Good night everyone :hatsoff:
You've made enough money -- Obama
- Thread starter ~~whimsy~~
- Start date
Good night everyone :hatsoff:
Now, I do agree with this post. Whatever the executives made, none of my business, I don't care. Whatever amount of money they make, they don't raise my taxes, they don't send me off to war, they don't take my money if I don't put it in their bank, and they don't force me to buy health insurance if I don't want to. Saying that someone or something is "too big to fail" is tantamount to saying that someone or something else is "too small to succeed" and I don't believe in anyone being too small to succeed. Even these huge multinational banks must have had some humble beginings with one small bank taking over other small banks and becoming even bigger sort of like a snowball effect. If I'm not mistaking even Microsoft started at Bill's mom's garage. If a bank is going broke due to bad decisions from their management, too bad, let them sink! But what do you do when those banks start going broke, not due to mismanagement, but due to being forced/coerced by the government into making loans they would otherwise not do? So the moral to the story is: you don't want banks to go broke and then have the government bail them out, don't force them into making bad loans. So, Obama, you want to give poor people mortgages, you start your own bank and do it, I mean, didn't you make $5 mil just last year? Oh, only one man can't do it? How about if you pass the hat around and have Biden, Pelosi, Reed, Soros, Oprah, Edwards, the Clintons, Kerry, Rezco, and have all those other "generous" people you know contribute?
But why did the GOP block attempts at "financial reform"? The bill did not include anything about reforming Freedie Mac and Fannie Mae, that's why. What guarantee is there that a later bill will do so? Not while the Democrats are in power.
Jagger69
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue
I believe Obama is trying to affect a huge distribution of wealth in this country through almost $14 TRILLION in proposed spending he wants to do during his term as President. This collossal spending spree on government programs will end up being paid for by our children and grandchildren. If he succeeds in spending everything he has proposed, this generation will likely also lose a lot of it's wealth due to out of control inflation that will result.
You are correct that all presidents support taxation. The difference seems to be that not all of them support the same amount of taxation, and they all seem to disagree on just how much of a role the government should play in implementing and paying for "the nation's priorities". In other words, there are a LOT of things our tax dollars pay for that are not "priorities" at all.
How do you explain when Obama told "Joe the Plumber" or whatever his name was, that "I don't begrudge you of your success, I just want to "spread it around a little..."? I said it then, and I'll say it now. It is NOT the role of government to "spread around" the wealth of the people.
Rey C.
Racing is life... anything else is just waiting.
You don't have to name a dozen, just name ONE bank or bank holding company that's been forced or coerced into making bad mortgages by the U.S. government or one of its GBE's. Just one. It's not a trick question, I promise you.
Did FNMA and FHLMC worsen the issue through their own frauds? Yeppers. But contrary to what I've seen posted on this message board, one does not get a FNMA or FHLMC mortgage by going to a FNMA or FHLMC office and talking to some government pencil pusher. You go to a PRIVATE banking or mortgage institution, and the bank's underwriter (who is supposed to be following the appropriate guidelines) approves or rejects your application. The Fed, under Greenspan (a Republican) and President G.W. Bush also touted higher home ownership rates. Somehow, some way, people have managed to weave internet urban legends into how this all (actually) went down.
And if that was true, then why wouldn't the GOP have wanted to debate the bill on the Senate floor and get those objections addressed??? Again, still
Here's my theory: the banking lobby has been sending out the troops in full force over the past few weeks, and they've spent millions of dollars to kill ANY meaningful financial reform package. They're more than comfortable with "too big to fail" and they don't want it to go away. They know that without some mechanism to unwind large financial services firms in dire times (which we do not now have), they'll always have access to the taxpayers' wallets by way of the Fed and the Treasury Dept. This is why the Goldman Sachs bombshell couldn't have come at a worse time (interesting timing, eh? :tongue
. Now the public (some of them anyway) are beginning to realize just what sort of mess we'll be in if what we have now is not changed. Include FNMA and FHLMC? Absolutely. Why not? But that means that the GOP will have to sit down at the table and lay their cards down. From what I've seen so far, it doesn't appear that very many of them (not all, but not many) want to do that.Bottomline, as it stands now, there is no orderly way to wind down a large money center financial services firm - much less three or four. And letting one or more of the majors just go belly up, with no way to contain the failure and part it out, would be like letting the drug dealer's apartment burn in your apartment building. It might make you feel good at first, but you're going to lose your place too.
some of the top 50 company ceos made less than him based on this data
http://old.swivel.com/data_columns/spreadsheet/9210361
http://old.swivel.com/data_columns/spreadsheet/9210361
"O'Bama"??
....now are you saying he's Irish?
Maybe. We never saw that birth certificate, did we? Hmmmmmm.
He brushed his teeth pretty good. They're pretty white, just look at them sometime.
Rey C.
Racing is life... anything else is just waiting.
Based on one CEO, whose compensation I know from an SEC filing, that list has some errors. Also, it doesn't look like it includes anything besides salary and (pure?) cash bonuses. Most CEO's, and a great many people even in non-executive level management, receive stock options and/or restricted stock grants as part of their annual compensation.
According to the 2009 Forbes rankings, there's no CEO in the Top 100 whose total compensation dipped below $12.8 million.
Forbes Compensation Rankings
This is only a big deal to people who want to take words out of context and create a meaning that suits their agenda. As has been said by Jagger and others, no one has proposed (or even suggested) anything that limits what a person can make - UNLESS they've hooked themselves onto the teat of the taxpayer to save their dying firms. And since it looks like we are going to continue to have "too big to fail" (if the GOP has anything to say about it), then I'm all for limiting what a TARP CEO can make. Otherwise, it's between the CEO, the BoD and the shareholders.
It's also (sadly) funny to read here that some still believe that the large money center financial services firms failed or stumbled because the government (actually, Obama? - even though he was just a Senator when this was taking place) forced and coerced (that just rolls off the tongue, don't it?) them to make loans to people who couldn't pay the money back. They didn't want to do it. No! The government made them do it. It had nothing to do with packaging any shit loan that they could make and selling the MBS with an A rating, or hack mortgage brokers who had been selling used cars one week and making $300 grand a year, (half way) filling out mortgage apps the next week. No, that wasn't it. The gubment forced these poor, naive bankers to make those loans and go under.
It would be so much more entertaining if some posts here began with, "Once upon a time..."
We are on schedule to get out of Iraq in July 2011, just as Obama promised in his campaign.
Gitmo is not closed yet because Congress has blocked it. Too bad the president is not a dictator.
Obama has lowered taxes for 98% of all Americans through the stimulus package, which I assume includes the middle class.
