Wednesday, July 1, 2009

In defense of Obamaland

Browse some political forums today and you'll likely find that there's a variety of opinions on President Obama. Mostly it seems to be negative. You've got to think about it though, the poor bastard got stuck with a thoroughly fucked system and had to fix it at the demand of the populace. Everyone complains about the near trillion dollar spending he's engaged in since taking office. Figure this, Bush eliminated laws to protect us from things like this. One notable bit was his deregulation of the banking system, which led us to our current situation of bailing out banks. Once deregulated the banks were free to do anything they wanted, including taking risks with their account holders money that wouldn't have been permitted before, such as sub prime loans. Those sub prime loans turned out to be the the straw that broke the camels back. Compound that with the banks fudging their SEC filings and you've got a ticking time bomb. For those of you that don't understand the sub prime loan problem, here's a simple explanation. Sub prime references loans taken out with an interest rate that defies the current "prime" rate dictated by the Federal Reserve. These loans are almost always given to people with less than good credit. They end up with interest rates around 10-14% where the prime rate was 6%. People with poor credit tend to have limited means as well, making it harder for them to make the larger payment forced upon them by the banks. Hence mass defaulting. With all that piling up, it's near impossible to keep the country from slipping into some seriously ugly place without the use of heavy government spending. If it hadn't been for the $787 billion dollar bailout bill, we'd probably be in much, much worse shape right now. Unemployment is at a 20-year high with most of the country experiencing 10+% jobless rates. The author has been without work for over 8 months. Something needed to be done and Bush was just making it worse. We're spending $5000 per second on the war right now. That comes to $12 billion per month. Think about that.... $12 billion per month for the last 8 and 1/2 years. That brings the entire cost of this war as of the writing of this piece up to $1.224 Trillion dollars. With state governments across the country predicting $500 million or better budget deficits, it stands to reason that this war is slowly killing us. If you want to see the actual statistics on it click here. While I'm thinking about it, the author of this blog does not support any political party or individual, all opinions are my own heavily researched thoughts, I am not paid to write this.

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