I much prefer Bush, who may have mangled the pronunciation of words from time to time but he at least knew the meanings of them.

Reading is more than word recognition and pronunciation. It’s actually understanding what the words are saying. Being a southerner I can mangle words with the best of them but I, too, know what they mean.

Such is the way of the education system these days. For my own college days, the most important lesson I learned didn’t come from any one class, textbook, or professor. It was that though I had learned a lot, I also learned how much I didn’t know and what I didn’t know made what I knew resemble the smallest of raindrops.

Eventually, everybody learns that lesson or dies dumb. If he’s your son, he’ll probably learn that lesson as soon as the real world intrudes since he now has a diploma to prove it.

My oldest had one online class between him and that diploma that has cost so damned much money. Well, they’d let him march and hear Pomp and Circumstance already, and he wasn’t much interested in interrupting his life of liesure – so worn out from the rough life of a college student – to finish the class. Out of self-defense because I WAS going to see that diploma, I went online, found his class, got the text, and did it for him. It was the kind of crappy siminar on “Leadership” that government employees get sent to for a couple of days, kinda show up if it doesn’t interfere with your golf game, and get a certificate for your wall and P-file. Took me a weekend and I got his A for him. I wouldn’t have wasted the two or three hundred bucks that classes like that cost for government employees and this was a Senior level college class!

Investment ensues from saving, which is the driver of the capital formation that generates employment, income, and wealth. Therefore any economy which exhibits sustainable growth will be the beneficiary of policies conducive to saving. Foremost among these are low tax rates on profits, capital gains, and marginal income; when combined with a disciplined restraint in government spending, these serve to promote the accumulation of capital and low real interest rates, in a “virtuous circle” of ever rising productivity and income growth. It should also be pointed out that while increased saving necessarily entails a reduction in the rate of growth of consumption in the current period, it need not necessitate a decline in consumer spending.

This spending-leads-to-growth concept is a perennial failure that can actually harm an economy. Its advocates suffer from a crucial error in their understanding of economics: for in fact, consumption is an effect, and not a cause, of economic growth. Stated simply, more spending without the greater output of goods and services that results from increased saving and investment — and concomitant higher real incomes — can only lead to higher prices and inflation.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=022509A

“As the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue which he derives either from labor, stock, or land. Although residences may last for centuries – they are ultimately consumed – just like food and clothing and furniture.”

When they can’t get a loan, and their property is being foreclosed on, and they’ve lost their job, and their taxes are going up (as gas taxes are about to in Massachusetts) and they’re being pushed to the edge of the abyss, it’s going to be very hard to swallow that a banker or people at the bank with access to the loan data (and a bailout from the Federal Government to keep them solvent) are going to be first in line to snap up their properties.

I’m just sayin’

Yes, it wasquite an acheivement for Americans to survive the mistakes of Hoover and FDR!

I think we will though because now people are attentive and that a majority still love liberty and will see clearly the failure of liberal policies.

We the people must punish government perpetrators at the ballot box in 2010 and beyond, and we are more likely to do that by focusing on liberal democrats than confusing the issue with demonizing CEOs of banks.

We have to have banks and banks will always be run by flawed human beings. The market will exact its punishment eventually, but we must not fall into the dem lib trap of appealing to people by promising to make them happier due to the misery of others, or any class warfare appeals.

Human nature is what it is, with its greed and capitalism with its bubbles, and we can’t change that. It is bad government policy and irresponsible private and public debt that caused this, and if our goal is to maintain the greatest system in history, we must not indulge diversions of schadenfreude.

more later

The ambulance expenses are going up. That doesn’t just reflect the cost of finding good ambulances, they’re going up because more people are getting hurt, in some cases because they’re getting drunk and crashing their cars or otherwise injuring themselves, and when they do, they call 911.

When the Alaska economy went to Hell in the mid-’80s, I ran for cover and took a government job. Then I had credit! The bank that wouldn’t even factor my signed, financed contracts a year or two before had the branch manager calling me wanting to “help” me buy a house, or this, or that. Then I hooked up with the woman who became Wife 2.0, much younger and a government accountant. Money was just a shell game for her. She is the archtype of what got us into this mess. I don’t fault her for it and I’m not being critical; somewhere in the ’90s the paradigm changed; nobody cared about what you were worth, it was only a question of what you could afford. And, afford was defined as whether you could make the payments long enough to move on to something else. Well, that paradigm is broken. And despite my wife’s best efforts, I still have a few acres in Georgia that have been in my family since 1795 and have NEVER had a mortgage on them! If I need it, that’s the Redneck Redoubt.

The problem is that I see absolutely nothing in the government’s “stimulus” packages that is ever going to put those people back to work in the long term. And when the unemployment rate in this country gets to 15 or 20%, there’s really going to be hell to pay.

From the photographs, he doesn’t look like he’s suffering too much. He looks like he just waited to snap the property up. A lot more of that is going to happen in the next few months, and it’s going to be very ugly, because people are going to really start to resist it actively.

Government and private finance held hands in historic fashion to create the most unprecedented fraud in human history.

We’ve found out that those risk models either were not being programmed accurately or simply weren’t being listened to when they forecast that the world would come crashing down.

The “real money” economy is going to be a terrible, wrenching pain for this country: people who used to hand over Visa cards with $20,000 limits to college students are going to think twice. People who took second mortgages on their homes to fund vacations to Costa Rica and braces for their kids are not going to get those loans. People are not going to be able to purchase $50,000 cars when they already owe $250,000 and only earn $60,000 a year.

Those things are all probably going to be good. But let’s make no mistake about it: the perpetrators are not being punished as much as the dupes. That’s what galls me, Mike.

How can you really believe it won’t happen again when you don’t really punish both the people in the government and in the private sector who encouraged this disaster? Even more pointedly, how can you bail out banks and lending institutions when their loan officers are there to snap up the foreclosures of working people who have been left high and dry by the terrible decisionmaking in Washington?

The guy who bought Ben Bernanke’s foreclosed childhood home was a BANKER. A loan officer, in fact. He knew where the value was after all the “losers” got kicked out. I think that’s going to be happening a lot more in the next six months, and the results are not going to be pretty. It looks like a gigantic wealth transfer.

Cause & effect

Domino effect

Do the liberals have any idea what kind of effects we are talking about?

Homebuilders would be the first to give up -

another $500 Billion lost -

Then the banks would be loaning money for crack instead of homes -
another 2 TRILLION lost

Then the cities & states would lose there tax base

another 5 TRILLION or more lost.

Then all the Insurance companies would fold –

another TRILLION or more lost.

The 8% cannot drag America into the crapper.

Then can go live in apartments or tents for all I care.

Obama and the left have just lost it.

Home ownership is not a right.

The futher down Obama’s yellowbrick road we go the harder

it will be to get back to sanity.