I can't say that they hate American business but instead hate that business, especially big business, is a threat to their power base. This is not limited to American business but applies to all business with multinational corporations being at the top of their list. Their never ending demand for continuing to increase the taxes on the "rich" stems from the need to beat them down and control them. It is no accident that they foster the class warfare and encourage the ongoing conflict between business management and labor.
Greed has little to do with being successful in business. I have worked for some extremely successful individuals and they made their fortunes by being able to see stuff that others didn't or can't such as future trends etc. The money making part is essentially a side issue because they do what they do so well and that is what they focus on and the money "happens".
And then there is greed as exemplified by Enron, big brokerages, big banks etc.
For some reason everyone likes to think republicans are responsible but politicians from both parties are owned. Just think back to a few years back when the Democrat Congress (the democrats held the majority during the last two years of the Bush administration. Congress is the only one who can spend money so they could have simply said no) bailed out all of the greedy bankers and brokerages by creating the "too big to fail" buzz. Instead of letting the crooked gamblers fail and letting responsible institutions take over they rescued the greedy crooked gamblers to insure their crooked institutions could stay in business and pay huge bonuses.
That is one of the reasons you now see such an effort from folks who never cared about elections to participate and fire folks on both sides.
I was just watching the morning news and there is supposed to be a report released today that tells how many thousands of jobs have been saved with stimulus money, and in the film clip there were some guys shoveling by hand and in the clip a big yellow Komatsu backhoe doing it's thing.
Your belief debunked by Kurt, so no more comments needed.
Here's a thought experiment: Assuming most of the wealth does go to the top
1%. What do you think they do with it? A. Stuff it in a mattress. B. Turn it into, say, gold and hoard it. C. Invest or othewise use it to create jobs.
Exactly WHAT social issues are in the top ten this political season?
Here's Gallup's list
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Terrorism Immigration Federal spending Economy Afghanistan Jobs Corruption in government Healthcare Environment
Please note there are NO classic "social issues" (abortion, gay rights, discrimination, gender equality, minimum wage, slavery, etc.) in the list.
As for the middle-class being beaten down, isn't this an incentive to move to the upper-class? And lest you say it can't be done, here's an idea: Start a web site to sell and trade Pez Dispensers.
Mostly. The Community Redevelopment Act was passed during the Carter administration. In 1995, under Clinton, the act was expanded to require banks and lending institutions to devote up to 55% of their loans - and other activities - to "lesser served" areas of the community.
Look around. Often you'll find a Chase or Bank of America store front competing with the hookers and dope-dealers as the only retail establishments on the block. Do you really think a national bank would, of their own free will, open such a facility?
Of course the banks and mortgage companies went nuts over the "quota system" for making loans, so Fannie & Freddie had to guarantee the insane loans.
Nobody said they had to make lier loans. They made the loans because they made a butt load of money and then sold them off.
Fannie and Freddie and for that matter the CRA provided standards, which just got in the way of making those and the money.
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...that subprime excesses came mainly from institutions not regulated by the CRA. In the February 2008 House hearing, law professor Michael S. Barr, a Treasury Department official under President Clinton,[67][113] stated that a Federal Reserve survey showed that affected institutions considered CRA loans profitable and not overly risky. He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA, and another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. Barr noted that institutions fully regulated by CRA made "perhaps one in four" sub-prime loans, and that "the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight".
George W Bush is a typical Republican, it is never their fault. It's always too much regulation, taxes and Democrats.
Interesting stat in this issue revolving around the GOP takeover of Congress. In the five fiscal years prior to 1994, the year-to-year increase in spending was fairly steady. Newt and the gang came in and for the next five years the average y/t/y increase was about .75% less (but omniously started trending up again in years 4 & 5). By the end of the next 5 years, it was back to where it started. So basically, the GOP after being a minority for 40 plus years soon found out how much fun it was to spend taxpayers money!! Along came GW and the Iraq war. Don't know if it was ever actually agreed to, but it was a certainly a nod-nod, wink-wink agreement that if Congress gave him the money to fight in Iraq, he'd not protest too much about their spending. How else do you explain the fact that most "War funding bills" included around 25% of the money being spent on domestic earmarks? History tells us that there is not now, nor probably ever be, no too big to fail policy. We promised ourselves after the S&L crisis that we wouldn't do that again. Yet we always do. We seem to be unable to divorce ourselves of the policy that we privatize the profit, but socialize the losses.
So the financial system should have just been allowed to melt down? GE, with a AAA rating couldn't find money, that is how bad is was.
The rules were written at the time so that there was no penalty for failure. Much of that is changing, so if an institution fails, those responsible for the short sighted decisions, don't come out smelling of roses.
This has all been about making vast amounts of short term profits, with little concern about the long term.
That is one of the most blindly opinionated statements I have ever read.
The rich are doing well enough.
The fact is the rich were doing better (and so were all Americans) during the marginal tax rates of Clinton. Or even the end of Reagan.
The tax cuts were unpaid for, as were two wars.
During W there was a lot of money sloshing around in the pockets of the rich. Little of that money was reinvested in business growth. It went into all these exotic investments, and running up the real estate market, all the things that are costing the nation so much now. Why wasn't the economy booming with all that money waiting to trickle down?
Obama did nothing less than save capitalism in this country. People who say Obama is a socialist or a communist know nothing about either one and just believe whatever sound bite they like. A lot of this explains the popularity of Sarah Palin, who knows little, can't complete a job, has a dysfunctional family, and is in it for her own good.
But the Tea Partiers like how she "thinks" because it plays into their emotions.
You may not like government, but breaking it, as the Tea Party wants, will have the same disastrous consequences as always. History is full of depressions and recessions from the Private Sector having run amuck.
As a parting shot to those Republicans worried about the deficit. Where was the concern when W turned a budget surplus, into a more than doubling of the National debt? All of that in relatively good times. And as far as employment, how about during W's first term there was almost a net loss of jobs. For the 8 years he was in office, only enough jobs were added that normally would have been needed for one year, not eight.
But none of this is the Republicans fault, it is always someone elses.
Go sell crazy somewhere else. I think Stormin Mormon has been staring into the bottom of a tea cup too long.
You upset about the Clinton tax cuts not being paid for? The REAL problem is that the spending continued. To say the cuts were unpaid for is to suggest that the government has dibs on a certain amount of our money no matter what. The Congress that passed the cuts knew how much they "cost" but did not stop spending.
Which alternative universe you in? Bush inherited Clinton's dot com bubble, his not doing anything to prevent 9-11 (both patently absurb statements, but since you are having presidents "own" things they have little control over I'll continue the trend). He got the Dow back to pre-bubble areas and tax receipts year over year grew all but the last year of his administration.
And from government run amuck. Heck the Great Depression is largely related to governmental action.
The budget surplus had already peaked and was gone by the time the first Bush budget came into effect, largely because government was did not "prevent" the dot com bubble.
Never the Dems, either. Actually a lot of this is secondary to business cycles that government has no control over.
Maybe he means TOTAL income tax. And in some places, that does bring it to 50%. And aside from income tax, we all pay sales taxes, property taxes, etc that can easily bring it to over 50%.
I have made my living for most of the last 40 years by providing services to small, medium sized businesses and a couple of very large corporations. It has been my experience that the vast majority of those businesses were run by caring people who were anything but GREEDY. They all understood that the continuance of their business depended on their taking care of that business and making a profit. No business does their employees any service by losing money and going out of business. The problem is that it only takes one glaring bad apple to spoil the image of all business. I knew a lot of people who worked for ENRON and all of them were honest hard working and caring individuals who gave their best to that company. All of them were the victims of a very few self-serving and yes greedy (although not necessairly for money but gready for power as well) individuals who destroyed that company. I worked with Shell Oil for many years and watched as many people there were hurt by a very few people who had their own agenda and the power to shove it down everyones throat. That doesn't make the corporations greedy or evil, it is effect of a very few people who are only there for themselves.
By the way, the same things can be said about every level and branch of government and the many government entities.
The only thing I would disagree with you on is that you apply the same logic as the Democrats, media, and our current president in regards to assigning the labels to the corporations such as Enron, big brokerage houses, and big banks. The blame must be properly assigned to the few, very few, individuals within these entities who are actually to blame, not to the entire organization. It only took a dozen or so people within an organization of thousands to bring down Enron. It took even less than that to bring down an even bigger but for some reason totally ignored and forgotten WorldCom.
Well, isn't that what we are talking about? The few greedy self serving pricks that ruin things for a lot of people?
I agree with what you said there and I was never meaning to include all the small business and even a few of the big businesses. But the ones that are the greediest are huge and do a lot of damage.
Any time a discussion starts to cut taxes, the Dems always refuse to cut them for the "rich". And when the discussion is about raising taxes, the Dems always want to raise them more on the rich. Repeat that cycle many times and it's obvious where it gets you?
It's like what Nixon said about negotiating with the Russians. He said their approach was what's mine is mine, what's yours is up for negotiation. As soon as the negotiations conclude, they want to do it again.
Back to the tax issue, if there was any common sense and decency in DC here is what they would do. They would agree to an overall income tax rate structure. That structure would then remain untouched for a very long time. Any time it was necessary to raise taxes or cut them, it would be done by adjusting all the rates, for everyone, uniformly. If you raise the 10% bracket to 11%, you raise the 30% bracket to 33%. And when you cut them, you do the exact same thing. That would eliminate 90% of the bickering over fooling with the progressiveness of the tax code that comes up all the time.
But the Dems would never agree to it because they want to use the issue of class warfare each time to try to re-distribute the wealth.
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