FedUpUSA

Archive for April 23rd, 2011

I’m getting very tired of this – isn’t there some sort of law about intentionally misleading people to their detriment?  Isn’t doing that called fraud?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has never defaulted on its debt and Democrats and Republicans say they don’t want it to happen now. But with partisan acrimony running at fever pitch, and Democrats and Republicans so far apart on how to tame the deficit, the unthinkable is suddenly being pondered.

No it’s not.

The government now borrows about 42 cents of every dollar it spends. Imagine that one day soon, the borrowing slams up against the current debt limit ceiling of $14.3 trillion and Congress fails to raise it. The damage would ripple across the entire economy, eventually affecting nearly every American, and rocking global markets in the process

That’s not a default.  Watch the (intentional) misdirection here:

A default would come if the government actually failed to fulfill a financial obligation, including repaying a loan or interest on that loan.

Uh, no.

“Including”?  No, not at all.

In fact a default is only the failure to pay interest or principal on a loan.  Nothing else is a default.

If the U.S. starts missing interest or principal payments, borrowers would demand higher and higher rates on new bonds, as they did with Greece, Portugal and other heavily indebted nations

The United States takes in about $2 trillion in taxes a year.  The total interest paid last year was about $180 billion, a ridiculously low blended rate, but that’s what ZIRP (zero interest rates by The Fed) get you.

Let’s assume for a moment that the blended rate was to more than double, to 4%.  That would be about $560 billion in interest a year, including interest on the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” (which aren’t trust funds, but I’ve been over that before.)

$560 billion is about one quarter of the tax revenues that the government takes in.  So even were interest rates to more than double The United States would not default.

Investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase recently concluded that any delay in making an interest or principal payments by the Treasury “even for a very short period of time” would have large “long-term adverse consequences for Treasury finances and the U.S. economy.” The analysis is being circulated on Capitol Hill by supporters of raising the debt limit.

There is no risk of default.  What JP Morgan is putting forward would be a default, but a failure to raise the debt ceiling would not cause one, because the Government takes in far more money in taxes than it must spend on interest.  JP Morgan knows this.

Therefore, running this line of crap is an intentionally false claim and those who are doing so must be identified by specific name, title and position and then be PERMANENTLY EJECTED by the people from the public conversation and debate on this issue.

Even though GOP leaders say they want to avoid more economic chaos, there is a large crop of tea-party aligned Republicans threatening to refuse to raise the cap under almost any circumstance. Polls suggest a large percentage of Americans oppose raising the debt limit.

The people are smarter this time around.  They were lied to last time; we were told that “Armageddon” would occur if TARP wasn’t passed.  The people said “bullcrap!” to the tune of three hundred to one among callers to Congress, but Congress passed TARP anyway.

Now the banks are running the same lie that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke ran in 2008: Either do this or the United States will “default.”

No it won’t.  A default only occurs if you can’t make the interest and principal payments. 

The United States Federal Government takes in more than ten times the amount of interest paid in fiscal 2010 in the form of taxes.  It is therefore more than able, without any increase in the debt ceiling, to meet its lawful obligations to creditors.

What it cannot do without an increase in the debt ceiling is continue to increase the amount of borrowed money that it does not have. 

In other words, a refusal to raise the debt ceiling is a Congressionally-imposed balanced budget amendment.

Since people like Jim DeMint have said they will not vote for the increase without a Constitutional Amendment requiring a balanced budget, the simplest way to get what they claim they want is to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

Such a refusal is a balanced budget mandate that can be imposed by Congress right now and which cannot be avoided or otherwise tampered with.

STOP LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE YOU BAND OF BANKSTER JACKALS!

If there IS such a thing as a fiscal responsibility party (whether it is called “Tea” or not) they must rise right now and refuse to pass ANY increase in the debt ceiling – period.

They must make clear that ANY lawmaker who votes for such a thing will be targeted for defeat in 2012 and will lose their job – no exceptions, no ifs, no ands, no buts and no maybes.

Refusing to raise the debt ceiling will not cause a default – it will, instead, force the government to live within its means.

The Market-Ticker

The United States is in the middle of a devastating long-term economic decline and it is getting really hard to deny it.  Over the past year I have included literally thousands of depressing statistics in my articles about the U.S. economy.  I have done this in order to make an overwhelming case that the U.S. economy is in deep decline and is dying a little bit more every single day.  Until we understand exactly how bad our problems are we will never be willing to accept the solutions.  The truth is that our leaders have absolutely wrecked the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen.  Most Americans just assume that we will always experience overwhelming prosperity, but that is not anywhere close to the truth.  We are not guaranteed anything.  Our manufacturing base has been gutted, the number of jobs is declining, more Americans are dependent on government handouts than ever before, our dollar is dying and as a nation we are absolutely drowning in debt.  The economists that are trumpeting an “economic recovery” and that are declaring that the U.S. economy will soon be “better than ever” are delusional.  We really are steamrolling toward a complete and total economic collapse and our leaders are doing nothing to stop it.

The following are 24 more signs of economic decline in America.  Hopefully you will not get too depressed as you read them….

#1 On Monday, Standard & Poor’s altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and warned the U.S. that it could soon lose its AAA rating.  This is yet another sign that the rest of the world is losing faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. Treasuries.

#2 China has announced that they are going to be reducing their holdings of U.S. dollars.  In fact, there are persistent rumors that this has already been happening.

#3 Hedge fund manager Dennis Gartman says that “panic dollar selling is setting in” and that the U.S. dollar could be in for a huge decline.

#4 The biggest bond fund in the world, PIMCO, is now shorting U.S. government bonds.

#5 This cruel economy is causing “ghost towns” to appear all across the United States.  There are quite a few counties across the nation that now have home vacancy rates of over 50%.

#6 There are now about 7.25 million less jobs in America than when the recession began back in 2007.

#7 The average American family is having a really tough time right now.  Only 45.4% of Americans had a job during 2010.  The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.

#8 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

#9 According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.

#10 Gas prices reached five dollars per gallon at a gas station in Washington, DC on April 19th, 2011.  Could we see $6 gas soon?

#11 Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.

#12 Due to rising fuel prices, American Airlines lost a staggering $436 million during the first quarter of 2011.

#13 U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

#14 Approximately one out of every four dollars that the U.S. government borrows goes to pay the interest on the national debt.

#15 Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.

#16 Total credit card debt in the United States is now more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.

#17 Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income.  In China, average household debt is only 17% of average household income.

#18 The average American now spends approximately 23 percent of his or her income on food and gas.

#19 In a recent survey conducted by Deloitte Consulting, 74 percent of Americans said that they planned to slow down their spending in coming months due to rising prices.

#20 59 percent of all Americans now receive money from the federal government in one form or another.

#21 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average length of unemployment in the U.S. is now an all-time record 39 weeks.

#22 As the economy continues to collapse, frustration among young people will continue to grow and we will see more seemingly “random acts of violence”.  One shocking example of this happened in the Atlanta area recently.  The following is how a local Atlanta newspaper described the attack….

Roughly two dozen teens, chanting the name of a well-known Atlanta gang, brought mob rule to MARTA early Sunday morning, overwhelming nervous passengers and assaulting two Delta flight attendants.

#23 Some Americans have become so desperate for cash that they are literally popping the gold teeth right out of their mouths and selling them to pawn shops.

#24 As the economy has declined, the American people have been gobbling up larger and larger amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs.  In fact, the American people spent 60 billion dollars more on prescription drugs in 2010 than they did in 2005.

The Economic Collapse

On the banks that are filing foreclosures improperly….

http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/21/sheriff-takes-on-banks-over-robo-signing/

Oh, and if you think this is only foreclosures?  Uh….. no.

It’s not the foreclosure affidavits only. Hello? It’s the whole kit-n-caboodle. it’s the fabricated assignments of mortgage, fake allonges, robo-stamped endorsements in blank, and satisfactions of mortgage, ignoring SEC and IRS regulations, disregard for the steps required by the REMIC rules. It’s all the top national banks and their servicing arms. The whole of it is a sham. Don’t believe the propaganda that insists otherwise.

If you “paid” your mortgage in full, did you actually pay the right person, and is that “satisfaction” that was filed authentic, or is that a fraud too?  Oh, read that second link carefully folks…. then ponder whether you have a trash title to your house, even if you’ve been paying on time, as-agreed.

The Market-Ticker