Where is the US economy headed?

@cicerone imposter,

my house is at the 2006 level, which considering that I bought in 2004 suits me fine. I am better off than most. We will bounce back before much of the rest of the nation as well, so by the time I need to sell all should be swell.

200 homes in our subdivision, only one has gone to foreclosure. And the HOA is gotten very active keeping the place up. In the subdivisions on both sides of us, both lower down the food chain and without HOA's, there have been a slew of foreclosures. Their values are WAY down.

2 Replies

@hawkeye10,

You seem to live in a community similar to ours where our home value has pretty much kept up compared to most of our surrounding area - even in our city, our ZIP code is the best with highest values and least amount of drops in prices. Since we're not planning to move any time soon, prices don't mean much to us. What matters most is our retirement funds that's now at the same level as what we had in January 2006. I see that as pretty positive, because we've been withdrawing funds from our retirement investments.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

We bought our current home in 1999, saw it more than double in value (on paper) as the housing bubble swelled, saw it lose a whole bunch in value (on paper) when the housing bubble burst, and now is valued at some better than we would have expected with normal appreciation over the past 10 years.

We are not in the 'ritzy' part of town--typical pleasant lower middle class neighborhood--but few 'for sale' signs in our neighborhood and no foreclosures that have been apparent. The houses going up for sale do seem to stay on the market a little honger than they used to, but they are selling.

I imagine most folks here who bought in the last 10-15 years also took out standard fixed loans with at least the normal 20% down when they bought too. We were recently able to refinance at a fixed below 5% rate which helps makes life good as we wind down into retirement. I wish we had paid off the place when we were making top money, but it didn't seem the thing to do at the time. But we didn't see the crash coming at the time either.

0 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

I can't believe that they're simply destroying those cars.

I could see not letting the dealer sell them for a profit, but at least they should be auctioned off to junk yards and the funds added back to the government accounts.

There are a **** load of used parts that are simply being destroyed, for no damn good reason.

2 Replies

@maporsche,

once the engines are destroyed, as by program rules they must be, the cars have almost no value to junkyards. Finding yards to take the cars is a problem.

Stuff can be stripped off, but not the transmission and not the frame. Yards can between what is stripped and the metal scrap income do just a bit better than break even.

0 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

Quote:

.What matters most is our retirement funds that's now at the same level as what we had in January 2006. I see that as pretty positive, because we've been withdrawing funds from our retirement investments

so what, you have decided to die in that house?? Most likely you will at some point downsize and maybe relocate, your house value is actively part of your retirement nest egg. Even if you want to plant yourself, you could still take a reverse mortgage...it may still be part of funding your retirement.

2 Replies

@hawkeye10,

We don't need a reverse mortgage; we have enough savings to last us through our retirement - unless our economy goes into a depression.

I can still travel which is my enjoyment in retirement, and that's all I need.

Don't get me wrong; we still have to watch our dollars, because we are not wealthy.

0 Replies

@maporsche,

maporsche, Excellent point; another boondoggle of our government making the wrong decisions on so many issues related to bailouts and the stimulus plan. Sloppy and incompetent comes to mind.

Our government has run our country poorly for the longest time, but we are at fault for electing representatives that has no idea about economics or governance. Many are beholding to private interests, and that's the reason K street firms exist in the first place.

They've been destroying our country that used to be the pride of Americans; it's so bad now, many can't survive in this country.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

According to my wife, yes. You got a problem with that?

0 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

It's crap like this that make me want to oppose the government getting involved in health care as well. I'm not there yet, but I'm damn close (especially given all the other issues with the plan I'm seeing).

I can't even begin to imagine the wasted energy that destroying those parts has created. Whatever we save in CO2 emissions we probably just lost a good chunk of it by not recycling those parts.

2 Replies

@maporsche,

we are going to have to wait for the post mortem to know. There is a reasonable chance that the cars junked under this program will fall into relatively few small catagories.....that is that with certain makes and model years the program will remove the majority of the operational stock, but have little effect on all of the rest . If this is the case, nost of the parts would never have found a market, because not enough of those cars will be still running to demand those parts.

we are a long ways from knowing exactly what is being junked.

0 Replies

@maporsche,

maporsche, You're trying to compare apples and oranges; there's a huge difference between the clunker trade-in and universal health care.

The current health care system in the US is inefficient at the highest cost while more people lose their coverage. Something has to be done; we would have survived without the clunker trade-in program; we can't do without establishing a universal health care.

People continue to talk about they will lose their choice of doctors; the reality is that more and more people can't even choose any doctor, because they don't have health insurance. The fear of not having choice is moot. Same as their fear that quality will diminish; without any health insurance, quality is also moot. As for cost, many companies are not only going bankrupt, but those who used to have company sponsored insurance are now out of jobs worried about putting food on the table. Health care insurance premiums run about $1,200 every month for a family. How many families can afford to pay those premiums? Can you?

I doubt it.

What our government needs to do is build in efficiencies into a universal health care system, reduce waste and fraud, and make health insurance affordable for all. Most developed countries have universal health care; we can replicate the ideas that work and don't implement a system that creates waste and fraud. Even today under the Medicare system, fraud is still going on that's costing the system millions almost every day. That needs to be stopped with huge penalties for perpetrators.

It can get done if they do it right; they must begin with communicating theright kind of information to suppress the lies being transmitted through the media by the insurance industry; they're spending $1.2 million every day to scare people like you!

0 Replies

The House, in it's eagerness to get out of D.C for August, approved the extra $2B by almost a 3-1 margin. The (dirty?) little secret, a cynic might argue, is that the auto makers and auto parts suppliers have imbedded themselves into so many Congressional districts such that no one dare oppose them.
Cash for couches or cash for refrigerators? No way. Cars, cars, cars.
I note that Diane Feinstein (D-Ca) and John McCain (R-Az) will be working together next week in the Senate to take a closer review of this. They will look, I hope, at the plan in general but also at what the fuel efficiency of the new car vs the old car should be.

1 Reply

@realjohnboy,

And this is a darn good time to start looking at the program. Especially the mpg of the new car compared to the old.

0 Replies

Meanwhile the administration is apparently preparing us for a blatant, intentional, and unavoidably obvious breaking of President Obama's solemn pledge to not raise taxes on the middle class.

Of importance, the only way they see to reduce the deficit is to raise taxes, a policy that all but the most keynesian economists would counsel is a fool's policy in time of already high unemployment. There is certain no indication they intend to slow down spending or roll back ambitious initiaties that could wait until the economy recovers.

Even more telling is that they now apparently don't consider TARP money that has come back into the system as 'already spent' but money that they can spend again.

As I've said before, the gods must surely be laughing.

Quote:

Geithner Won’t Rule Out New Taxes for Middle Class
George Stephanopoulos
August 02, 2009 8:02 AM

To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a “This Week” exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, "We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”

Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.

“We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,” Geithner told me. “And that’s going to require some very hard choices.”

“We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will be not strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,” he said.

While Geithner told me, “There are signs the recession is easing,” he warned that, “We have a ways to go.”

“I want to emphasize the basic reality that unemployment is very high in this country,” the secretary said. But, he underlined that the administration is “going to do what is necessary to bring growth back on track.”

Turning to the bank bailout, he told me it is “quite unlikely” that the U.S. Treasury will go back to Congress to ask for more funding for the financial rescue package.

"We do not plan to ask for more money and I think it’s quite unlikely that we do," Geithner said in his most blunt language to date on TARP funding. The secretary said that today the TARP has roughly $130 billion, in part due to more than $70 billion that has already come back into the government.

MORE HERE:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/08/geithner-wont-rule-out-new-taxes-for-middle-class.html

1 Reply

@Foxfyre,

That's true and I agree that deficit reduction must be a priority for our government; that's not going to be possible without some tax hikes.

That's really not a bad thing, because our taxation is already one of the lowest as a percentage of GDP. As has been found, over 60% of corporations pay no taxes.

2 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

Quote:

That's really not a bad thing, because our taxation is already one of the lowest as a percentage of GDP. As has been found, over 60% of corporations pay no taxes.

UNder the free trade scheme we can't make them either. Just as corporations have long played states off of each other and only rewarded the states which demanded the least amount of diversion of corporate profits towards taxes (their viewpoint), with global free trade agreements nations have lost the power to tax corporations. If you try to tax them they will move to someplace which will not, and because of the trade agreements that are now part of international law we can neither keep them out of our markets or punish them with tariffs.

Global free trade theory is 90% about what is good for wealth skimming projects that the corporate class conducts, 10% about what is good for everyone else.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

There's a limit to off-shoring everything by US companies. A CEO sitting in a huge office with a secretary in the US controlling factories all over the globe isn't going to help our economy.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

YOu are talking about where the manufacturing takes place, and ya, for most it can be moved out of the US. As we have recently seen so can a lot of of the service industry. Many US corporations have already moved most of their back office and telecom stuff to India or other such places.

I am also talking about moving the HQ out of the US, delisting the corp from the American exchanges, moving out of the jurisdiction of the American Government. We have not seen this yet, but the scheme is brand new (less than 20 years old) and the international law is in place to allow for it. We have seen corporations move from state to state for a long time now seeking the best deal, what gives you the idea that they will not move nation to nation if they decide that it is in their best financial interests to do so?

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

And how do you suppose Americans will make a living?

1 Reply

Where is the US economy headed?

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know