The national debt will destroy the dollar, and destroy this country.

The poor pay almost no taxes. The bottom 35% of American’s pay ZERO Federal tax. And the other taxes (sales, etc) they pay are essentially zero on a relative basis. Making a case that the poor subsidize anyone, on a monetary basis, is folly. One could make an argument about economic fairness and inequitable wealth concentrations – but when the top 50% of Americans essentially pay ALL of the taxes, any argument about how they benefit embarrasses the person making that argument.

Fannie and Freddie made mistakes – no doubt. But, if you want to understand the REAL reason Fan/Fred are bleeding right now – you need to meander through Fannie’s balance sheet. Take a look at which loans are going bad and which loans are performing well.

You’ll quickly realize that Fan/Fred made a lot of loans where the borrower put no money down, had very high debt ratios and had iffy credit. They also made loans to people without verifying their income.

These loans are almost 100% responsible for the losses that Fan/Fred are taking. The old fashioned, 30 year fixed with a 10% downpayment to people with a job history are performing perfectly.

So, why did Fan/Fred lose their way? (They only starting making the riskier loans in the past six or seven years). Answer – congress.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversite (OFHEO), which regulated Fan/Fred would give Fan/Fred annual “housing goals” to meet. These numbers were pushed HARD by liberal Democrats (and some Republicans as well because, after all, who would ever say no to housing…)

So, not only did Wall Street get greedy – our government got greedy as well. Bush pushed hard for ever-increasing homeownership goals and the Democrats pushed extremely hard to get more and more minorities and “underserved” into homes.

How do you get more “underserved” into homes? You dramatically loosen credit standards.

It’s popular now to blame the lenders for having the gall to give people six figures so they could own a home – but it’s an absolute truism, when it comes to Fan/Fred, to say they had no choice.

I have friends in senior positions at Fannie. They would often marvel that the OFHEO goals for homeownership EXCEEDED the market. In other words, the goals forced them to create loans for people who had no business owning a home.

So, feel good about your Socialist story – but know that it’s dead wrong.

One sizable component of the taxable income of many rich folks is unearned income from capital gains from investments. This is currently taxed at 15% for investments held longer than 18 months. Joe Sixpack may have some retirement investments and so forth, but I doubt he’s got an income stream from investments, let alone the tax-free municipal bonds that are probably in the portfolios of older rich folks. In short, rich people’s investments are a hedge against inflation and also buy them time, keep them from having to take on debt to deal with tough times. Joe Sixpack doesn’t have that cushion.

I may be a squatter but I am not a freeloader. So I have had it up to here with right-wingers. They say the minimum wage is evil. Who are they to talk? When they’ve had to worry about getting enough to eat each day, then they can talk about abolishing economic regulations. Some of them even say “taxation is theft.” I don’t mind taxation in itself. What I do mind is seeing 20% of my earnings go to — not health care for me, not shelter for me, but to fund a bunch of frivolous financial and military adventures that line the pockets of the already-rich. Maybe I’m the only one who’s annoyed at this? Well, ‘they’ had better hope I’m the only one, because otherwise there’s major inter-class trouble brewing in America.

Over 70 percent of taxes are paid by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population… and it still has almost NO IMPACT on their lifestyle.

The only way that the wealthy would suffer is if they paid prices for ALL ITEMS in proportion to their wealth. But none of them have to pay $10000 for a gallon of milk. Even with inflation, fixed prices means that money works EXPONENTIALLY for the wealthy… that’s why a $20000 car represents 20 percent of the income of someone making 100K a year but only 2 percent of the income of someone making 1mil a year, .2 percent of someone making 10mil a year, etc. So even at inflated tax brackets, the wealthy pay less in taxes, not only propotionally, but because EVERYTHING they purchase is actually cheaper based on proportionality based on fixed costs. So, not only do the wealthy have more money, everything to them is actually CHEAPER from a mathematical standpoint.

We are prolonging the pain of the housing market leveling itself back to fundamentals (based on wages). We are creating “Japan” like conditions, where even people with good credit will not be able to afford a mortgage or home ownership.

Let us not forget that we aren’t just paying back on housing, we will be paying back for this “war” as well.