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Banned
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Originally Posted by aceventura3
.......Bush is basically a lame duck. The only issue on his plate is Iraq. <b>The economy is strong, there is job growth, inflation is low, the deficit is getting smaller</b>, no attacks within our boarders, etc, etc. If he gets Iraq under control he will have had a good presidency. I think the problem you see is the result of the fact that liberals don't have much to complain about other than Iraq.
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ace....you say you have a "reality based", POV, but we can't discuss or debate anything...because you refuse to let data....facts....dent your "reality":
ace, I showed you, in this Oct., 2006 post, why your claims of "deficit" reduction were grossly misleading, and could be claimed to be false:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...0&postcount=44
....and, in the post at the above link, I referred you to my June, 2006 post, at the next link:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...9&postcount=31
.....and it explain why there was no actual economic growth....it all came from an inefficient stimulus of increased federal borrowing and spending, and from MEW (mortgage equity extraction) and it predicts the "news" below, the implosion of the subprime lending industry, which will be followed by a residential realty valuation implosion, IMO.
Here are federal borrowing comparisons over the last ten years. The "deficit reduction" which you tout, has already been thoroughly explained to you....by me...as deliberate moving by the president and his administration, of "on budget" items, to "off-budget" status, as two articles below, strongly support.
10/01/1996 $5,234,730,786,626 to
02/23/1999 $5,619,947,525,857
<b>$385 billion= Additonal Federal Borrowing in second term of previous president</b>
10/01/2004 $7,409,510,200,267 to
02/21/2007 $8,752,478,768,342
<b>$1343 billion= Additonal Federal Borrowing in second term of current president</b>
<b>Last year Federal borrowing, fiscal year to date, vs. this year:</b>
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723 to
02/23/2006 $8,248,764,007,091
<b>February 2006= $316 billion increase in federal borrowing in 4 mos. and 23 days...</b>
10/02/2006 $8,506,973,899,215 to
02/21/2007 $8,752,478,768,342
<b>February 2007= $246 billion increase in federal borrowing in 4 mos. and 23 days...</b>
<b>This years federal borrowing increase rate has been slowed by the previous congress's decision to walk away from it's budget making responsibilities, leaving the task to the new congress:</b>
Quote:
http://ombwatch.org/article/articleview/3723/1/478
Congress Finally Finishes FY 07 Appropriations
It took four extra months and a new Congress, but on Feb. 14, lawmakers finished the FY 2007 appropriations cycle when the Senate passed H.J.Res. 20.
....Appropriators are expected to act first, though, on the $100 billion FY 2007 war supplemental that President Bush requested at the same time that he sent his FY 2008 budget to Capitol Hill. Despite pleas from Congress and outside budget experts to break their reliance on supplemental funding requests for the war, it appears the administration has no intention of stopping this detrimental practice.
The supplemental is fast becoming a magnet for additional military and non-military funding items, some left unaddressed during the abbreviated debate at the end of the FY 07 appropriations process.....
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<b>News Report on last years supplemental appropriations:</b>
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...AD0894DE404482
Apr 25, 2006
New Criticism Falls on 'Supplemental' Bills
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and EDMUND L. ANDREWS. New York Times.
Tucked inside an emergency spending bill that the Senate will take up this week are provisions far afield from the legislation's main purpose of paying for the war in Iraq and hurricane recovery. There are farm-program provisions totaling $4 billion, for instance, along with $700 million to relocate a rail line in Mississippi and $1.1 billion for fishery projects, including a $15 million ''seafood promotion strategy.''
While each program has supporters who can make a case for its urgency, together they have helped to increase the ''supplemental'' bill's price tag to $106 billion, $14 billion more than President Bush requested and nearly $15 billion more than the House has approved. And they have focused new attention on what many fiscal conservatives and watchdog groups consider a growing problem: the use of emergency spending bills for initiatives that critics say should be considered through the regular budget process.
''Emergencies are not true emergencies when you're repairing highway backlogs that go back several years, when Congress is giving large handouts to farmers despite record farm incomes and when you're relocating a rail line'' whose change of course was proposed decades ago, said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. ''That doesn't sound like an emergency to me.''
Emergency spending has ballooned over the last five years, driven first by the Sept. 11 attacks, followed by the war in Iraq and then by natural disasters including the tsunami in Asia and Hurricane Katrina.
Critics of the Congressional spending process say lawmakers have used emergencies as a cover to push through other projects or simply to make more room for regular government spending programs. The Senate bill includes $72 billion for military and other operations related to Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are also billions more for programs as diverse as forests, highways and higher education.
Most of those programs have some tie to military operations or to hurricane recovery efforts. In many cases, like highway construction along the Gulf Coast, it is hard to separate money for disaster recovery from money for new projects.
But the bill is coming to the Senate floor at a time when Republicans in particular are grappling with how to rein in the growth of government spending and bring down the federal budget deficit.
Especially in an election year, they are trying to find a middle ground between their desire to provide money to address local issues and the pressure for tighter spending controls. The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal put the spotlight on the pet projects known as earmarks, and there have been recent moves in the Senate to contain such spending.
The majority leader, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, appears to be trying to push his colleagues to strip some spending out of the measure. In a letter to fellow Republicans on Monday, Mr. Frist wrote: ''The supplemental should not be bogged down with extraneous amendments and unrelated provisions. In the face of continued deficits, we must be careful not to blow the bank on the back of war.''
The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which produced the bill, is Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican from the storm-stricken state of Mississippi. Mr. Cochran is one of the strongest supporters of the $700 million provision to move a long stretch of the CSX cross-country railroad, which was damaged by last year's storms, a few miles inland, away from the Mississippi coast.
The project has drawn intense and public criticism from another Republican, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who in remarks earlier this month called it ''ludicrous.'' But Mr. Cochran and his Republican colleague from Mississippi, Senator Trent Lott, contend that moving the line inland would make it less vulnerable to future hurricanes and would encourage other businesses to locate farther from the coast.
Mississippi lawmakers have been pushing for the railroad relocation for years. And the emergency spending bill includes many other provisions that have been on lawmakers' to-do lists for a long time. Within the tens of billions allocated to military operations, for example, are $230 million for an order of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and $227 million for an order of C-17 cargo planes.
Supporters of the C-17 order say it was added in large part because the production line is about to be shut down as the Pentagon gears up for a new generation of cargo aircraft. The supporters say this is the last chance to place an order for C-17's, which remain popular in the military.
But critics of the spending bill say such provisions allow lawmakers to avoid making tough decisions about budget priorities.
''A lot of these things are desirable, and some are even necessary, but they don't belong in an emergency spending bill,'' said Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. ''If you don't go through the normal budget process, you don't consider any of the trade-offs.''
While lawmakers wrestle about what deserves to be in a supplemental spending bill, some critics complain that such measures should no longer be used to finance the war.
Veronique de Rugy, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said supplemental bills amounted to ''budget tricks'' to evade spending limits.
''We have been using supplementals to finance the war, and it might actually make sense the first year,'' she said. ''But three or four years into the war, no war spending should be going through supplementals. It's not as if it's sudden, urgent and unforeseen, or temporary.''
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Per data available here:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPD...application=np
Quote:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...ndex_companies
Top News February 22, 2007, 12:00AM
A Painful Hiss from the Subprime Balloon
Subprime lender NovaStar's warning of little, if any, taxable income through 2011 sends another unwelcome jolt through mortgage company stocks
by Justin Bachman and Sonja Ryst
....."One of the Scariest Signs"
A subprime mortgage is one granted to borrowers with less-than-perfect credit histories because they've missed payments on credit cards, they are too young to have established a credit record, or a similar issue. As housing boomed in recent years, lenders rushed into making these loans, in some cases letting people borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars without ever having to prove their income or assets. <b>Subprime lenders now represent about one-fifth of the overall $5.5 trillion U.S. mortgage market.</b>
The quick growth of subprime mortgages in the recent housing boom has been eclipsed by an equally rapid decline, <b>with several major subprime lenders, ResMae Mortgage, Mortgage Lenders Network USA, and OwnIt Mortgage Solutions declaring bankruptcy since December. Others very well may follow. ......</b>
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Link to source..."You're seeing 40 or 50 (subprime companies) a day throughout the country going down in one form or another. I expect that to continue throughout the year," Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial, told investors in a recent conference call."
Quote:
Zero-down mortgage lenders foldingZero-down mortgage lenders folding click to show
http://www.azcentral.com/business/ar...ders20-ON.html
Zero-down mortgage lenders folding
Aldo Svaldi
Denver Post
Feb. 20, 2007 12:20 PM
......Brian and Selah Davenport were two days away from closing on a townhouse in Parker, Colo., when their mortgage broker called on Valentine's Day.
Their lender, Las Vegas-based Silver State Financial Services, one of the country's bigger subprime lenders, had ceased operations. That forced the couple, who were looking for a zero-down loan, to scramble to find another lender and save the purchase.
"I didn't know a lender could shut down all of a sudden and there would be nothing for you as a consumer," said Selah, who hopes to close Friday.
About two dozen of the largest subprime mortgage lenders across the country have gone under or stopped making loans since December, according to the Mortgage Lender "Implode-O-Meter," a new Web site tracking closures in the subprime lending industry.
The site tracks only large lenders, so there are probably far more closures.
"You're seeing 40 or 50 (subprime companies) a day throughout the country going down in one form or another. I expect that to continue throughout the year," Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial, told investors in a recent conference call.</b>
That means it has become tougher for homeowners who are accustomed to zero-down mortgages and easy approvals to get loans.
Subprime or alternative lenders provide loans with slightly higher interest rates, usually 2 to 3 percentage points above prime rates, to borrowers with lower credit scores.
They also make loans that conventional lenders consider too risky, such as interest-only and no-money-down loans without proof of income.
The failure of so many subprime lenders is symptomatic of a larger trend - Wall Street's loss of appetite for risk. With so many mortgages going bad, investment banks have quit backing subprimes and are actually kicking bad loans back to originating lenders, forcing some of them to close up shop........ |
Quote:
http://ml-implode.com/
<img src="http://ml-implode.com/mliom9fs.jpg">
Latest count of major US Mortgage lenders that have croaked since about Dec 2006:
23 lenders have now gone kaput....
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Last edited by host; 02-24-2007 at 09:09 AM..
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