tax all the major business more and not the consumer.
A tax on business IS a tax on the consumer, an indirect tax that's paid by those who consume the product or service supplied by the business.
The money would be better "spent" (in our case borrowed or printed) with massive tax reform: 15% flat tax on income, 15% corporate tax (down from 35%) and an immigration overhaul that that can bring 3-5 million highly skilled, highly valued, highly educated individuals into the country.
The current "stimulus" plan amounts to little more than a government giveaway to special interest groups and an expansion of the welfare state into the corporate world.
I know that there's this great hangup about "soclialism" and all that bollox...
Call it whatever you like... From my point of view, people have their biggest hangup where Capitalism is concerned, they use it as a pejorative term synonymous with corruption and greed. Capitalism always gets the blame while Government always gets a pass. Government is the poison that's making capitalism ill and the only prescription being offered is more government.
Business exists to create products and services in order to sell those products and services to its consumers at a profit. Business doesn't need the government to tell it to do so, government doesn't need to explain to them how its done, it doesn't have to provide the capital or hold anyone's hand... government needs to let go of its grip on business and get out of the way.
Business, the markets, the entire economy is being held back by the actions of the government and the politicians in charge want everyone to believe only more government action, only a tighter grip, can solve the problem... Sadly people buy into that reasoning and let the same politicians and government that created the mess be in charge of "solving" it.
if Government had regulated the financial markets in such as way as to demand due diligence then this would never have happened.
Andy is 100% correct, its government regulation at the root of the problem. You don't have to force lenders to
not make high risk loans, they avoid it on their own or fail as a consequence. Its because they didn't make many high risk loans that government passed the Community Reinvestment Act, established Fannie and Freddie, ordered banks to make high risk loans and ordered Fannie and Freddie to buy them.
Was there greed on the part of lenders? Yes, government seemed to open the door for a quick buck and they walked through it. They saw that they could make high risk loans, thought they could push that risk onto Fannie and Freddie without it coming back to bite them, and make a profit on closing costs and fees in the process. At the same time, government had Fannie and Freddie slice up mortgages and repackage them so that a percentage of a high risk loan was mixed with a percentage of low and medium risk loans and then sold the volatile credit bundles on the credit market. When just one high risk loan defaulted, it negatively affected the low and medium risk loans that were now attached to that debt, dragging them all down with it. If these high risk loans had remained whole, then there would not have been the massive fallout that resulted from defaults.
One last thing I'd like to address/ask everyone... If you believe a company or industry is too big to fail, so you lend it money and they use that money to buy their competition and get even bigger... Where will you draw the line on bailing out that company or industry?
Will you ever come to the realization that if its "too big to fail" that its also too big to remain whole and IF you really must loan it money, the company should use that money to split up into multiple companies, ones small enough to fail, so that the profitable ones can survive and the rest can fail without bringing down the whole ship?
Now that companies that were too big to fail are even larger, and you're already invested so heavily, will you ever cut your losses and walk away or will you continue to double down with every loss in desperate hope of making your money back?
Politicians and the public sound like a a bunch of gamblers sitting at a roulette wheel with a plan to cover every possible bet, so they started by losing what was in their wallet, then they got out all they could from their line of credit and now they're just printing money out of thin air to throw at the wheel. They see its at 35-1 odds of paying off, so they spread their printed money around the table trying to cover all the possible bets, that way when one pays off they can rationalize it as an excuse to keep playing every bet despite losing more than what they can win every time the ball drops.
America has gone insane.
...sorry Andy you lost me....as far as I know during the current crisis its only acquisition has been Merrill Lynch which they tried to get out of. It was the Government that forced BofA into closing the deal at the last minute on the understanding that further guarantees would be avialable as the extent of Merril's CDS exposure unraveled. I don't know what other companies they've purchased in 2008/2009.
