Jarasans Blog

I just saw a talking head on the tube telling us that there is not dime of credit to be gotten out there. 

In my mail was a solicitation for $7,000 loan from Citibank because I have such excellent credit.

In my mail was a solicitation from AIG telling me I was overpaying on insurance.(They already started spending the 85 Billion on postage)!

In my mail was a picture of the gekko from Geico telling me I am overpaying on my insurance.

Of course, I ripped them up and threw them in the trash, I've been doing this for a long time.  I learned something a long time ago from my parents who came here with nothing.  I reccommend this to anybody at no charge, you don't need any special counseling or books etc..

This applies to your personal needs:

If you don't need it don't buy it.  And even more importantly if you don't need it and you don't have the money to buy it outright don't even think of buying it.

It looks like avarice is the culprit of these problems in our financial markets but not everyone is guilty,  the majority of American business is sound, the practice of backing securities with mortgage money has to be reigned in.

Newt Gingrich has some great ideas on the solution for this self induced crisis.  Here you go:

Get the Politicians Out of the Economy: Recipe for Sound Economic Growth

By Newt Gingrich on September 21, 2008 1:54 PM 12 Comments

(This is a message from Newt Gingrich to American Solutions members on getting the American economy back on track, and the key is to get the politicians out of the economy and then have a recipe for sound economic growth.)

 

You know, the last few weeks have been painful economically and even more painful as an historian and citizen. 

On Saturday, September 27 we'll spend six hours proposing bold dramatic change at our second annual Solutions Day which will be in the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta, Georgia and will be on the Internet on Dish Satellite Television, on  Direct TV, and all the details are at AmericanSolutions.com.

But, the rate at which politicians, lobbyists and bureaucrats in Washington are doing the wrong things in the wrong way requires speaking out NOW. This is why I wanted to share today with the members and supporters of American Solutions some thoughts on the state of the economy and what we need to do to move America forward.

If you're like me and like most Americans, you've watched your savings shrink, your house value decline, the price you pay for gasoline rise, and the economy within many of us run a company get worse. But your economic problems have been dwarfed by the appalling behavior of Washington politicians.

Not only are they undermining our economic future but if unchecked they will ruin the future for our children and grandchildren.

Washington politicians in both parties are panicked and as a result they are making things worse.

• The liberals in Congress have responded to the American people's anger over energy prices by trying to pass fundamentally dishonest bills which raise taxes and at the same time limit energy production while pretending to increase it. These dishonest efforts would actually make it permanently illegal to drill for oil and natural gas in most of the areas offshore.  Instead of letting the ban on offshore oil drilling end naturally on October 1, the liberals in Congress are trying to enact a new, permanent ban on offshore development.  These dishonest "no drill bills" offer no hope of solving the underlying challenge of energy for a country which is shipping $700 billion overseas every year. And notice you now see foreign, sovereign funds with your money coming back to buy your banks and your companies because of our truly destructive energy policy.
• In the name of economic security the Congress passed a Sarbanes-Oxley law which is driving companies from public scrutiny into private ownership, driving new companies out of New York and into London for financing and slowing down dramatically the development of new companies. . Let me be very clear, Sarbanes Oxley has failed. It failed to warn about Fannie Mae. It failed to warn about Freddie Mac. It failed to warn about Bear Stearns. It failed to warn about Lehman Brothers. It failed to warn about AIG. And yet, while being a total failure in every big case, it adds $3 million dollars a year to the cost of a startup company having to hire accountants and take care of paperwork when they actually should be focused on growing, hiring people, and being productive. The result has been in the second quarter of this year, we had zero new public offerings by new companies, and in the third quarter we had one. We used to have thirty or forty every quarter. That's how bad Sarbanes Oxley is weakening this economy.
• In the name of national security Congress adopted a visa law which cripples America's ability to attract successful people, crippled our international tourism business, and weakened our ability to attract first class students in math and science.
• Congress insists on education policies which prop up failed bureaucracies, trap children in institutions which destroy their future -- and in some neighborhoods making prison much more likely than college. These failed policies guarantee the continuing decay of America in both economic and national security competition with China and India.
• Americans still put up with a failing healthcare system. They still pay too much for too little quality, too little choice, and too little convenience. Congress has thus far failed to improve safety by investing in electronic health records, failed to crack down on fraud, and failed to find a way through tax credits to make sure everyone can have health insurance.
• In the name of limiting legal immigration while ignoring the millions of illegal immigrants in America, the Congress refuses to adopt policies to increase the number of smart, educated and successful people who can come to America to work. This refusal leads to high value jobs being exported to, India, China, Canada, and elsewhere while low paying illegal jobs grow in the United States.
• For too long, Congress has failed to stop the practice of using surplus Social Security funds for other purposes, including pork barrel spending.  This continued raid on Social Security makes it more and more difficult to achieve real reform for Social Security.
• Congress compounds our long term weakness in economic competition by sustaining the world's second highest corporate tax rate (three times higher than Ireland's), sustaining a legal system which is the most economically destructive on the planet, and taxing capital gains. All this while the world's best competitors encourage savings and investment with low corporate tax rates and zero taxes on capital gains.

 

Faced with the economic mess they have made, most Congressional politicians then call for protecting the very jobs they are killing by adopting economically unsustainable but politically attractive demagoguery.

The Federal Reserve has forgotten that its first job is to protect the dollar. In its search for a pain free here and now it has flooded the world with dollars which has set the stage for a return to the 1970s model of stagflation in which the combination of high taxes and high inflation cripple economic growth and weaken our economic future.

The Treasury has forgotten that its first job is to protect the taxpayer and reinforce the Federal Reserve in protecting the dollar. Now we have a Treasury which is capriciously deciding which firm to help and which firm to let die. In the process it is piling up huge liabilities for the taxpayer, potentially increasing the long term debt of the American taxpayer by what may amount to a nearly 50% increase.

This process of debt accumulation started with the government intervention in the case of the failing Bear Stearns at a potential cost to taxpayers of $30 billion, followed by a weekend "saving" Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae at an estimated cost of $200 billion.

Then this past week we saw the decision to allow Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt followed by the decision that AIG needed to be rescued, subjecting the taxpayer to a potential risk of an additional $85 billion.

We cannot have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down. We cannot have a welfare state for Wall Street.

You know, that was not all.  This interventionism is so capricious, just yesterday we learned that the taxpayer could be responsible for $700 billion in potential bad debt. We don't know what the rules are. We don't know what the structure is. This is all going to be decided in secret by a handful of congressmen and the Secretary of the Treasury with no American knowing what's being decided, and yet it could shape this country for the next 20 years.

In addition, to show you how much the rule of law has decayed, we were told that 799 companies will be protected by stopping the ability to sell short on their stock-that is to gamble that they're going to get weaker. Why 799? Why not 797? Why not 801? Who's on the list to be protected by the government, and who isn't on the list to be protected, and who made that decision?

This is not the rule of law. This is not what we thought America was supposed to be about. This is very dangerous government by politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats, who are making decisions in secret without the country knowing what the ground rules are.

As a principled conservative it is even more sobering to see the amount of economic power being centralized in Washington with these interventions. Deals are being struck behind closed doors with little or no transparency. Things are happening at the intersection of politics and finance that we, the American people, know nothing about except the potential price tag we will pay. These many new federal responsibilities will politicize finances at giant institutions and will guarantee massive increases in lobbying.

Lobbyists are a consequence of big government not a cause of it. The more money centered in government the more value there will be in hiring a lobbyist. The more lobbyists are hired the more politics will be dominated by the political contributions of the lobbyists and their employers. The more power the lobbyists and their employers amass over the politicians the more politics will define the economy. It will become more profitable to influence a politician than to invent a product. If the market rejects you or your ideas fail to compete, the help of your lobbyist may be all you need. Your lobbyist may be able to get government to protect you from your own failure.

The failure of politicians to solve the systemic and fundamental economic problems has led them to paper over these failures with your money. Using your money inevitably increases the power and size of Washington bureaucracy. In the long run, centralized bureaucratic planning will inevitably make the United States less competitive, less creative, and less capable.

If we do not stop the current lobbyist driven, politician enhancing, and bureaucracy empowering trend, America will be poorer, weaker, and less capable for a long time to come.

In an amazing display of historic ignorance, economic destructiveness, and ideologically driven dishonesty, Washington politicians are in the process of combining the worst of the 1970s bad economic policies with the worst of Detroit's economic and educational decay.

We are in grave danger of turning all of America into the kind of declining economy and bureaucratic mess which Detroit has become over the last 40 years.

It is essential that we face the facts and return to the fundamentals.

To paraphrase then Governor Ronald Reagan in February 1975 at the first Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference (which then Naval Officer John McCain went to as the guest of Governor Reagan), the time has come to outline a policy of bold colors with no pale pastels.