[Jill]

Originally Posted by Fair&Balanced

I dont dispute any of the above....until your conclusion.

PAYGO,if implemented fully and honestly, will prevent any future growth in the debt; it wont help pay down the current debt.

The Bush tax cuts for the top bracket are a significant contributing factor to both present and future debt and should be restored to pre-2001 levels.

The Bush Medicare Prescription Drug reform costs the taxpayers more than the Affordable Care Act ever will.

I'm all for getting out of Iraq immediately and finding the best way to transition out of Afghanistan asap.

Cuts to programs like Planned Parenthood, Head Start, education, workforce investment, etc. are ideological and counter-productive.

We should also eliminate corporate tax subsidies and corporate welfare to big oil, big agriculture, etc.

We should cut defense spending significantly.

We should raise the income base for FICA so that those making over $106K pay the same percentage as those under $106K.

We should reduce the rate paid to providers of Medicare Advantage.

All of the above would certainly prevent the debt from continuing to grow by $trillions/year and would even make a big dent in the current debt level.

We also need to continue to invest in education, health care, job training, transportation and infrastructure, alternative energy, r&d, etc all of which contribute to economic growth.

We cant continue to fund housing assistance programs at current levels that reward people (middle class) who made bad decisions in the past and/or programs that are ineffective.

AND we also need to make fiscally justifiable cuts to other non-defense discretionary spending and that means cutting some popular programs and eliminating others.

IMO, the choice is not between spending cuts or tax increases. It is a combination of both.

We agree on nearly every count. I apologize for not being more clear in my post.

Spending cuts are absolutely necessary! Required!

But the distraction is where the current Republican Leadership is claiming those cuts need to come from. The Pentagon budget is out of control. $4 billion in subsidies to the oil industry is outrageous. It's so much bigger than $375 million on health care for the needy, that I cannot believe we're actually talking about eliminating Title X funding as if it would make any difference whatsoever.

We need to cut waste and fraud in some of the programs, not necessarily the programs themselves.

As for the housing bailouts, I do part ways with you there. The notion that people were greedy and knowingly got in over their heads is yet another lie perpetuated by the Right to demonize people for their own political benefit and distract from what actually caused the real problem. I don't know why it's so easy to believe that individual home buyers were irresponsible, but hard to believe that there could be lenders who were irresponsible in their duty to disclose, and who actually sold people a bill of goods.

I am an extremely savvy contract negotiator. I read everything (yes, it took many, many, many hours to go through closing). I ask all the right questions. My husband and I had excellent credit (750 range). Our income was totally sufficient and then some. We had no debt. None. Not a vehicle, not a credit card, nothing. We were completely qualified for a conventional loan.

But after our earnest money was already paid, and one day before closing, all of a sudden our broker "sadly" informed us that he wasn't able to get us a conventional loan after all. The "best" he could do was an interest only 1st and an adjustable 2nd mortgage. We're ONE day before closing! We have NO WAY to go looking for another lender. And then, to rub salt in the wound, the "Good Faith Estimate of Closing Costs" that he provided us was anything but "Good Faith". Imagine our shock when we walked into the escrow office with a GFE of $10,000 in costs, and were handed an actual closing cost document with $20,000 in costs! $5,000 of that was a full point the broker took that he told us he we wouldn't be paying. And he was the only sonofabitch that wouldn't budge on lowering his fees to get the costs more in line with what he told us they would be.

And take a wild guess who he put our loans with. . .

IndyMac and Countrywide.

I didn't pick those banks. I didn't walk in and ask for a loan I couldn't afford. Yet here I was, forced into a position of either sucking it up, signing the documents and coughing up the extra cash, or losing our earnest money and the house! And then the banks bundled up our loan with a bunch of other loans, many of which ended up being bad, and sold them on the secondary market!

The only thing that separated us from many, many of the people who got sucked into this mess is that we were very, very lucky that we were able to refinance into a conventional loan within the first 2 years, because our home hadn't started losing value yet.

The hucksters at the banks and mortgage companies played dirty tricks with the housing market, but they were "too big to fail" so they had to be "bailed out". People who made HUGE mistakes in how they did business -- intentionally -- got bailed out. Our economy would have completely collapsed had we let that many large institutions fail.

I contend our economy continues to be at enormous risk as more and more individuals are unable to get out of these ridiculous loans into conventional loans and the market continues to be flooded with foreclosed homes and bankruptcies rise. If the people who actually caused this mess can be relieved of their financial burden (and even walk away with HUGE bonuses), then let the people who suffered from this mess be relieved of their financial burden.

Yeah, some irresponsible individuals will benefit from it, and on a gut level that feels wrong. But most individuals were ordinary people like me and my husband who were manipulated into bad loans by thieving lenders. Let them wipe their slates clean just like we let the banks do, stabilizing the housing market and the economy, and move forward from here with some new regulations that will prevent lenders from ever getting away with this again.