I’m sure they are not happy with this. Now they look bad with their quasi apologies in face of such fine example how it should be done.

I’m also proud of family of this man – it’s easy to see that it was their words (especially of his wife) that made him make such an honest apology.

Makes me wonder what can be done to make families of other prominent people start asking them hard questions.

Ed is a fighting Dem.
A fighting liberal.

He’s a real man, a real human, fighting on the battle lines between good and evil, between ruin and resuscitation. He’s on the battle line. Things were said. That happens in a firefight. But his motive is to help the people. Ordinary Americans. I don’t know any one person that puts as much blood, sweat and tears into this fight. And he represents you and me.

As a liberal myself, seeing the devastation that republican/conservative’s have caused, it’s difficult for me to see the virtue in their motives. In fact, I can’t see it. None of it makes sense.

Take Bush for example. He made it into office, with a negative plurality, by underhanded means in Florida, then proceeded to underreact to the threat of terrorism, then when that blew up in all of ours faces, overreacting to it. In the mean time he looted the treasury with tax cuts for the rich, unnecessary wars, lax enforcement of regulations and tax code. The concentration of wealth shifted $10 trillion from the demand side to the supply side of the economy, totally destroying our economy, millions of lives, families, homes foreclosed. He spent his last term trying to destroy social security. Had he succeeded even more lives would have been devastated with the collapse in the economy and stock market.

Today these people are trying to destroy medicare and medicaid. 60% of the elderly depend upon medicaid to pay their nursing home bills. These people don’t care about the consequences. It tells me that they don’t care about people. I don’t know what they care about – but it appears to be an attack on the people of the United States – the people who do all the living, working, fighting and dying: they want these people to suffer, live, and die in squalor and misery.

Ed fights this with all he’s got. I don’t very often catch his show. But, I know, It’s not elegant – he’s a bit like a bull in a China shop, like Maddow’s is or Obermann’s was. But he takes the fight to the other side. I did catch him on Maher’s show taking it to the former head of the Republican Party, Steel. He mauled him. It was the first time I’d seen a fighting dem in action. I was stunned.

I hope Ed recovers from this. He’s a good man who made a mistake. We need more men like him.

The concentration of wealth shifted $10 trillion from the demand side to the supply side of the economy, totally destroying our economy, millions of lives, families, homes foreclosed.

True in the general shape but I think the detail is missing here.

What is happening to our economy is a general hollowing out, the “giant sucking sound” that Perot was referring to back in 1992.

The way I see it, our trade imbalances with China ($60B in 1Q11), Japan ($16B), Mexico ($16B) and oil producers ($600B in imports and a lot less in exports) are simply extracting money from the paycheck economy.

This is caused by having our currency too strong. A strong currency benefits those with money and generally hurts those who work (but a strong currency also benefits Americans since it allows us to import things we can’t make here — mostly oil — cheaper).

The deficit is $600B/yr now. That is 10 million solid jobs ($60,000) worth of money leaving our economy and going out into the international economy. Much of it comes back to us in the form of loans and investment in ownership of our capital and equities, and these investments do not really come back to our economy as paychecks.

This is an immense leak in the system! The economy is supposed to be a Great Circle, where A buys from B who buys from C who buys from A.

But when we spend $100 from our paycheck to pump some gas, $10 eventually comes back into our paycheck the economy directly, while the rest ends up in the global financial system and US Treasuries.

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt

This trend got rolling in 1970 when we began losing our trade surplus: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/historical/gands.txt

and we began the hollowing out in manufacturing:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USGOOD

Theoretically, it is economically beneficial in the aggregate to offshore wealth-creation to cheap labor, but for it to be sustainable I think there needs to be a trade balance, otherwise we just get Perot’s “giant sucking sound”.

The 1990s featured a pretty decent job recovery, but I think this was boosted by the initial benefits of our expanding trade with China, as we learned how to integrate their expanding production capability with our own, dramatically lowering our production costs and thus increasing our productivity.

The way I think of this is that we substituted a customs guy in the shipping department for a domestic factory floor. Importing from China is much more “efficient” than producing most anything here at home.

But given the trade deficit, it has long-run costs.

And it was the housing bubble of 2002-2007 that temporarily hid the accumulating costs we’ve been incurring.

The bubble was created by a number of confluences:

1) Rising wages in the 1990s as our economy began to expand

this chart:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=Cx

is subtle but it shows personal income vs total debt (household, corporate, and government) since 1970, and you can see how in the 1990s we temporarily had an expansion of household income vs debt.

Whenever wages rise, especially real wages, the housing market catches on fire, since housing and land is something that is very wage sensitive (supply is fixed and we all bid against each other for ownership of a scarce resource — just look at Luis having to pay about a month’s income for each square meter his new house sits on).

2) Subprime lending was expanded beginning in the mid-1990s, allowing more people to buy homes even though their credit was damaged.

3) Then in the late 1990s they eliminated the capital gains tax on home sales. This attracted speculators into the market.

4) Greenspan lowering interest rates in response to the tech recession, resulting in mortgage rates falling from above 8% to below 7%. This increased borrower’s ability to pay, but since housing supply is generally fixed, all this increased buying power ended up in higher real estate prices.

5) Downpayments were systematically reduced from the traditional 10-20% to 5% and even -3%. This brought more buyers into the market (but alone did not serve to increase the price level since, somewhat paradoxically, the lower the downpayment the lower the borrowing a borrower can qualify for)

6) The Bush tax cuts of 2001-2003 pushed thousands of dollars of money into the nation’s paychecks. This was inflationary for housing.

7) Innovative “suicide” lending products went mainstream — borrowers with good credit scores could simply state their income and assets on their loan applications, and most borrowers could now opt for negative-amortization, teaser-rate, interest-only products that boosted buying power but required prices to continue rising or the borrower would default since he could not really handle the loan over the long term.

7a) Regulators did not supervise credit underwriting, letting their “laissez faire” pro-industry ideology/bias create massive crimogenic systemic fraud at all levels of the industry, from customer-facing loan brokers to the highest levels of Wall Street.

8) Money was flowing into the lending sector via the rise of securitization and the false credit ratings being applied to these mortgage-related securities.

9) The expanding real estate sector — mortgage brokers, real estate agents, banks, home improvement centers, construction workers, contractors –provided millions of jobs, but these jobs were only bubble jobs.

10) Rising home valuations from the above factors allowed people to “cash out” their newfound equity to support their consumption. Lots of new stuff was bought and put onto the mortgage payment (this is, I think partially why Japan enjoyed an export boom during this period). Over $1 trillion per year of new borrowing was allowed during the peak of the bubble, 2005-2006. This was an immense temporary stimulus, good enough to support TWENTY MILLION $50,000/yr jobs.

This all collapsed when all the bubble lending blew up in 2007-2008 and housing prices began to crash back to what borrowers could actually afford to pay, which cut off the trillion dollar debt stimulus and thus killed the economy.

Anyhoo, most of us deserve the blame. We screwed up the economy together.

He spent his last term trying to destroy social security.

First few months of it, at least.

Had he succeeded even more lives would have been devastated with the collapse in the economy and stock market.

Not really, the stock market is currently back at the levels it was before the crash. But I do think the stock market is a possibly dangerous place for people’s pension money, going forward, given the baby boom coming up on retirement now and looking to cash out their holdings. Maybe our trading partners will be the buyers of this equity, and the price level will be maintained, maybe not.

Today these people are trying to destroy medicare and medicaid. 60% of the elderly depend upon medicaid to pay their nursing home bills. These people don’t care about the consequences.

Balanced with the scaling back of LBJ’s Great Society welfare reforms, comes with a lower tax burden on the rich. They do like that consequence, and this is what all this is about.

I don’t know what they care about – but it appears to be an attack on the people of the United States – the people who do all the living, working, fighting and dying: they want these people to suffer, live, and die in squalor and misery.

They care about their money. They don’t want to pay for someone else’s problems.

This is understandable. Currently government is spending about $44,000 per household on everything. This is against $30,000 in revenue. Taxes need to be raised by 50% just to bring the system into balance, and this doesn’t even factor in the additional 3% rate raise we need to make in medicare, 2% rate raise we need to cover ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies, and the 2% FICA rate raise we need to make over the next 10-20 years to keep that system in balance.

While I am not a teaparty twit, I do think that government spending is totally out of control. At the state and local level there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of unfunded pension promises too that we have to deal with.

The fiscal state of this country is simply parlous. 1999-2000 was a temporary bubble but to get back to that is going to require massive, massive tax increases couple with massive spending cuts, especially on the military.

This is simply politically impossible to do. The whole thing is going to collapse, probably.

Troy,

Please think about upping the dose. 😉 nice on-topic post.

-Jim