Transparency Right?

Suffragette America: wham, bam, thank you mam’! Congratulations the recovery and reinvestment act is law!

Our government is borrowing and this bill is so freaking huge, both colossuses’ of Memnon couldn’t prop the thing between them if they tried. It’s ridiculous! Throughout the history of mankind this type of unchecked spending has collapsed societies.

While I am on the topic of ancient civilizations that no longer exist can I just scream out Rome! Thank you but I am dumbfounded by all of this and not in a good way. I can’t believe the people that are think certain aspects of this bill are good.

“Like, yo dude, I found an extra twenty-five dollars a week in my paycheck! It just appeared magically! Cool!” These knot heads don’t get it! Somebody will pay …all of us will pay… and we’ll pay and pay and pay!

Maybe it has all gotten to me but I see all of this borrowing as being a little like we have this giant drill and we’re boring through the earth. In the end we will pop out the other side and be siphoned into some impoverished third world nation but nobody will notice because it’s been such a slow downward spiral.

For many we are just nibbling on the sweet illusion of socialism but not quite ready for the commitment. Some are excited, some are exasperated and I just may be resigned to what is happening. Trust me I don’t want that and I am almost confident in saying that you don’t want to see it happen either, what a nightmare!

Now I know I am being a little rough on the new bill and some say we need to give it time. All I can say in my defense is that we’ve seen this before and it hasn’t worked. But this time we have ‘transparency’ so everyone can see what’s going on. Right? That makes it all different…

The seductress is Lady Transparency. She’s all dressed up for us and promises the fulfillment of our wildest fantasy, a government that is for the people, by the people and keeps the people free. A government with no corruption and where we can spend all this money and do ‘good’ for ALL people.

But underneath the seductive trappings is a two-timing tramp that is telling lies and stealing from us. You need proof, then just look at the new government web site, recovery.gov. It’s one huge piece of Socialist propaganda. The so called transparency is fiction, read the fine print and the asterisk on the site. Transparency my a**!

Hold on America! I started this blog entry with a song so I’ll end with one. Back in the USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are boy, back in the, back in the, back in the USSR!

Shut Up and Get Out of the Way!

There ...I said it! The talking heads in the government need to just shut up and get out of the way. What gives me the right to be so pointed? Well I'll tell you.

I have a unique perspective, being one of the few people in the mortgage industry that didn't go gonzo and make loans to every breathing Jack that walked through my door. I didn't get rich off the housing boom and I wasn't part of the "problem."

I sit everyday watching the stock markets, analyzing the bond market and reading about the mortgage backed securities market trying to give my clients some direction about where interest rates are headed. Right when I think I see a trend developing, BAM! something happens that causes huge volatility in the market!

That 'something' that causes volatility and turns good markets into bad is usually very simple to identify. It is a press conference. Not just any press conference, it's usually a press conference by the President or one of his newly appointed minions.

Case in fact, on Tuesday, February 10, 2009, Sec. Tres. Geihtner has a press conference to announce how the Treasury plans to move forward to 'fix' the crisis, the markets tank and theirs huge volatility everywhere. It's not directional, it's just panic selling without solid trends. It's mindless and crazy.

So what's going on? Well the markets begin to settle and everyone is becoming comfortable. In many cases trends are forming and they are good trends, Whew! We can breath a sigh of relief right?

Wrong! Before a good trend has a chance to take hold and before the capitalism side of our capitalist economy can begin to do what it does, someone from the government announces some new spending, printing or borrowing plan that throws everything out of whack again.

The markets can fix themselves with some oversight and some slight tightening of regulations. But before a real fix can take hold two things have to happen!

One, the government has to Shut Up! Stop telling the markets what your going to do and start listening to what the markets are saying. Step two, is to supply the markets with what they say the need! THEN..... GET OUT OF THE WAY!

If the government officials would quit trying to get face time so they can claim credit for the fix then the fix would come a lot sooner. I for one am tired of seeing the people that got us in this mess claim that they have the fix to get us out.

And I dare you to tell me there's a whole new crowd in charge now and they didn't have anything to do with this mess, come on....I dare you... ;-)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Finally we might get some movement on solving the bank and mortgage mess! It is about time. I've always said if the problem is really bad loans then get them out of the system and everything will be fine.

Now we here that's exactly what might happen. New Tres. Sec., Timothy Gheithner has suggested the creation of a 'bad bank'. This bank would be an aggregator used to accumulate the loans that are in default, essentially removing them from banks books and getting them out of the system.

This 'bad bank' would absorb all of the delinquent assets and turn our banks back into 'good banks' again! Stupendous. But wait, here's the ugly part, there's not enough money left in the TARP fund to buy all the bad loans.

The answer might be to seek investment capital from the private sector. With enough government guarantees on returns, that money might come flowing in fast and furious. However, the real ugly part would be if the American tax payer were to be burdened further with those guarantees.

For now all we can do is take a wait and see stance on this. This is the most logical decision to be made by the Treasury since this whole thing started over two years ago.

Let's hope Timothy 'the dodger' Geithner is right. I think he is, it's what the economist I follow have been saying for a while ....and they are all conservatives so maybe they all got it right this time.

What? 'the dodger' comment above? What's that all about? Sorry, it's just my swipe at yet another Obama appointment where the appointee had a tax problem....but that's a subject for another blog isn't it.

Sorry, back to the subject at hand. If the Secretary of Tresury is correct on this one, the fix could be in and we might see our economy improve as early as the 4th quarter of this year.

But the recovery may still be blunted if the Democrats are successfully in Porking America again with this huge, over inflated, pork barrel, pig belly so called stimulus package. Again, we will all just have to wait and see.....zzzzz.....zzzzz..... Somebody wake me up when this nightmare is over please! ;-)

To One Sided

Okay, I just realized something. I've been to one sided. I'm bashing the so-called stimulus plan, referring to it as a huge chunk of pork. It really is nothing more than one giant 'earmark' written as a law.

But that's not the point I want to make today. Along come the Republicans and they band together and not a single Republican votes for the bill. They rant about the pork and they rave about the lie Obama supposedly told about working with both parties.

The one thing they don't do is offer any viable solutions themselves! Tax cuts is cannot be the end-all/be-all answer for the Republican Party every time their is an economic crisis. The answer must be radical change, but not in the way that the dems want. More spending is NOT the answer either!

These guys just don't get it! We need real change! Change, real change, would be the elimination of the tax code as we know it. You want to talk change, let's change our economy from a spending economy to a saving economy by installing the Fair Tax! That's real change.

Change would be the elimination of Corporate Taxes. Everybody talks a good game about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. but nobody is doing anything about it! Imagine if corporations didn't pay any tax at all! (well they don't really, we pay the tax in the form of higher prices on goods and services)

All that money would be enough to make up for the extortion large manufacturers pay to the Unions. That's CHANGE!

Nobody gets it. Obama hasn't changed anything yet, he's just changed who's in charge. We still have the same old politics. The Republicans need to quit complaining and start offering us something real.

Just pinning the bad ideas on the Democrats so that they get full credit when these ideas fail ...and believe me, they will fail... is not good for America. If Republicans want to be seen as more than obstructionist, then they need to propose real and radical change!

"Change we can believe in", it's what Americans thought we voted for, now can we get some please?!