Bye bye $2 trillion, hello $7.4 trillion!

RIP US Dollar

wb Rob Matter

Fixed!

You describe the most extreme redistribution of money that would ever have hit America as a simple matter of "pay off half the mortgages". The loser in your scenario is everyone in the US required to pay the dollars into the pool that pays off the mortgages.

What's "not to love" is that you vote. And that you voice your opinions in public.

Was it the lack of smilies that caused you to fail to grasp that this wasn't a serious proposal on my part?

My apologies.

You said 'call me crazy' or something similar, words usually prefacing something meant to be taken seriously. And not usually used before making a joke. Something like "It may sound crazy, but I agree with Tuckerfan."

Guess it went over my head.

Guess having my tongue in my cheek was screwing up my typing worse than I thought.

I would have taken "call me crazy . . ." as a warning that warning that what may follow may not sound sane.

Seriously, increasing the national debt to 120-130% of GDP could be worse than letting these institutions fail.

Whenever I hear the term crisis used by any member of Congress or the White House, I now wonder, what else do they want to assume control of at my expense.

There is no "could be" about it. Were the money to be spent on something useful like scientific research, beefing up the military, national infrastructure, or some kind of physical asset, I would not have any qualms about the matter. All of those things employ people, and in a worse case scenerio, where our financial system is in the same kind of mess afterwards as it was before, at least offer us the potential of some kind of gain. Just handing the money over to people who've made a career out of shifting it around on paper and declaring themselves to be richer, is a bad fucking move of epic proportions.

Fixed...er.

Whenever I've asked for a loan, the first thing the bank asks is how I intend to pay the loan back. What are the loan repayment terms here? Or is this a blank check to be repaid "eventually"?

There are some stricter terms on this, than what was given to AIG, but lets face it, given that a good chunk of the money will go to lobbyists hired by the folks being bailed out, if they can't manage to make payments, we're going to see the government just absorbing these losses, and not putting the hurt on the financial sector like they do us, when we're a second late on our payments.

laying aside the ethics of this....

you wouldn't even have to go that far.

Mortgages that are in trouble are not in trouble in that the homeowner can pay NOTHING (in most cases) simply that they can't pay ENOUGH.

So what would happen if the government paid 1/2 of the value of all your mortgage payments for the next five years or even ten? Maybe set an income limit so that people making more than $1 million a year or some such would be excluded.
If eight trillion dollars would completely pay off half the mortgages, it stands to reason that a much lower amount would do this.

You could also pay off other past due debt in struggling households without a mortgage like credit cards or whatever - forgive student loans and small business loans.

Not that any of this is proper governance but if you are bound and determined to waste $8 trillion anyway, might as well cut to the chase.

Bush Begins Preparations For Nation's Final Year.

I'll just go back to my position on the original bailout plan: Why don't we just set the damned money on fire for all the good its doing?

At least then it would it wouldn't bring mass inflation.

Carbon emissions.


The Greenies would go nuts.

Because most of it is electronic. Only a small fraction is even printed anymore.

Well lets set the computers and banks on fire!!!!

Sounds good to me... something like at the end of Fight Club.

[YT="Nah, more liike this!"]zKmH3lssJCo[/YT]

OK... I was just watching a podcast of last night's NBC Nightly News and they announced another separate $800B in bailouts directed at getting consumers credit....

I'm losing track of the bailouts...

won't all this extra liquidity trigger deflation?

^How do you figure?

I'm sorry, Inflation...

In short, yes. In longer, while not the whole story, read this: http://www.taipanpublishinggroup.com/Taipan-Daily-112108.html