USA Politics

bearfan said:
For your big business argument, them getting massive tax favors and just flat out cash from government .. party in power really does not matter ... does not help any of that at all. Add to that, some of those high risk investments are prodded by government ... see FNMA ... essentially a government agency massively lowering requirements for loans and pushing home equity loans with the goal of increasing home ownership in the country.

Minus that pressure and had they kept their requirements to purchase loans where they were prior to the mid-late 90s the amount of bad loans made would have been minimal .. for the fact lenders would not have been able to bundle them up and sell them upstream

We are about (within the next 5 years) to see the same thing in the health insurance markets.
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I'll be honest, economics isn't my area of expertise, especially not American economics. But I'll do my best.

From what you're describing, it sounds that the government was more negligent than bearing the burden of responsibility here. Which is not to say the government shouldn't be criticised for their role in creating this environment for the financial crisis to occur in the first place, but they're definitely not the primary suspect.

Why should we now allow these investments to go unregulated now in our still recovering economic state? If it isn't the government maintaining responsibility, then who's responsibility is it?

For government size, they have proposed cutting 20% .. realistically that is not going to pass Congress ... I think though they can at least keep it from getting worse and maybe a tiny decline. Hillary promised everything to everyone and Trump is pretty much doing the same ... I think the choice there is pretty much status quo to minimally better versus a decent expansion and more layers of crap
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Depends on what the expansions are. If the expansions are worthwhile, then go for it. If not, don't add them. I don't think it would be wise to ignore necessary bureaucracy just because it's another layer and people find it annoying.

Interventionism, is one are I disagree with the Libertarian Party to a degree, I think the US needs to be involved in the world, but smartly. In one case here I actually do agree with Trump, we need to rethink NATO ... it should still exist, but it's original purpose is gone and adjustments need to be made and add to that, some countries are not keeping up their contribution levels.
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Don't know what you mean by the original purpose being "gone", but I definitely agree that some countries are not keeping up their contribution levels.
 
bearfan said:
In one case here I actually do agree with Trump, we need to rethink NATO ... it should still exist, but it's original purpose is gone and adjustments need to be made and add to that, some countries are not keeping up their contribution levels.
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Well the problem is you're thinking of a pragmatic approach to NATO. Trump isn't reconsidering support for NATO because he is looking for a more practical alternative or redesign, it's for nationalist reasons. He would never support NATO no matter how many "adjustments" were made.
 
Investments .. depending on what investments you are talking about range from highly regulated to minimally regulated. But they are at heart private investment.

I do think they are a very primary suspect in the lending problems. The fact is that they encouraged these loans to happen and made it easy for them to happen, then bought those loans and encouraged more of them .. until it went south, then they started blaming the institutions they were egging along

The original intent was to combat the Warsaw Pact .. that purpose is gone, because the Warsaw Pact is gone ... there is really no threat or Russian tanks rolling through Europe. That is what I meant.
 
Mosh said:
Well the problem is you're thinking of a pragmatic approach to NATO. Trump isn't reconsidering support for NATO because he is looking for a more practical alternative or redesign, it's for nationalist reasons. He would never support NATO no matter how many "adjustments" were made.
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That may be true, but at least he brought it up
 
bearfan said:
Investments .. depending on what investments you are talking about range from highly regulated to minimally regulated. But they are at heart private investment.
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These private investments have grounding impacts on our GDP though. I'm not saying we need ubiquitous surveillance of all of these investments, but such investments that have a certain probability of causing large-scale economic regression should require a closer eye at the least.

I do think they are a very primary suspect in the lending problems. The fact is that they encouraged these loans to happen and made it easy for them to happen, then bought those loans and encouraged more of them .. until it went south, then they started blaming the institutions they were egging along
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You make a good point, but as aforementioned, who else is going to regulate the institutions when things do go to shit? The government is the only entity we can really rely on to reign these in if they go out of control. I don't agree with what the government did, but the alternative is only going to make the problem perpetuate.

The original intent was to combat the Warsaw Pact .. that purpose is gone, because the Warsaw Pact is gone ... there is really no threat or Russian tanks rolling through Europe. That is what I meant.
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Yes, but Russia could still be classified as a threat, especially with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
 
it depends on the investment ... putting in money for startups, money into businesses on the path to failure to turn them around, additional equity to stable companies benefit the economy and society as a whols (more goods and services available)

Back to lending, my main point here is government encouraged the risk .. not through some evil plan, but through a not very well thought out plan of "we want to make home ownership available to more people" Nothing wrong with it on its face, but they royally fucked it up to the point where we would have been much better off if they did nothing at all. I think a lot of what is wrong with the economy is based on crony capitalism and that needs to be addressed and government has zero benefit in addressing it as it takes power away from them ... not to mention $ to the two main parties

I think Russia is a threat, but Crimea is a good example of why NATO needs to be rethought, it was zero deterrent to Russia taking Crimea. I do not think Russia rolling through Germany is a threat, but they are certainly a major threat to the former Soviet states and probably somewhat of a threat to the Baltic States.
 
bearfan said:
I think Russia is a threat, but Crimea is a good example of why NATO needs to be rethought, it was zero deterrent to Russia taking Crimea.
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To be honest, I put this down as Putin reading the tea leaves correctly. NATO did not act because NATO does not officially care what happens outside of its sphere of influence. In the Cold War, such a deliberate invasion by Russia would never have happened, anyway - they would have used proxies. Putin gambled that nobody would directly oppose his motion because they didn't have to.

NATO only needs one adjustment to return to relevance - prospective members gain NATO protection in the event of their borders being violated. That would essentially call Putin's bluff.
 
LooseCannon said:
To be honest, I put this down as Putin reading the tea leaves correctly. NATO did not act because NATO does not officially care what happens outside of its sphere of influence. In the Cold War, such a deliberate invasion by Russia would never have happened, anyway - they would have used proxies. Putin gambled that nobody would directly oppose his motion because they didn't have to.

NATO only needs one adjustment to return to relevance - prospective members gain NATO protection in the event of their borders being violated. That would essentially call Putin's bluff.
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In theory in practice if NATO had guaranteed Ukraine and Russia did what they did in Crimea, I doubt the outcome would have been different.
 
While that last sentence seems logical, it really isn't.
A prospective member retains the 'prospective' status because cons still outweigh the pros. And there are also countries that aren't even in NATO and NATO would respond to Russian aggression against them.

Regardless of what rank and label you put on it, a country has a specific geopolitical situation in a given time. And actions will be done according to that only.

I don't fear Russia because Putin plays smart. He didn't create the chaos in Ukraine, he profited from it. Maybe not Russia (the folk itself), but him directly, as in popularity and such. But what made it possible (and justifiable in the eyes of their people) was the whole pretext of coup and the historical context(es) behind Crimea.
There is no such context for Eastern Ukraine. And there is no context at all for Poland or Baltic states. Simply put, that kind of annexation/aggression would be justifiable to basically no-one even in Russia.
So, IMHO, that kind of a move would be completely opposite to his behaviour, which has been analyzed by many think-tanks over and over again. He's a chess player, not a boxer.
 
bearfan said:
In theory in practice if NATO had guaranteed Ukraine and Russia did what they did in Crimea, I doubt the outcome would have been different.
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Whole shit happened because BSF agreements came under jeopardy.
There was no time frame available for that proposition to occur. The old corrupt government agreed to transfer the power to Euromaidan players, which in turn agreed to leave BSF contracts well into the 2020s. So Russia had no problem with it.

And then violence started, and then Ru Army secured BSF bases, Sevastopol, and all of Crimea as a buffer.
You just ask yourself what would happen if someone tried to take away Pearl Harbor from U.S.
 
I would hope the same thing that happened in 1941.

I agree with what you said about Putin. But there is always the who comes next question
 
That question is always a problematic one when it comes to authoritarian regimes.
 
The issue to me is twofold ... 1) you have a threat in Russia but 2) what is the long term purpose of the alliance and who contributes what to it. With any organization you always start off with a main purpose (in this case a counter threat to the USSR) and over time it goes in a zillion different directions .. some good, some better off without and obviously over the years many things change politically and with technology. Any organization (private, public, international, whatever) probably benefits from an occasional review of the basic question of why do we exist and what is our main purpose ... because that really tends to fragment over time.
 
This should be interesting

Donald Trump announced Tuesday night that he will meet Wednesday with the President of Mexico just hours before he is set to deliver a speech focused on immigration policy.

"I have accepted the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto, of Mexico, and look very much forward to meeting him tomorrow," Trump tweeted as reports swirled that Trump was mulling a last-minute trip to Mexico.
 
What's really interesting is that according to some other sources, Trump has been working on this meeting quietly for weeks. He had his big speech where he swore to make Mexico pay for the wall, too.

I am guessing the meeting did not go so great.
 
.. and her email server did get hacked


An unknown individual using the encrypted privacy tool Tor to hide their tracks accessed an email account on a Clinton family server, the FBI revealed Friday.
The incident appears to be the first confirmed intrusion into a piece of hardware associated with Hillary Clinton’s private email system, which originated with a server established for her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

The FBI disclosed the event in its newly released report on the former secretary of state’s handling of classified information.
According to the bureau’s review of server logs, someone accessed an email account on Jan. 5, 2013, using three IP addresses known to serve as Tor “exit nodes” — jumping-off points from the anonymity network to the public internet.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/clinton-email-server-tor-227697#ixzz4JAPfQhro
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
 
Well, if you want to be president you should perhaps be more informed on such matters than Joe the Plumber. Especially if you don't have the best people to help you sort it out :D
 
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