Just another nail in the coffin of our media. Last year they, along with Democrats, cried and wailed over Ted Cruz wanting a government shutdown over Obamacare. This year when Elizabeth Warren wants a shutdown over business friendly provisions the media is singing a different tune:
Instead of “Why Democrats Want to Shut Down the Government,” we get “Warren tells House Dems not to support omnibus.” Instead of “Elizabeth Warren and the shutdown caucus,” we get “Spending bill teeters amid Democratic discontent.” Instead of “Elizabeth Warren Is Protesting the Shutdown She Asked For” we have “Elizabeth Warren Joinse Revolt Against Wall Street Deal In Government Shutdown Talks.
Last year, Ted Cruz’s push against the government spending deal was all about how Ted Cruz wants a shutdown. But when Elizabeth Warren threatens to torpedo a spending deal that will result in a shutdown, it’s all about her courage in standing up to Wall Street and her populist movement against fat cats. Everyone loves a good story about intrapartisan fighting on Capitol Hill, but only the media wants to hide that what’s behind Elizabeth Warren’s crusade is that she wants to shut down the government to achieve her goals.
And let’s not get started on the flurry of media hyperventilating about how terrible a government shutdown would be when it’s Republicans’ fault, yet not a peep now that a Democratic hero is leading the charge.
The hypocrisy is just appalling, but not shocking. We have been dealing with the bias in our media for decades now so what’s one more example?
On a different note it’s pretty telling that Obama is becoming the big cheerleader for this Omnibus bill..
White House chief of staff Denis McDonough arrives to Dem caucus meeting on Capitol Hill!
— Rebecca Shabad (@RebeccaShabad) December 11, 2014
If he’s isn’t successful then he has officially become the lamest of lame ducks.
See author page
Michelle Obama’s vile and unappetizing lunch program would suffer a blow under the new federal budget deal being considered.
The unappetizing new foods have caused a drop in lunch sales, “crippling” school budgets.
The drop in sales of school lunches over the last two years is astonishing. “The number of school lunches served in America dropped more than 1 million between 2013 and 2014, according to data released this month by the Department of Agriculture.”
http://nypost.com/2014/12/10/federal-budget-bill-hits-michelle-obama-in-the-gut/
So, hopefully that cut stays when we do get a budget.
I had heard there is a 48-hour extension being readied for a vote before midnight Eastern.
Obama sent Denis McDonough to the Hill?
Is he known to be persuasive?
There are some questionable provisions in the budget deal that haven’t had much coverage in the news. The Washington Post has listed some of that here: What’s in the spending bill? We skim it so you don’t have to
The Dodd-Frank rollback is just asking for another round of taxpayer-funded bailouts. The provision that would allow drastic cuts to existing pensions would set a seriously worrisome precedent. Then we’ve got campaign finance anti-reform. Professional politicians have got to love that one.
The Dodd-Frank bill needs to be totally abolished. It basically puts such onus regulations on banks that only the large banks can function under them. Due to Dodd-Frank, thousands of small banks that service rural/small communities will go out of business. The large banking firm don’t want these small banks because of the small customer numbers. The people that will be harmed from Dodd-Frank will be the small rancher/farmer that relies on a close relationship with a local small bank for operating loans.
One third of what has been spent this year has gone to one entity, the Baptist Family Services. This group has raked in money like it was falling off trees with little/no oversight. The CEO of BFS earns almost 1/2 million $$$s a year, with an additional extremely high value dollar in “benefits.” Another group, Southwest Key, run by a former board member of La Raza, is also raking in the bucks. Catholic Charities of Miami was paid over $4,000,000.00 for the care of 60 unaccompanied alien children. Do the math.
This amount does not even begin to reimburse school districts for the cost of educating illegal alien children. The Houston Independent School District has been required to accept over 3,000 UACs at a cost of roughly $8,000.00 per student. $24 million in cost to just one school district.
What the Washington Compost didn’t tell you is that the is money earmarked to facilitate the transportation of children who are still in Central America to reunite them with their parents who are in the United States, ILLEGALLY. Not only are their parents no being deported, we’re paying to bring them here. How screwed up is that?
But of course, the Washington Compost, in it’s very biased article (biased against Republicans) will tell you only what it wants you to know. How kind of them.
@retire05, #3:
That’s more skewed right-wing history. It was deregulation of the financial industry that resulted in the wave of consolidations and mergers during the late ’80s and early ’90s that eliminated over 12,000 small community banks to begin with. I remember that period well enough. I never made a decision to do business with a certain large investment bank. They successively took over each of the small community banks that I had chosen.
What the Dodd-Frank budget provision will do is put taxpayers at increased risk from derivative investments by removing a barrier between that activity and regular FDIC-insured banking activities. It’s freaking astonishing that this seems like a good idea to anyone, after the meltdowns of 2008. You can’t trust these industries to look out for the public interest. They’re looking out for their own, and often their decision makers are mainly looking out for their own. Short-term gains can yield very large personal bonuses; the long-term risk of getting them is somebody else’s worry.
And the pension provision? That new precedent will have long-term implications for anyone who worked for 20 or 30 or 40 years with the expectation that a promise would be kept. You don’t want people to get decent wages up front. Apparently you don’t want them to get what was promised later in return for years of service, either.
@Greg:
You have a lot of gall accusing me of those things. Especially after you supported Obamacare which caused me to lose my health insurance. And yes, you dimwit, that health insurance was part of a retirement package, negotiated over many years with the company, after not 20, but 33 years with the same company. Now, because of people like you, I will be forced to fork out over $300 a month for something that was supposed to be paid for by the company.
So stick it, ObamaButtBoy, as far as I’m concerned, you owe me $300 a month, and that’s letting you off easy since it doesn’t cover the cost of dental or vision, which will add another 100 bucks to the tab.
As to Dodd-Frank; perhaps if Clinton hadn’t forced the banks to grant loans to high risk home buyers due to a faulty Boston Fed report, and forced the GSEs to pick up at least 50% of those high risk loans, we would have never seen the meltdown that you want to attribute to George Bush.
So go away, you commie. If you are against it, I am all for it.
It’s because of people who never seem to be able to figure out that they’re being conned into voting against their own best interests. Do you have a pension? Take note of the precedent being set. You’ve probably voted election after election for people who have opposed unions, workers’ rights and benefits, fair wage laws, etc. You’re probably voting for people who would like to roll back Medicare and Social Security as well. What are you thinking the eventual results will be?
That’s an incomplete and misleading tale. No one was forced to grant loans to unqualified home buyers. That happened because the financial industry created an incentive system that rewarded people for generating an increased volume of approved loans, which in turn generated increased profits for lending institutions. Unacceptable levels of risk were deliberately concealed upstream by way of bundling, and the risky loans were turned into financial instruments which were deliberately rated falsely and sold to unsuspecting investors to generate even more profits. In a properly regulated industry there would have been oversight, and there would have been serious consequences for those who participated in the scam. There was’t any, all the way from the bottom up. Responsible behavior would have slowed down the money machine. Ultimately there were no negative consequences for those who were directly responsible. It was robbery on a massive scale. The taxpayers got screwed, the people who lost their homes got screwed, the economy was shaken to its foundations, and the crooks got away with the loot.
Anyone who doesn’t want a repeat wants closer regulation. You can’t trust the foxes to guard the hen house. We’ve all seen recent proof of it.
You might want to try thinking things through for yourself instead.
The spending bill has passed in both the House and Senate, with the provision ending the Dodd-Frank prohibition of risky derivatives trading by FDIC-insured banks intact. The provision never would have gotten through the Senate as a stand-alone bill with democrats in control, despite having been sponsored by a democrat in the House to begin with. Like a number of other questionable items, it was slipped through while attention was focused on avoiding a government shutdown.
Hey, it just appeared out of nowhere! Nobody is to blame!
Unbelievable.
So, nobody will be to blame if the derivatives market flies south, taking the solvency of a couple of too-big-to-fail gambling-casinos-posing-as-banks along with it. Everybody will be pointing their fingers at some other guy.
Himes has tough win on controversial Wall Street provision in spending bill
See also: The Great Derivatives Scam
Surely they’re a bunch of conspiracy theorists, just making this stuff up, right? Google derivatives scam and see what comes up. So, why would Congress…
Oh, yeah. Money buys influence, and the financial system is made out of money.
@Greg:
Actually banks were forced to loan to high risk people. It’s pretty well documented how Clinton used his attorney general, the IRS and other agencies to coerce lending institutions into making high risk loans or face consequences. Some were sub prime and some were alt-A loans. The banks were back stopped by those loans being bought up by Fannie and Freddie where they were repackaged. There are books out on this whole mess. Just remember if everyone who got a home loan had just paid their mortgage payment regularly the entire financial mess would never have happened.
Go read this article. Note the date it was first published. Long before GWB left Texas and a precursor to what happened.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html
Also people forget how Clinton bailed out big US banks in the 1990’s when he bailed out Mexico. A case of moral hazard that set a precedent for banks to not worry about making bad investments as the US government would come to their rescue.
@Greg: Yet it was EVIL of Cruz to demand that the mandates be revoked or delayed (which Obama eventually did anyway, illegally) last year, wasn’t it? Then, it was the opinion of the left that no matter how bad anything was, the one and only priority was to fund the government. Otherwise, the entire solar system would stop rotating and the universe would collapse. Remember that?
Now, the Democrats are willing to shut the government rather than lose some control over private business. Frankendodd is not what protects us, the cancellation of the Community Reinvestment Act (which Obama wants to ramp back up, by the way) is our savior.
It was Clinton’s deregulation that caused the current financial collapse. Using variable rate loans to make it appear people that do not have the means to afford a mortgage can was the problem. While it is great for people to own a home, what the left cannot get through their thick, stupid skulls is that if you can’t, you just can’t. No amount of smoke and mirrors via Clinton, Bawney Fwank, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (while Dodd gets his sweet personal mortgage deals) can change that.
Liberals only understand socialism and socialism never works. They should not be in the way of growing an economy to thrive and provide economic opportunities to those that would take them.
I guess they should get into the habit of reading bills, huh?
@Greg:
Gee, Greggie, spoken like a true Socialist. What is in a person’s best interest, is not always in the best interest of the country. People vote for those who promise them more free crap (i.e. they vote for Democrats) when having $18 trillion in debt is not in the best interest of the nation. But what do the Democrats in D.C. care? They will be long gone when the piper demands to be paid.
Nope, took a buy-out.
But there was a catch; it was paid out as income and taxed accordingly, even though it was reinvested in an IRA.
Another rule passed by Democrats.
Against unions? You betcha. They are nothing more than an arm of the DNC. And why don’t you name those that oppose worker’s rights? Do I support minimum wage laws? Nope, they hurt the very people Democrats claim it will help. Ironic, isn’t it, that when Democrats get involved the sh!t always rolls downhill?
Both unconstitutional laws. And just another way the Democrats found to redistribute wealth. I support our Constitution, not the Democrats feel-good laws that are always promised to bring us to their ideal Socialist utopia. I notice that the other day when you brought up life expectancy in the ’30’s was only 62 (for white women, not white men or black men as those life expectancy ages were lower) and I pointed out that FDR made the retirement age 65 due to that very reason, you ran away from that. A law, built and passed on a lie, just as every other Democrat brain fart. The Democrats were too stupid to take into consideration medical advances that would extend our lives. And now the unfunded liability that is the Social Security Administration is an absolute disaster.
You’re a moron. I suggest you call what ever bank you do business with and ask them if they have a CRA officer (no, that doesn’t stand for Civil Rights Act). Ask the officer about the rules of mortgage lending that they are required to adhere to, including giving loans based on demographics and how they find ways to do that if the number of minorities they lend to do not meet federal standards. So the requirements for mortgage loans are reduced if you are a minority so that the Democrats can be happy about their redistributive philosophies. Funny how you never want to admit that the economic disaster we went through was predicted by the top economists in the nation due to Clinton’s actions on the CRA long before Bush took office. NIJA (no income, job, assets) loans were created long before Bush entered the Oval Office. Under Clinton, welfare payments and child support became income that could be used to secure a mortgage loan.
I used to feel sorry for you, Greggie. I thought you were just ill informed. No longer. You are simply a sycophant for the Socialist movement. Bet you’re a big fan of Fauxchahontas Elizabeth Warren. Someone who claimed, falsely, Native American heritage to give her a push up the career ladder. Just another dishonest Democrat who certainly is not willing to live under the rules she foists on the rest of us.
@Bill, #9:
Maybe you should get a jump on things and start figuring out how to put all the blame on democrats when $1.2 quadrillion in fairy gold is suddenly revealed as the total rubbish it actually is.
Derivatives have purely imaginary value. It’s pure idiocy to allow them to become the foundation of a national and global financial system. It’s insane to let them undermine the FDIC system. What that could eventually come to guarantee is that in the next financial collapse the destruction will be total. It’s almost like the financial equivalent of having enough nuclear weapons to guarantee Mutual Assured Destruction. Governments will become nothing more than servants of the financial system, terrified of interfering with any small part of its workings lest the entire house of cards collapses.
Apparently it has now become impossible to examine a common threat to everyone’s financial security without it becoming a partisan issue. There’s this fantasy us and them dividing line that totally conceals where the real division of interests lies.
@retire05, #10:
Federal law never required anyone to approve high risk loans to people who were clearly unqualified to receive them. Instead, the CRA inadvertently led to an exploitable environment that emerged years later, and the financial industry exploited the hell out of it with wild abandon. They ceased looking carefully at qualifications because they could make enormous sums of money very quickly by doing so, and could pass the risk on to somebody else.
Here’s How The Community Reinvestment Act Led To The Housing Bubble’s Lax Lending
You want to put all of the blame on a well intentioned law that was passed in 1977, and none whatsoever on the greedy people in the financial industry who exploited it to the maximum degree possible the moment all conditions were right.
@Greg: Did you happen to read what I said about derivatives elsewhere? However, my point here was that Cruze railed against Obamacare, which has proven to be (and, through his repeated illegal alterations and delays, actually admitted as such by Obama) extremely harmful to not just health care but the economy as a whole but the government shutdown was blamed on “Republicans hating government” or some such liberal nonsense. Don’t like things to devolve down to partisanship? Stop being so damned partisan then.
The CRA led to lax lending standards because that was what was required to be able to grant loans to people that could not qualify. That’s how social engineering works; it mandates things that cannot occur naturally or normally. It forces policies that are mechanically unacceptable down the throats of the public to achieve an idealistic goal. It usually fails, as the CRA did.
@Greg:
Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
Ummm, remind me again, Greggie, who was president in September, 1999.
I guess your next excuse will be that the NYSlimes is a conservative publication.
@Greg:
As Investor’s Business Daily recently put it, succinctly and correctly: “Over the past 30 years, Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.”
The march toward the eventual financial meltdown picked up speed during the Clinton administration via an increased lowering of loan standards in order to expand minority borrowing.
http://triblive.com//x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/reiland/s_590330.html
@retire05, #14:
Has the possibility occurred to you that there might be a very important difference between “easing the credit requirements” and showing total disregard for whether or not a loan applicant actually met those requirements? Because the latter is what actually happened. Nor have you ever once acknowledged the fact of the widespread deliberate concealment of the enormous volume of bad loans that the industry was generating in its blind quest for profits. That’s what bundling was all about, and what deliberately falsifying the ratings of bundled investment instruments was all about. That’s what tipped over and nearly destroyed the global economy. Fraud and greed.
You want to place all blame on a well-intentioned law, but totally disregard the private industry wrongdoing and fraud that were taking place on a grand scale, and that went totally unpunished. You even want to loosen the newly tightened regulations that were intended to prevent a repetition.
@Greg:
Try a bit more reading and maybe you will just begin to see the light. Unless you have to wait for Rachael Maddow to mis-inform you.
@Greg:
Let me see if I understand your economic theory correctly; banks think making a lot of bad loans is a good idea to create profits?
Actually, the banks were forced into making loans they feared would fail and, looking out for their viability, they bundled this trash and sold it. Thanks to the government guaranteeing the loans, other financial institutions bought them and it built and built and built until it was totally unsustainable. All made possible by your wonderful, liberal, socializing government. Had the CRA never been instituted, the financial disaster would never have occurred.
Well intentioned or not, it was a very bad idea. Just like Obamacare. And, just like Obamacare, it has caused trillions of unintended bad consequences.
Do you deny that private sector financial institutions were showing widespread disregard for whether or not loan applicants truly met established qualifying standards?
Do you deny that private lenders were out beating the bushes to find as many people to lend money to as possible? (I recall getting unsolicited offers in my mailbox, unsolicited marketing calls on my home phone, and an avalanche of email offers. I doubt if my experience was unique.)
Do you deny that private sector financial institutions were deliberately concealing the bad loans they were making by way of bundling, hiding their rotten apples underneath layers of good ones?
Do you deny that high-level private sector financial institutions were deliberately falsifying the safety ratings of investment instruments that included unacceptably risky loans, so that they could be passed on to pension fund investors and the international investment market?
All of the above is proven. There’s absolutely no question that it happened, or what the consequences were. I didn’t need Rachel Maddow to tell me about it.
You people are deep in denial. Denial seems to be a common underlying theme with regard to any number of issues.
@Bill, #18:
The banks that made such loans generally didn’t keep those loans. The loans were sold to somebody else. Eventually, with their true degree of risk concealed, such loans became part of investment instruments, held by unsuspecting pensioners and the like. It was the concealment and invisible transfer of risk that allowed the whole thing to happen. So, yes. A lot of people made a lot of profit by passing on a lot of bad loans. Untold billions in profits which wound up in somebody’s pocket, with the costs turned into additional billions in public debt and duped pension funds left holding empty bags. And the pirates sailed away into the sunset.
One would think this would all have become common knowledge at this point. It’s part of recent history. Nearly everyone was effected.
@Greg:
The roots of today’s mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty activists and housing advocates about banks allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers and “redlining” inner-city neighborhoods, the CRA decreed that banks had “an affirmative obligation” to meet the credit needs of victims of discrimination in borrowing.
To add a government stick to the process, the CRA decreed that federal banking regulators would consider how well banks were doing in meeting the goal of more multiculturalism in loaning when considering requests by banks to open new branches or to merge.
A good “CRA rating” was earned by way of increasing loans in poor neighborhoods. Conversely, lenders with low ratings could be fined.
The Fed, for instance, warned banks that failure to comply with government guidelines regarding the delivery of “equal credit” could subject them to “civil liability for actual or punitive damages in individual or class actions, with liability for punitive damages being as much as $10,000 in individual actions and the lesser of $500,000 or 1 percent of the creditor’s net worth in class actions.”
However well-intentioned in terms of delivering “economic justice,” this push for more government-directed social engineering produced a widespread weakening of long-established industry standards for credit worthiness.
Read more: http://triblive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/reiland/s_590330.html#ixzz3LjGSJH4w
Follow us: @triblive on Twitter | triblive on Facebook
There you go, Greggie. The lending agencies, mostly banks, were under the Fed gun to approve more and more mortgages to low income applicants so that the Democrats pushing it could achieve “economic” justice. The GSEs had already lowered the loan standards so that those that really should not have received those loans in the first place, would get them. Eligibility was based on such fluid things like welfare/child support payments, sources of income that had the possibility of disappearing. Banks who declined loans based on lack of income or poor credit history were punished by not being allowed to expand (branch banking) and were actually fined, in many cases.
The Fed, under Clinton’s direction, didn’t care that many of these borrowers would never be able to met their payment liability. Just force the lending agencies to give the loans, and wholla!! you have lots of low income/minority home buyers.
But owning a home is not like renting an apartment. When the hot water heater goes out or the toilet overflows, there is no landlord to call for repairs. Many homes became in such a state of disrepair that people, who were struggling from the git-go to pay for them, just walked away.
Jimmy Carter signed the CRA. But it took Bubba Clinton, the first black president, to put the act on steroids. He wanted to show what a great job he was doing for minorities. So the loan requirements were relaxed, freebies like no interest on the first three years of the loan was introduced. It was all a scam, not thought out with no concern for residual effects. Just get minorities into homes and be done with it and let the future take care of itself. Many of those minorities that Clinton wanted to be sure were allowed home ownership wound up defaulting on their loans because they could not afford the higher interest that came with those loans, many guaranteed by the GSEs, and the higher taxes imposed on those homes.
No, not all the banks kept those loans. The big banks, the ones that were bailed out, bundled those sub-prime loans (high risk loans) with other loans just to be able to sell them. But had the standard lending practices not been discarded by the Clinton Administration all in the name of “economic” justice, there would have been no bad loans to be defaulted on.
@Greg: #19 & 20 Do you deny that none… NONE of that would have happened had the federal government not interfered with the free market and manipulated the practical way loans are granted… based on merit?
In the United States of America, the federal government is charged with assuring free trade between the states, providing national security and guaranteeing certain basic rights; it is NOT in the health care, solar panel, automobile or mortgage business. When it enters into those realms, disaster ensues.
@retire05: In 1976, not long after marriage, my wife and I had the opportunity to make a home purchase. My great aunt, who worked for a real estate agency (though not a realtor) had found this house, a $17,500 mansion.
Realtors like to sell homes. While helping me fill out the mortgage paperwork, they kept mining me for whatever sources of income I had available, including overtime. The idea of committing to a mortgage scared the hell out of me to begin with, but I had no interest whatsoever in padding my earning capability to make myself more worthy of a loan, even to get out of the dump apartment we currently lived in. For, I had this weird notion that this was my (our) responsibility and failing meant ruin.
We bought the house and sold it 7 years later for $53,700. Took the proceeds and built a larger home, which is now paid off.
A lot of these people, Greg, were loaded into the barrel by the federal government that all too often thinks it knows better than financial professionals or private citizens what they ought to do, want, buy or think.
@Bill:
I know a young couple that had not been married all that long, had one child 2 1/2 and another on the way. They were paying about $1,000/month I rent but decided they wanted to buy a home. They found a new home, around 1,700 square feet for $114,000.00. This was in 1989. Both of them had pretty good jobs, and so they crunched the numbers and decided they could afford the house with payments of $1,400.00 a month. I strongly advised against the purchase, telling them that if they saved that extra $400 a month, in just a year they would have almost $5,000 to put down on a similar house. But noooooo, they wanted a new home.
Their credit was not clean so they fell into the sub-prime category. They got a special deal with low (maybe 2%) interest for the first year and it would increase after that and under the “first time” buyer rules set out by the GSEs, no money down, not one damn dime. Their taxes and insurance was built into an equity account and attached to their monthly payment. In three years, the value of their house had increased $37,000. But with that increase came a 33% increase in their taxes, and since the GSE that held their loan also arranged for insurance, a 33% increase in insurance. So…………..
in 3 years they had another baby and extra day care costs; the husband got laid off; their insurance and taxes had increased to compensate for the increased value, their variable interest rate had increase considerably and their payments were now almost $1,900 a month. In 3 1/2 years they could not meet their mortgage obligations so they walked on the house and filed bankruptcy that included plumber bills for the oldest child shoving a stuffed toy down the toilet, furniture bills and by then, a new car payment.
I knew the agent at the title company that sat down with them at closing. The couple had everything explained them in clear, concise term; that increase that would come from a variable interest rate as well as increase in taxes and insurance. The couple nodded in agreement and signed on the dotted line. You see, they were “first time” buyer and the government had made oh so easy for them to buy a home.
They were not hoodwinked, lied to or lead down the rosy path. They were not in a position to afford a house but bought one anyway. Was that the fault of the realtor, mortgage agency? No. The rules that came out of the Clinton administration allowed them to make that grave mistake, and here we are, ten years later and they cannot buy another home because of the bankruptcy and the fact that they walked on their previous mortgage.
@retire05: That is what I meant; I was scared and anxious about a purchase as I felt I was on my own. However, the government gives the impression nothing bad can happen (liberals always seem to feel everything will just work out; be it a mortgage or $18 trillion dollars, something will somehow happen to make the bills go away) and everyone has the “right” to whatever someone else has.