First off, I'd like to post this URL. I heard about this Congressional report a few days ago:
http://republicans.oversight.house.gov/media/pdfs/20090723ACORNReport.pdfAccusations of fraud (non-voter registration kind), racketeering and embezzlement.
sharon kinsella wrote:What led to the housing crisis was greed. The banks, unscrupulous mortgage bankers and brokers, sub-prime loans. It was the fat cats, not the lean ones. Do not try and deflect the blame.
http://www.aei.org/issue/100001Through new rules connected with the Community Reinvestment Act, banks were pressured into giving loans to families that were a greater risk than the banks would normally lend to.
Quoting the above article:
In 1995, the regulators created new rules that sought to establish objective criteria for determining whether a bank was meeting CRA standards. Examiners no longer had the discretion they once had. For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers was not enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of "innovative or flexible" lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods. Thus, a law that was originally intended to encourage banks to use safe and sound practices in lending now required them to be "innovative" and "flexible." In other words, it called for the relaxation of lending standards, and it was the bank regulators who were expected to enforce these relaxed standards.ACORN lobbied to have these standards reduced as well as pressured banks into making increasingly more loans.
sharon kinsella wrote:Voter registration did get out of control, by trying to do too much without enough funding to provide proper supervision, some rogue employees ran rough shod and went overboard. Kind of like the DOD, but I digress.
The jury is still out.
I recently saw some video from the Wisconsin Historical Society which seems to demonstrate that they've been
teaching aggressive registration tactics for a long time. Granted, it wasn't pushing voter registration fraud.
sharon kinsella wrote:Minimum wage did not hurt employment. Employers who want to keep up profits and starve workers are what are killing manufacturing in our country. When they can't scam our workforce. they move operations to China, where labor is cheap because people are viewed as disposable. They get away with this because import agreements have not been regulated due to the agencies who enforce being dismantled during the Bush administration.
Young people are the ones most affected by the minimum wage because they're just putting their experience and skill sets together. But how can they get experience when their skills aren't worth the minimum wage? The unemployment rate for those 16 to 24 is now higher than any point since at least 1948.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm(Last paragraph.)
sharon kinsella wrote:You will blow this information off because in your and other republican estimations, liberals don't know what they're talking about when it comes to economics.
I see some inflammatory statements made about bankers (greedy, fat cats) and employers (they want to starve workers). Did I miss the economics?? Give me some numbers, links to articles or something to work with.
I could name call too, but that only degrades the conversation into a playground shouting match which resolves nothing.
sharon kinsella wrote:The republicans are so much wiser about these things that the republican administration created the largest deficit in the history of our country after being gifted with a healthy economy.
Ummm, second biggest deficit.
Just for the record: You talked about republicans a lot. I've stopped looking at politics in terms of (R) and (D). I'm sick of it. Just about every one of the politicians in DC is screwing things up for us.
