Three Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law

http://www.truth-out.org/three-charts-e ... 1314626142

Yea right- spending is up 32% since 2008.

It's not right to spread lies - those charts are more phoney than a 3 dollar bill.

Nice try though.

The sources are clearly listed.

You didn't give a source for your claim.

Why only the last year for job growth under Bush instead of for all 8 years Wayne? What about the other 7 years? Why include projections for the Obama deficit spending based upon presumptions that bear no resemblance to reality in the second graph? If my sister in law sent this to me, I would simply deconstruct the flawed premises upon which they were generated for her and send it back so that she would have some knowledge and facts rather than some partisan hack generated talking point graph.

If you get tricked into thinking that Obama has made things worse and that we should go back to what we were doing before Obama -- tax cuts for the rich, giving giant corporations and Wall Street everything they want -- when those are the things that caused the problems in the first place, then we will be in real trouble.

Thanks Wayne

Good stuff

WayneH wrote: If you get tricked into thinking that Obama has made things worse and that we should go back to what we were doing before Obama -- tax cuts for the rich, giving giant corporations and Wall Street everything they want -- when those are the things that caused the problems in the first place, then we will be in real trouble.

What caused the problem in the first place was government policies. You know, the ones that required 50% of every loan purchased by Fannie and Freddie to be to low income families or in areas of community redevelopment and also require fair lending practices? If they will lend to a low income family with only 5% down, or finance 100% of the purchase, but won't do the same for a middle or high income family, doesn't that fall crosswise of fair lending practices? Add in some wonderful government accounting rules and regs put into place in the wake of Enron and Qwest. Add to that the private profit driven nature of Fannie and Freddie and the federal guarantees on the mortgage securities they issue and what other result would you expect other than a bubble that would quickly inflate and burst?

Here again the problem is government, not too little of it, too much of it. Fannie and Freddie were made into GSE's because they were losing too much money when LBJ was in the midst of trying to provide guns and butter, but the taxpayers were still the ones guaranteeing private industry against loss from what they purchased from Fannie and Freddie. The federal government was the one using that leverage to require 50% of what Fannie and Freddie bought be loans made to low income families. Fannie and Freddie were losing market share, ie profits, to other institutions, so they entered the subprime market, bundled together bums and plums, and sold mortgage securities to other financial institutions, which were guaranteed with the full faith and credit of the federal government. Naturally when those subprime loans started defaulting, and federal accounting rules dictated that the securities, which the institutions were using as assets since they were guaranteed, be removed from the ledgers, the loss of those assets from the books put them in violation of federal lending requirements that made them have $X in assets for every $Y in loans. Since the securities were guaranteed with the full faith and credit of the US federal government, allowing those securities and their derivatives to default would have been a selective default of the federal government itself.

Wasn't the "progressive" argument about why the TEA Party was so bad rooted in the premise that it would cause the first ever default of the federal government, which would harm the economy and cause all of the debt we had to go up in price to finance? Wouldn't that be precisely what would have happened without the passage of TARP? Isn't that why the TARP legislation allotted up to $800 billion to cover the guarantees of the federal government on the Fannie and Freddie issued securities? Isn't that why Fannie and Freddie received more TARP money than all the other financial institutions combined?

Hey PrintS**t.....We have imperial statistical data that trikle down economics doesn't work and has never worked in all of human history...

What about that don't you understand?

Why would you want to double down on it? Are you an idiot or something?

Trickle down works a lot better than trickle up does VL. That is why the economy was well on its way to recovery within 2 years of Reagan's policies and we're stuck in the mud after 2 years worth of Obama's. Supply side, or classical economics is a much better system than demand side, or Keynesian economics. That is why the nation recovered so quickly after a much worse situation at the beginning of the 1920's (you do remember the "Roaring 20's") than it did during the FDR years, where it was also stuck in the mud until those failed economic policies were abandoned at the conclusion of WWII in favor of lower taxes and significant reductions in the actual amount of money spend by DC (as opposed to the slight reductions in the rate of increase we are hearing about today).

Oh brother


Imperial statistical data over the last 50 years paints a different picture my friend. First lets get you into reality, then we'll go from there