not sell to the government-controlled (if not outright owned) FMs, they did try to sell to others in various forms.
The bottom line is this — if the government (and government-allied pressure groups) didn't try to arm-twist the banks into giving mortgages to people not qualified to receive them, none of this would've happened. It was a wrong thing to do in the first place, and how exactly it damaged the economy is rather secondary.
When a partisan states, that "we are all to blame", he is admitting, that the bulk of the responsibility is on his side... I'll accept that.
That's a nice strawman you got there. Wow! No, the politicians I'm blaming are all very well off. It is not the poor, whom I blame, but the attempts to help them: "oh, if only they could get a mortgage, they'd be fine". No, they wouldn't be — in a Capitalist economy home loans bring profit — banks want to give them to everyone already, so if there is someone, who can't get it, the problem is not with the bank, but with that someone: "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required". No shit...
You mean, your Left-wing lions really haven't said anything, the linked-to videos purport they said? Because GP's words can't "lies" otherwise...
The first and foremost such "investors" were Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac — then-quasi (and now fully) government owned corporations, pressured by the government to lower the requirements on the mortgages that could be off-loaded to them by the private banks.
That pressure to buy ever-riskier loans was what caused these "investors" to allow the banks sell ever-riskier mortgages. The Democrats were doing it "help the poor" of course — in their attempts to make the poor richer, they made the rich poorer...
What we blame — with figures, dates, and names — are the misguided attempts by the government to "do good" (such as "kickstarting" something for the "low income"). It never works, and it always makes things worse. That it is also anti-Constitutional bothers some of as as well...
And here is the 1999 New York Times article matter-of-factly reporting on Fannie Mae easing credit to aid mortgage lending:
The difference between my point and your counter example is that while the Stone Age is countless generations behind us, the pre-Internet era was experienced by most of people still living today... Thus there is nothing particularly cruel about depriving a person of this aspect of modern life — assuming, of course, that what they've done should, indeed, be punished at all...
And if you don't share that assumption, well, then it is rather insincere of you (and of Doctorow, BTW), to pretend, that it is just the punishment you find disagreeable...
We are discussing a punishment — it is supposed to feel bad. Or even "really" bad.
Citation needed.
1. (2) mercenary, soldier of fortune -- (a person hired to fight for another country than their own)
Overview of adj mercenary
The adj mercenary has 3 senses (no senses from tagged texts)
I don't think, you used the term in its second sense, but there is certainly nothing lamentable, that people work for money and are thus "profit oriented" (1st and 3rd senses). It has always been like that and works out pretty well...
Yes, it is amazing, that the Internet has become all this — and more — but civilization did exist before 1990ies, and all of the freedoms mentioned were there — some of them even more so than today, perhaps.
This is not entirely fair, because people are often advised against investing in a company (or even industry), where they themselves work. Doing so could, some day, result in a "double whammy" if/when your company goes down (or the entire industry gets into turmoil): you lose both your job and your investment.
Similarly, a broker following his own (or his co-workers') stock-picks is exposing himself to both risks. Whereas the client risks only their investment, should the advice be poor, the broker also risks his job — even though the reward is the same.
Expecting people to bet their own farm on the advice they charge you money for is unrealistic — and their not doing so is not, in itself, a reflection of the quality of the advice.
Is it really just human nature, or could it — just possibly — be, that the American entertainment is, really and truly, the most entertaining, for whatever reasons? There really is so much of it — with something for everyone: from Michale Moore to South Park, from zombies to healthy families...
But no, let's not acknowledge, American-made can be good for anything — let's pretend, all interest is only there because of access limits...
Most of your rant is about equality being a good thing — and I absolutely agree with it. What I disapprove, however, is the government's pursuit of artificial equality. The difference is that of between healthy green grass, and not-so-healthy painted grass.
In other words, it is great, if citizens are equally rich naturally, but any attempts to make them equal by the government only make them equally poor. This is because you can not make people more productive, if they don't pursue that themselves. But you can confiscate from the productive — and this is your only instrument towards equality...
It is patently obvious, that "the rich" pay a lot more in both absolute ($$) and relative (%%) terms in taxes. Both on income and on property. If your point is about something else, you don't articulate it...
We have a public school system, and some still don't get education "at all". As recently as in 2003 — decades after public school system was created — New York (of all places) was still blamed for school children "not receiving the constitutionally-mandated opportunity for a sound basic education". We are at the very top of spenders per pupil world-wide (and New York is at the top among the States), but there are still major gaps in educations with kids barely learning, how to put on a condom — forget adding fractions...
Government-provided health-care will be no different...
That's right — you can not buy insurance for a car after the accident either. You can still get treatment (and repair your car) — you'll just have to pay for it yourself. And if you "can't afford it", then what you are asking for is charity. We, Americans, are very charitable on average, but we don't like it, when we are forced to help the poor at gunpoint (i.g. via the IRS).
As for their "record profits" — that's simply irrelevant. Oh, and it is also not true...
Socialism is inherently evil. First of all, by taking from work to console the idle it is patently unfair. And second — as Socialist countries world-wide demonstrate — it is also ineffective. At best, a Socialist country can survive economically. But it has no money to defend itself. Capitalism, on the other hand, not gives fair opportunities, but also provides enormous economic benefits even to the least successful of its participants. Forcing Socialism on a Capitalist society — using a temporary crisis, whenever convenient — is evil.
Michael Phelps is a son of a policeman and a school principal. His parents divorced, when he was 9. He has an arrest record... And yet, he achieve
It is not only that, but also the belief (sincere or not) that equality ought to trump quality... Government-provided schools, clinics, roads, subways, postal service, inevitably suck, but they suck equally for all — rich and poor — except, maybe, for the superrich like the politicians, who view themselves as more equal than others and send their own children to very expensive private schools.
To the holders of this opinion, the fact that parts of the country can get an ultra-fast optical connection (without government's subsidy), and that there is not a person any more, who can't get a high-speed dial-up (without government's subsidy), is nothing compared to the inequality between the two extremes.
The trouble with this attitude is that it is impossible to make things equally good for all people. So all attempts to do so end up making things equally bad. Equality is achieved, and quality was secondary anyway.
It is this crusaders for equality, who keep bringing up "growing income disparity" — and advocate taxation and regulation to make things "fair". Why they haven't yet thought of amputating a limb of Michael Phelps — to "level the playing field" between him and other swimmers — is beyond me... Clearly, his 8 Olympic gold medals is grossly unfair towards the rest of the swimmers, who swam the same distance at nearly the same times, but got no or one gold medal only.
Private market — despite occasional flaws — is the best there can be. And when there is a problem, it is usually traced to the government's filthy little fingers. In this case, it is the "genius" decision to grant telecoms a mono- or, at best, duopoly over a market...
Good to see more brave Americans joining the President in his War on Fox News! The enemy will be crushed!
That said, I fail to see, how their being news or not is relevant to the issue. DeBeers and Ralph Loren most certainly aren't news organizations, but they do have their listings anyway.
That's right, comrade!.. That's a bit of objective fact-delivery, that all true news organizations must try to emulate...
But Fox is not there?.. How come? Why are they so special? Certainly could've come after all those calling them "Faux", for just one example...
Why are Washington's courts underfunded despite the State having the additional taxes compared to Nevada? I mean, even if Microsoft does not pay their "fair share", at least some other companies in the State do. And yet, the courts remain "underfunded".
Could it be, that the tax revenue is being used for something else, and that even if Microsoft did pay as kdawson would want them to, the courts would've remained underfunded anyway?
Actually, this is one scenario:
This may not work against all users-admins combinations, but it does not have to — just against even a small percentage of them...
Neah, I don't think, this is a big problem. And even if it were, it is orthogonal to the one I was talking about — the public schools are currently a stronghold of the Left and children are being brainwashed there. Not all of them are able to shake it off later in life... You lose your hard-reared children's mind to the Illiberals, who thus manage to protract the existence of their ideology way beyond, what their own birthrate would afford...
This is, where we split — my favorite Conservatism is Libertarianism... To me the spread of McDonald's and globalization in general (and, even more generally, Capitalism itself) are derived not from their being economically beneficial, but from everyone's freedom to Pursue their Happiness: including founding a corporation and expanding it wherever one wants to, as well as going to any restaurant one likes, even if its mere presence offends a high-brow minority ("Starbucks was bad enough but McDonald's is worse").
If you truly are interested, then do your own research. The point being made by abortion-opponents (a majority in this country, BTW), is that they are being unfairly vilified. Whereas terrorist acts by fanatics of other religion(s) (and they too have plenty of little-reported failures) are immediately followed by calls to not consider all adherents of the religion terrorists, the anti-abortion Christians are never defended in this manner. Worse — as this very thread has shown — they are being openly accused of sharing each terrorist's views and thus their guilt.
This will be much harder to do, than to simply have children... Your opponents have recognized this attack vector long ago — and spared no effort to entrench themselves at the "public" education front. (Their strong positions in popular culture is, likely, natural — having fewer children leads one more time to pursue other interests.)
As long as they can convert your children to their mentality — and they aren't going to stop trying — they don't need to outbreed you. Worse — by seeding your children's minds with their ideas, they make their ideology (if not their genes) come out ahead. You get to go through pain and expense of birth and child-rearing, and then struggle to win your kid's mind from the State's "educators".
This is not meant to discourage you — while this recent immigrant finds both of the main sides of America's culture-wars unpleasant, I'd rather the conservatives win — but to point out, that taking back the schools and the popular culture should be the primary target, rather than a mere afterthought.
People do think of that, and these people are wrong. That was the point of my response...
As evidenced by, what, a whopping five abortion-providers killed since 1993? Although each death is one too many, you are still overly concerned with this particular injustice.