TWO VIEWS



The liberal view that all wealth is stolen from the proletariat:

Here’s your “honest” man, Professor. Sen. Max Baucus explains it all:
…this is also an income shift. It’s a shift to leveling to help lower income, middle income Americans. Too often…in the last couple of years the maldistribution of income in America has gone up way too much. The wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy and the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with the increase in income of the highest income Americans. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that maldistribution of income in America because health care is now a right for all Americans…
But, hey, don’t you dare call these redistributionists socialists or Marxists. No, they’re merely fulfilling our Founders’ promise of the American Dream. Yes, they are. Yes, they can. Yes, they did.

A realistic view of where all the money went in the last decade:

Recent ABC News story on the relatively strong state of home mortgages in Texas contained this fascinating note about the late-2000’s real estate bubble:
One of Alan Greenspan’s lesser-known contributions to the annals of the credit crisis was a pair of studies he co-authored for the Fed, sizing up exactly how much Americans borrowed against their home equity in the bubble and what it was they were spending their new found (phantom) wealth on. Greenspan estimated that four-fifths of the trifold increase in American households’ mortgage debt between 1990 and 2006 resulted from “discretionary extraction of home equity.” Only one-fifth resulted from the purchase of new homes. In 2005 alone, U.S. homeowners extracted a half-trillion-plus dollars from their real estate via home-equity loans and cash-out refinances. Some $263 billion of the proceeds went to consumer spending and to pay off other debts.
In other words, a great deal of the borrowing among people who weren’t all that creditworthy in the first place was not only based on bubble real estate valuations, but the money borrowed didn’t even go towards actually buying houses. It just evaporated into buying more stuff, with overvalued low-equity homes as the only collateral.

IN OTHER WORDS THE 'POOR EXPLOITED MORTGAGE DEFUALTERS' WERE SUCKING THE MONEY OUT OF THEIR HOMES AND BUYING 'GOODIES' IN THE EXPECTATION THAT THE GOOD TIMES WILL NEVER END. NOW IT IS THE ' DUTY' OF RESPONSIBLE AMERICAN TO BAIL THEM OUT. AS OBAMA SAYS, IT'S ONLY FAIR.