The American Nightmare

The American dream has been perverted. Corrupt realtors, loan officers, mortgage bankers have encouraged people filling out mortgage applications to commit fraud. They produced fiction, exaggerating incomes to make deals work. Banks were a party to this but were also pressured by politicians and groups like ACORN to make loans that could never be paid back. Redlining was criminalized even in areas with near universal default rates. Government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cooked their books to ensure that their executives received huge bonuses. The GSEs gave large contributions to Democrat politicians-in three years Obama was the second largest recipient of their largesse (behind only Senator Dodd who had been at the trough much longer). Senator McCain did warn of the coming train wreck more than two years ago as Sean Hannity has chronicled. Half measures were passed to try to prevent the catastrophe. The minumim wage was raised supposedly to a living wage but really only devaluing the dollar and making entry level positions harder to find. Relatively tiny stimulus checks were sent out, putting a bandaid on a brain tumor. If President Bush's tax cuts had been made permanent, capital gains tax lowered, and some marginal income tax rates lowered, the crisis may have been forestalled. Fair tax, flat tax, or a national sales tax replacing the income tax (encouraging thrift and punishing excess) may have helped. Socialism has never worked. Great Britain did not recover from World War II until Thatcherism drove the stake through socialism's heart. Mistakes have been made at every turn. Schizophrenia took hold allowing Lehman to fail but not other institutions. Even the energy policy has been disasterous with some corn state Republicans culpable as they helped raise the price of all comestible commodities further devaluing the dollar. Now we will erode our lifestyle by imposing fixes to the chimera of manmade global warming. Let the markets work, let nature work, and let common sense seize the day.