Socialism in the USA

Great quotes in The Daily Reckoning today.

The "Consumer Economy" was Always a Mockery

But, last week, the U.S. Senate bent down and pressed its large mouth onto those gaping traps of the mortgage twins - gurgling into them a corrupt breath of life. Since the two hold one out of every two mortgages in the nation, in effect, Congress is nationalizing the U.S. housing stock itself. Henceforth, citizens will pay not only their taxes to the government, but their mortgage payments too.

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The cartoon capitalists did it all backwards; they are supposed to exploit the workers, not be exploited by them. But while consumers and investors were going nowhere, corporate managers and Wall Street hustlers were getting rich. The two Bozos running Fannie and Freddie, for example, pocketed about $32 million between them last year - during a period in which the companies lost almost $5.2 billion - not to mention the losses to shareholders. And on Wall Street, managers paid out $250 billion in bonuses in the 4 years leading up to the credit crunch. The firms declared a profit and paid bonuses when the bets were made; they didn't wait to see how they turned out. Thus did the big banks and big brokers become capitalists without capital, dependent on the gullibility of investors to keep them in business. And when investors began to wise up, they turned to the public for capital support.

What kind of scam is this? It may look like capitalism from a distance. But this is not real capitalism; this is cartoon capitalism - run by clowns, who sell freak investments to chump investors, and encourage the lumpen householder to ruin himself.

U.S. Economy is Still Growing but GDP Growth Rates Are Mostly Fraud

There are only so many hours in the day...and only so many resources to work with. The real question is what is done with them. If they are used to produce things, to build factories, and to add to the nation's capital, people become wealthier. If they are squandered - using up capital instead of adding to it - people become poorer. GDP figures don't tell you want is really going on. But when an economy becomes too dependent on credit and consumer spending, GDP figures actually become perverse; they measure the rate at which the nation impoverishes itself.