Thanks to the visual imagery of Josh Dyess at WallStats.com I am happy to help educate the masses. Josh has a creative eye and can help you get a better understanding of complex (and not so complex) stuff via pictures. Check out his site when you have a moment. [update: Josh tells me he didn't create these images, he got it from a friend, who got it from a friend, etc. So, I don't know who actually created them. But still visit Josh's site, its pretty cool.]
So, how big is a trillion?
God bless Twitter for helping me find this graphic by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. As he says, when you start talking about our budget in trillions, people fail to comprehend the sizes we are talking about. Pictures help people like me put the current administration’s drunken spending into a proper frame of reference. At this point I don’t give a crap how much Bush spent… Obama has taken spending to an entirely new level, one that we as a country CANNOT sustain. If Barack-O inherited a single crap sandwich from Bush (a common lefty claim), Barack is currently preparing a fecal cruise ship buffet for the Republican president that WILL be elected in 2012. (more credit due here and here.)
What happens when the entity that exists to protect your bank deposits goes broke? What would a run on the banks do then? At the present rate of losing a few billion dollars a month we might know the answer to this question by Independence Day.
Calling all moderate Americans. WAKE UP! I can’t save or even influence the far lefties that have no clue about reality, but I can try to those of you in the middle ground.
Look back over the “failed eight years” that the left and Obama loved to whine about. Make a list of the accusations pointed at Bush and Cheney. What was he accused of? EVEN IF, for the sake of argument, you take the truther side and agree with their crazy assertions, what Obama is doing is exponentially worse, more restrictive, more invasive and more dangerous than ANYTHING that the Bush administration was accused of.
The Obama Administration has now expressed the need to restrict free speech, not only of lobbyists and insiders, but of “anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program.” Who wrote that quote? Norman Eisen, who works for Barack Obama as Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform. Ed Morrissey had this to say:
Remember when the Left took to the streets to declare dissent “patriotic” during wartime? I didn’t have a problem with dissent then, but apparently the Left has a curious definition of “patriotism”. Now, suddenly, the federal government can silence their critics at will, not to protect critical national-security programs or keep from undermining a war effort, but to protect a Democratic president intent on seizing control of private industry across a wide swath of the nation. Suddenly, that kind of dissent threatens America.
Seriously speaking, when will the media and moderates that voted for Obama wake up and realize that this man is truly dangerous for America? Once upon a time liberals stood up for free speech. Remember the 1960s? What the hell has happened to the Left?Let me leave you chewing on this:
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
Norman Thomas, U.S. Socialist Party presidential candidate 1940, 1944 and 1948
An interesting article presented by the University of Virginia sheds some light on the current housing market. Specifically, the study shows that “66 percent of potential housing value losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent in Florida, Nevada and Arizona, for a total of 87 percent of national declines.”
66% of the financial losses occurred in California. Two thirds of the failing mortgages that President Obama and others are demanding that taxpayers bail out are in California. The other three states make up another 21%. Here is another quote from this study:
“Potential losses in housing values from 2008 foreclosures in all 50 states — if values decline to 2000 levels — were less than one-third of the $350 billion provided to banks and insurance companies to cope with losses in mortgage-backed securities…”
“Damage to the balance sheets of large banks and AIG occurred not mainly from losses on foreclosed residential mortgages, but because of borrowing short-range to buy long-range derivatives and from selling credit default swaps insuring derivatives backed by mortgage payments,” Lucy and Herlitz said.
In other words, the banks that are being bailed out lost billions thanks to risky investments and lack of management/oversight. The housing bailout is not nearly as expensive as we’ve been led to believe. We’ve been asked to support giving banks $700B yet they only need about $100B to cover their mortgage-backed risk?
For another perspective take a look at the following maps.
Do you see what I see? three of the four “mortgage crisis” states are blue, as in Democratic. The only reason Arizona is red is because that’s McCain’s state. He won his own state 54:45 by less than two million votes. If Romney had been the candidate I bet that AZ would have also gone blue.
My point? Democratic leadership sucks. Liberal policies focus more on making things fair, making everyone equal, instead of looking at legitimate financial issues and holding citizens accountable for their own actions, including their ability to pay for a mortgage. But, we don’t hear this in the press now, do we? Where is the hype over the fact that President Obama wants to give billions of dollars to in essence bail out four of our fifty states? ::crickets::
This is the sort of info you need to have top of mind when talking to liberals AND moderates that are less than energetic about learning the truth. We’ve got three years to educate five million voters so that conservative values have a fighting chance in 2012. Spread the word, be a loud talker.
