I already turned down a job with more pay because it places me in a higher tax bracket. The last thing I want to do is to pay more in taxes to bailout the greedy, lazy, stupid or entitled of this country.

Whaaaaa….? Where’s the logic in that?
You’re only taxed more on the marginal income beyond that in your current bracket, not on all your income.

If I had to pay an additional, say, $5K in order boost my take-home income by $20K to spend on myself and support my family, I would go for it. This assumes the job is otherwise attractive, for all the usual reasons).

Ask yourself: do millionaires turn down an extra million because of the extra tax bite?

Further, assuming that all your current and “extra” taxes go for “fraud, waste and abuse” isn’t reasonable. Who pays for our soldiers, fer instance?

WHAT PARENT TAKES THE ALLOWANCE AWAY FROM CHILD #1 AND GIVES IT TO CHILD #2

Actually, I think most parents would put their resources to helping the child who needs their help.

Fortunately, and I can’t stress this enough, the federal government is not a parent. Really.

September 9th, 2008 at 1:50 pm, feebiebabe said:

Ive been looking to buy houses here in the bay area and people are Bidding on foreclosure properties. Bidding!!!!! Meaning, Bank is making *more* profit off what they lost.

The bailout of these banks is criminal.

Fee – Believe me the banks are loosing money here in the Bay Area. Yes, the banks are taking bids on foreclosed property, but the received bids are in no way covering their losses. The highest bid only mitigates their loss. Hang tough. Decide how much you want to pay per square foot. A real good deal would be $125.00 per square foot. There are some in Suisun City at that price, but the homes usually need a lot of work at that price.

On September 9th, 2008 at 3:31 pm, Ahh a Lion! said:

I wish we’d get even a shred of clarity from the GOP candidates. Here’s Palin’s statements again:

(FNM, FRE have) gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.

and

A McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.

Now what I get from this is that because FNM and FRE have overdosed on moral hazard due to their government insurance policy, the government needs to take over. However, the left’s attacks are almost as shallow as Palin’s statement. It’s the conservative side that should be attacking her position on the issue. Her logic is inherently socialist, naive, and conflicts with everything conservatism preaches regarding government-run entities.

Man, take a breath! There is so much hyperventilation in this thread that needs to be reviewed…

For years, I worked in the mortgage industry, so long ago that it was Fannie that put stops on bad lending practice. Freddie even more so. The real problem with them stems from pressure from congress to make bad loans to minorities and low-income people that did not qualify for such loans. The realtor lobby added to that pressure. Realtors want loans, consequences be damned. A foreclosure just means another sale down the road.

Fannie and Freddie aided your neighborhood bank by taking loans off the books. A bank can lend only what it holds in deposits. If they lend $100,000 for thirty years, they need to wait 30 years to lend that $100k to someone else or hope they pull in $100k in deposits. Fannie and Freddie, in buying these loans, allowed banks to re-lend that money to someone else in a matter of days, not years.

Since homes were thought to be very good collateral, loan payments were pretty well assured. That made them good investments. Fannie and Freddie “securitized” these loans, meaning turned them into investments, and sold them to the public. By selling them to the public, they got to lend the money over again. Look in your balanced mutual fund. Look in your retirement plan at work. Look in your school districts investment accounts. Fannie and Freddie are in all of them. In fact, in most states, government entities are permitted to invest only in government bonds and Freddie and Fannie. Without this process, only the rich could afford homes since they would need cash to do so or pay very high interest rates on long term loans.

The lending standards were strong for decades, until congress stuck their noses in. I don’t understand why they privatized these two, but their function is essential to the U.S. housing market. They should get back to their conservative practices.

I can easily blame San Francisco for this problem. Up until recently, the asking price for a house in SF was the opening bid in an auction! Prices went through the roof, banks accommodated the madness. Fannie and Freddie made special high loan limits for California. The whole rest of the country (I mean realtors all over the rest of the country) clamored to get those higher loan limits and the things spiraled out of control. Wages didn’t rise as fast as home prices and people found ways to cut corners on their honesty, buying houses they couldn’t afford because everyone wanted their own McMansion.

So, Fannie and Freddie aided this dishonesty and greed but their basic mission is a good one. They just have to go back to conservative practices.

lgm: If they hadn’t been “privatized” in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened.

Blame LBJ.
Origins of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Initially, Fannie Mae operated like a national savings and loan, allowing local banks to charge low interest rates on mortgages for the benefit of the home buyer. This lead to the development of what is now known as the secondary mortgage market. Within the secondary mortgage market, companies such as Fannie Mae are able to borrow money from foreign investors at low interest rates because of the financial support that they receive from the U.S. Government. It is this ability to borrow at low rates that allows Fannie Mae to provide fixed interest rate mortgages with low down payments to home buyers. Fannie Mae makes a profit from the difference between the interest rates homeowners pay and foreign lenders charge.

For the first thirty years following its inception, Fannie Mae held a veritable monopoly over the secondary mortgage market. In 1968, due to fiscal pressures created by the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson privatized Fannie Mae in order to remove it from the national budget. At this point, Fannie Mae began operating as a GSE, generating profits for stock holders while enjoying the benefits of exemption from taxation and oversight as well as implied government backing. In order to prevent any further monopolization of the market, a second GSE known as Freddie Mac was created in 1970. Currently, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control about 90 percent of the nation’s secondary mortgage market.

In this case, lgm is correct to put “privatized” in scare quotes. When the risk is still born by the taxpayer, they aren’t private at all. But note that Freddie Mac was created as a GSE.

Is it serving the needs of the taxpayer?

I would be more excited if the wording was:

Is it serving the cause of freedom?

“Needs” is the foothold that collectivism uses to generate the worst kinds of evil. “Needs” can not be quantified and is used to justify welfare, income redistribution, etc…

In the first 100 days of our administration, we will look at every agency and department and expenditure of the federal government and ask this simple question: Is it serving the needs of the taxpayer? If it is not, we will reform it or shut it down, and we will spend money only on what is truly in the interest of the American people.

This is why I have been excited since McCain chose Palin as his vp. Unlike Pelosi, Palin will work for the American people and honor her promises.

The fact is you can’t package a socialist program in conservative wrapping paper and expect anything more than socialism…

Sort of like mixing dog excrement with vanilla ice-cream. Ice-cream is still in the mix, but you won’t want to eat it.

Therefore, isn’t the word wanted in the case of the headline at the beginning of this post really MORON?

I believe the use of “maroon” in exchange for “moron” can be traced back to that of Moe (of Three Stooges fame), who often misused the word. The use has since entered into popular culture and is used in this way often.

Therefore, isn’t the word wanted in the case of the headline at the beginning of this post really MORON?

Didn’t you ever watch Looney Tunes? “What a Maroon!” Was a Bugs Bunny catch phrase. I suppose saying “Moron” was a bit too offensive for a cartoon character at the time.

Mitsubishi
Japanese Imperial WWII fighters, bombers. Examples: the infamous “Zero” and “Sally.”

Volkswagen
Hitler’s “Folk Car”, “Bucket-Wagon”, and amphibious “Schwimmwagen.”

Topf & Söhne
Manufacturers of the ovens and other ventilation systems employed at Auschwitz.

Tupolev Design Bureau
Russian (Previously Soviet) aerospace company that built the TU-95 Bear (and variants) nuclear bomber designed to wipe the United States from the face of the planet.