[quote=briansd1][quote=jpinpb]
I think you have it backwards, brian. Wall Street has been relying on us. They made money off our stupidity and they are being bailed out by the taxpayers while cuts are made.
[/quote]
Ok. That’s where we differ.
As a society, we greatly benefited from Wall Street. Without Wall Street and the lending they created, our economy would have been a fraction of what it is now.
Without credit cards, retailers would suffer, restaurants would close and the economy wouldn’t be as vibrant.
Without Wall Street, America would not be the capitalist society it is today.
BTW, CA renter complains about the 7%-9% annual returns that Wall Street did not deliver, but she forgot that relying on those returns allowed the compensation largesse to begin with.
Another thing that CA renter did not address is layoffs. As she admitted before, the revenue of the bubble years, combined with anticipated returns on investments allowed state and local governments to go on a spending binge (government spending grew much faster than population and inflation).
How about rolling back spending to the pre-bubble years and mandating that government spending not increase faster than population growth + inflation?[/quote]
Brian,
When you’re talking about debt used for consumption, all they’ve done is pulled demand forward, and made it more expensive to pay for things. They have done us NO favors by forcing people into debt in order to survive. Those of us who try to live without debt are forced to pay higher prices because we’re competing with idiots who don’t understand that buying a hamburger today for $1.00 means paying $1.25 in the future, while still needing to buy more burgers in the meantime.
If “capitalism” means we’re all deep in debt, and will have to dedicate the majority of the fruits of our labor to the most wealthy people in this country (who all own private jets, multiple mansions, yachts, and can go on exotic vacations every month while J6 struggles to feed his family); sitting in the middle of a pile of cheap, toxic, plastic crap from China; losing good jobs in favor of minimum-wage-paying retail jobs; being unable to provide for ourselves in an emergency because we’ve emptied our factories and rendered our working people useless…give me socialism any day.
