TARP. There is only one way to get maximum bang for the $350 billion bucks...loan it directly to American citizens. It's the only way to track it, the only way to make sure it 'trickles' down to work on the problem. It also would jump-start other solutions to our many problems.
The money could be loaned to Americans at 2% to 4% above prime to:
1. Refinance existing homes or purchase new homes; 2. Purchase new cars ONLY if their mileage exceeded 30 m.p.g. 3. Start-up funding for green businesses / expansion funding for green businesses.
The best part of this would be the Treasury MAKING money instead of giving it away. (Income, oh you tax cutters, is a good thing).
This could not only rescue many homes / homeowners from foreclosure, it would create an immediate boom in the housing market. As for autos, automakers would have to rev up their plants to meet demand, and the perfect part is that they would have to come into instant compliance with a market that wanted high mileage cars to begin with. Banks, the super-predators of the last 8 years, would have to compete fairly or go down. I am sick of my tax dollars bailing out Big Business (especially failing businesses), while my family, friends and neighbors are loosing their homes and jobs.
I swear, giving banks TARP money is like an ER doctor giving himself a transfusion to try to save a patient dying from blood loss. And Republicans are probably being leaned on by the banking industry to interfere here. The whole culture of Washington power holders is corrupt. Big business has been running our country and emptying our Treasury for too long.
Please find a way to inject the transfusion directly into the veins that need it.
I think I came up with the perfect bank fix today: Use the next $350 billion in TARP funds to open a National Treasury bank.
Yep, just eliminate those pesky irresponsible super-predator financial institutions in the middle. You know...those rocks that are standing in the way, between the $$$ we loaned them to help Americans and the Americans who still need that $$$ and don't have it.
Fund a national bank, let it loan money to people for 2% to 4% over the prime rate (a better return than we're getting on the FIRST TARP loans).
Let the gov (which loaned banks $33 billion? $330 billion last year?? from the Federal Reserve) loan money to new home and existing home buyers/owners and small business ownwers. Let the Fed and the financial consumer deal with each other and eliminate the middle men all together.
Then we don't have to worry about regulating the industry, we ARE the industry. And we're actually being repaid! And the money is actually going to real Americans instead of super wealthy institutions.
I'm not going to be happy about sending another $350 billion down the road the first one took (new regulations or not), with rumors of more needed in the future. The quickest and surest path between any stimulus and where it will do some good is a direct pipeline between source and end-user.
I think the tax-cut proposal is going to send more US Treasury dollars right into the black hole of financial institutions. Kind of like how buying lottery tickets and scratchers is 'voluntary taxation."
Americans have learned a BRUTAL lesson in consuming in the last six months. Any extra money they get now won't go into the economy in the form of purchases, it's going to head right for their debt. And thus, the lending institutions not only get the first $350 billion in T.A.R.P., and the last $350 billion in T.A.R.P., but probably most of the tax cut $$, refunds, rebates, and credits as well.
Black hole: everything gets sucked in, nothing gets out.
Ironies of the week:
1. Bush insisting on TV that he’s a ‘free trade’ guy.
Sorry, but isn’t this the administration that slammed it doors on the importation of incredibly affordable Canadian pharmaceuticals?
2. The Right Wing bombasting on about Obama’s agenda to “redistribute the wealth” in America.
What? The most massive ‘redistribution of wealth’ in the history of the world took place in the last eight years. Only unlike Robin Hood, the Bush administration’s ‘redistribution’ robbed the US Treasury, the incomes of the middle class and the safety nets of the needy and gave it all to the corporate rich. They planted a derrick over the Treasury and sucked the revenue of three generations straight up to the top. Sucked it dry.
3. The Big 3 US automakers coming to Washington wanting bundles of tax dollars in bailout.
Excuse me? The guys who successfully helped lobby for lower corporate taxes? Lower capital gains taxes? Lower income taxes on higher incomes? No estate taxes?
The guys who opened auto factories all over the world to find cheap labor, not only escaping even more US corporate taxes but further depriving the US Treasury of the income taxes once paid by several million autoworkers?
I see. They helped hack the tax revenue milk cow into hamburger, and now they show up needing a quart of cream? Thinking they actually DESERVE a quart of cream? If it wasn’t so sickening it would be funny.
Looking around at this country now, it almost seems like capitalism is a failed experiment. Except maybe the last 40 years in this country haven’t been about capitalism, but about covert Economic Fascism. Maybe our democracy has been hijacked by Big Business.
That would sure reconcile a lot of contradictory, senseless recent history. Maybe curing our woes is as simple as practicing a working democracy instead of only paying lip service to it?
Hi honey. Yeah, the email system is OK, no complaints at this point. I seem to get what I'm expecting, and not too much spam, other than these Arabic looking emails once or twice a month. I've always figured them to be mass spam mailings from the Dept. of Homeland Security, to justify keeping a bunch of us liberals wire tapped. I delete them.
I now have a mybarackobama profile. I signed up so I can help when he begins to address problems and solutions and asks the American people to pitch in. I will be a most happy little foot soldier in the OAs (as in Dumbledore's Army).
Kayla, don't ever let your hopes and dreams die, don't ever despair of the world or the future, because it's funny how opportunities and philosophies roll back around decades later. Re-tooled and repackaged and definitely matured, perhaps, but still essentially intact.
I'm not just talking about the relief from the near-absolute despair I have felt in the last 6 or 7 years over the direction, future and actions of my country. Jeesh, anyone who's lived with me for those years knows that. But there is a feeling, a tone in the country I haven't seen in 40 years and never hoped to see or feel again.
I've never lost an opportunity to refer to myself "an old hippy." (In fact, I'm on record during the 1990s in "The New York Times" with that one, lol) I have simply never lost a measure of pride for the hopes a generation once had for the world.
There was a dream, once, shared by millions of young Americans. It was naive and fairly immature, but it was REAL and it was strong and it was right. It was so much more than "free sex, drugs and rock and roll." At essence it really was the catch-phrase of my generation: "peace and love."
We certainly hadn't thought it out very well, and certainly didn't act it out very well, but a many people of my generation could feel it...could feel the elemental rightness of our new direction and feel the swell of destiny beneath our feet. We thought it would carry the world to a better place for everyone. I think we largely felt it would carry the world there simply by pointing it out and living it ourselves...
We were naive, lazy idiots, thinking we could make it so by wanting it so and making little effort (other than our music, our discourse and our lifestyles) to take anyone else along. We got seduced by the journey and lost sight of our destination.
But we had been captured by a seismic wave that resonated in every cell of our bodies that there was a better way to live. And that way included peace, universal love, freedom, tolerance and a rejection of super materialism, greed and war. A reverence for the planet we lived on. A cry for simpler, more natural lifestyles. And it seemed so self-evident to us, we never made wise choices about making it evident to all.
It also didn't help that we united largely to end a war, and the slap-down on that from the "establishment" (as we called them then) was not countered wisely or well, and at the end of the smear campaign we looked merely foolish and self-indulgent.
When I looked at the video election night, at the faces of so many Americans and then so many globals hearing the news Obama had won, and could see what they were feeling and feeling it myself...Kayla, it's back. A great hope has been born in the world and you get to ride the wave. I pray your generation can bring it to shore.
Love you and so proud of you, O-Girl
grandma
