[Psudo]

CaliShark wrote:

There is more than enough blame to go around (Deregulation in an environment of government coercion for low-income loaning is just like throwing people into a shark pool).

This is the most universally agreed-upon point in this thread.

[CanadianJeff]

WesterCharcoal wrote:

CanadianJeff wrote:

Wester you sound just like Hwacker. You both just want to lay the blame at the feet of the "enemy" which is everyone who doesn't think like you do. You just smack one label on them all as "left" and consider yourself supperior.

CanadianJeff wrote:

Wake up already and start realizing who you should vote for are the people who didn't make the mess no matter what party they belong to plain and simple!

Cry some more.

It's a lot easier to attack my character than even reading my statements isn't it? In this case you imply that I'm a straight ticket, close minded, judgmental, elitist. Then, instead of looking at anything I wrote you just focused in on the word Democrat and dismissed EVERY THING I SAID as partisan sniping. You should try reasoning instead of insinuating terrible things about me in a slightly more sophisticated fashion than name calling.

Maybe because your argument amounts to nothing more then purposely mistaken representations of the very idea your objecting to an trying to pin it all on a certain group to incite hate for that group.

Since you don't seem to understand the difference between Marxism (which I fully agree is never going to work) with wealth distribution I'll clarify it down for you.

Marxism is basically the idea that there are two different levels in a society of one group who controls the money and the jobs and one group who sells their manual work to the other group to survive. It pushes the idea that the workers overthrow those in control and establish a new government that redistributes the property around equally for all.

Redistribution of wealth does not even try and deal with the idea of who owns what and who controls the jobs. What this theory deals operates on is the idea that being born into a poor family makes one much more likely to be poor as does being born into a rich family makes one more likely to end up with a high income.

Right now about 80% of the wealth in North America is owned by 20% of the population One quick source This is also known as the Pareto principle Source. Needless to say that means for those in the lower ends of the spectrum things like education and investment have much more of an impact on the life of that individual.

What redistribution of wealth tries to do is realize this principle and reanalyze how wealth makes it's way down the ladder. This is often done by taxes and by income bracket. It tries to adjust taxes so that the lower brackets have a bit more of the income so that more of it is spent in the free market rather then being taxed into government hands. Basically put changes just what is taxed and who is taxed so that more money goes into the hands of the working family.

I'm sure your familiar with Obama's tax plan to only increase taxes on the rich and those who makes more then 250,000 what the plan is trying to do is put more money in the pockets of those who would spend it. Namely the middle class and the poor. Of course this is also backed by the idea that the rich can cut their taxes quite a bit if they pay their workers a lot more money or start putting the money into charity or social programs.

The plan is basically not at all government trying to take property then hand it out. It's government trying to get the rich to just give the money to the workers so they will go out and spend it. Workers spending more right now is about the best thing for the economy.

That's the plan that Redistribution of wealth is. Putting money into the hands of those in lower income brackets by taxing the rich. It's going to mean more middle and poor kids in post secondary school and it's also going to mean more people spending money in the market.

Frankly I'd much rather see the billions in bailouts in the hands of taxpayers who will reinvest it in the market with their wallets. Don't you?[url][/url]

[Psudo]

I love the idea of taxpayers keeping their money. But when I say that, I mean every individual taxpayer out there. You, CanadianJeff, seem to be OK with individual having their money moved to other taxpayers so long as taxpayers as a whole don't lose money to the government. This keeps government from capturing money for themselves, but instead establishes government's role as an enabler of the capture of money.

What entitles any man to another man's money in cases of redistribution? What virtue does the poor man possess or the rich man lack that the transfer of money settles? And why must it be done by force of law rather than persuasive arguments offered to the rich?

CanadianJeff wrote:

the rich can cut their taxes quite a bit if they pay their workers a lot more money or start putting the money into charity or social programs.

So one way or the other, the rich are denied their money. Their will is irrelevant, except that they can choose who gets their money to the extent government allows.

Thus the concept of possession is eroded.

[CanadianJeff]

I never implied I agree with the whole concept. I see many of the same problems you do.

I just can't stand to see people try to paint one idea as another when it's not to incite hate. So I called him on it.

[Firekite]

Zipperfish wrote:

Well as one of the "barely veiled scoialists" on the left, I'd like to point out the abysmal record of federal right-wing parties in the US and Canada over the last 30 years, when it comes to fiscal responsibility. I don't think, based on the record, it's fair to accuse the left of "reckless spending."

Why not? That the Republicans have been doing it recently, too, doesn't make it any better. "The cop was going 130mph behind me, too, so it's not fair to accuse me of reckless driving."

Quote:

Firekite wrote:

A pittance. A drop a much larger bucket.

So is the wage of some union guy making $30/hour. Your condemnation of high union wages while supporting high exectutive remuneration strikes me as more as an ideological stance as opposed to a practical criticism of the matter. You know, "Union bad, Exectuives good."

Only someone as far to the left as you are could possibly have read that in it, surely. The difference is in the job itself and in supply and demand. If the guy making $30/hr with sweetheart benefits is tightening a nut, something a half-retarded chimp can do, they're overpaid because the talent pool for that is MASSIVE. It takes no special skill to do, and people would do it for a lot less. A CEO, on the other hand, comes from a tiny talent pool, it's a highly skilled position, and even if they are overpaid or set up with sweetheart contracts where they're taken care of even if they fail to do a good job, it's a problem that occurs once compared to the problem that occurs hundreds of thousands of times. Who the hell said "executives good" anyway?

[WesterCharcoal]

CanadianJeff wrote:

I never implied I agree with the whole concept. I see many of the same problems you do.

I just can't stand to see people try to paint one idea as another when it's not to incite hate. So I called him on it.

I think Psudo did a nice job of taking care of this. You didn't read my post, assumed I was being hateful, and then wrote whole pages that were unnecessary.

Example: I never said Obama was a Marxist. Didn't even use that word. Why you felt you had to explain what Marxism to me I will never know.

If you really think I'm spouting nothing but hateful labels and nonsense, then you are truly deluded and I am very sorry for you.

If you STILL don't know what I'm talking about, then you need only look back at my original post to realize that I didn't say anything like what you think I did.

[GenericHito]

People seem to be playing the blame game over how the financial crises came about, so rather than add any of my own opinions or insight, I'll just parrot what FactCheck.org has told me. Here's a list of those at fault (according to various experts):

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

Source:
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008 ... risis.html

[Psudo]

Hail Hito, the master of clarity. It's a beautiful thing.

[Taospark]

Unless the SEC or DoJ actually pushes for prosecution of a bank's executives, the blame game is a pointless academic exercise. (The current administration looks like it will escape any punishment. Cheney was finally indicted but not for what you'd think or want.)

Right now, it just seems that everyone in government doesn't have any plans except to follow either the Bernanke-Paulson TARP plan or give out another stimulus check next year. The only bright idea I've seen so far which has had a longer and somewhat provable track record is directly funding job training.

[Psudo]

Taospark wrote:

(The current administration looks like it will escape any punishment. Cheney was finally indicted but not for what you'd think or want.)

You sound like conservatives talking about Clinton in 2000.

[Taospark]

Conservatives were mostly angry about Clinton because he turned out to be more centrist than they wanted and they could only nail on the same wrongdoing that nearly every President has committed in the White House since Jefferson.

Cheney, on the other hand, actually violated the judgement of the Supreme Court not to mention the other dozen actual illegal things he's done.

[Psudo]

How do you know that "nearly every President has committed [adultery] in the White House since Jefferson"? Most Presidents, I'd suggest, either didn't or were subtle enough that you can't know they did it.

[EDIT: Of course! The obvious, demonstrable example where you're wrong: President Buchanan is "since Jefferson" and clearly did not commit adultery; he wasn't married (he was widower), so adultery wasn't possible.]

Either way, though, that doesn't change the fact that partisans always target the opposition with rhetoric that boils down to "He's not one of us."