Bail out debate in house.......GDG GDG

[Sundown49 aka Otey B]

As I am retired I hve been watching the "debate" on CSPAN this morning and I have never in my life seen such Bull S--- . I have made up my mind today to, when I vote, vote for anyone but the incumbents. They spent more time patting each other on the back than talking about the bill. When to get a bill passed you have to add 185 billion in pork to it HOW can any of those jerks be HONEST? We are seeing how much our "politicians" are in lobbyists pockets. There has been several congresmen begging for an amendment to cut the pork and limit the amount to 250 billion. The liberals blocked this in the rules committee so it could not be added or debated on the floor of the house. I am on a stipend from SS that I worked 48 years for and paid it all tht time. I was never without a job for more than 8 hours in the 48 years. Why should a bunch of people that have never worked and probably never will get a home for nothing??? FAIR,,,,,,,,,,,,BS again. Why are we, the taxpayer, who works and saves be penalized for someone that sits on their butt and expects the government to take care of them.

[kjrice]

I was just thinking the other day that my VA home benefit is worth something again, now these sham loans are drying up. The government will even help people get them, by dedicating their time to the military.

[mhitesman]

This bail out is scarier than the oil crisis/price and potentially more devastating to our economy. It doesn't take much common sense to figure out that a bail out is a short term fix that has devastating long term effects. But then, the American people have become a people of short term thinking, we are being lied to, and politicians' goals are, first and foremost, to get re-elected... so it is pretty unlikely that our elected politicians are going to save us in this mess, and anyone who tries to rally support for looking at this realistically, like McCain tried to do, is not going to get support. I have no doubt those jerks in Congress, along with patting each other on the back, are busy buying large tracts of land in remote areas, putting up wind turbines, and making plans to have a place to run to when the crap really hits the fan, businesses collapse, and our money is no good.

This downward spiral began in 1995 when our government decided to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac so as to make our economy look better by removing the massive liabilities those (then) government agencies had accrued. They created Ginnie Mae as a government agency to back VA and FHA at that time. Once Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were on Wall Street, the pressure to show profits was huge. So, their lobbyists successfully got the government to loosen borrowing regulations. Hence the negative amortization, zero down, non-verified income requirements, ARMs, the All Americans Deserve to Own a House programs, etc etc etc. In fact, the agencies provided incentives for banks to make these sub prime loans and probably even insisted that they do. It is so like our government to blame the banks and or even Wall Street for this debacle when they caused it.

In 2000, HUD warned the government that the industry was too overloaded with subprime loans and recommended tightening the qualifications for loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, but the only thing boosting our economy at that time was, in fact, the housing market so the government instead loosened the controls even more ...resulting in even more bad loans headed for default.

This bailout raises the debt ceiling approved from $800billion to $10.7 trillion dollars. China and Russia, amongst many others, have already indicated they will not loan us any more money as they consider we are already a bad risk. Taxpayers cannot possibly come up with enough increased tax to pay this debt, so our government will probably print more money -- something they have been doing right along...inflating our dollar even more.

This bailout does nothing to halt the foreclosures or fix any aspect of the bad loans. It seems, to me, that it is a head in the sand maneuver designed to ensure banks continue to loan money to people who cannot afford to borrow money. It's like a shell game, but it cannot be sustained indefinitely. It infuriates me that we are being told this is going to fix anything other than re-election for the politicians that got us into this mess.

This could very easily cause a total economic collapse since there is, by design, no attempt to halt the problem of making bad loans.