Where is the US economy headed?

But it doesn't mean the claim is false. Would you be prepared to sacrifice 10% of your standard of living in order to bring another billion out of poverty.

If not you can forget all about being a socialist and admit you're on an envy jag.

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Reported by who? Global media companies and international bankers?

I would guess that that is the case. But it doesn't mean the claim is false. Would you be prepared to sacrifice 10% of your standard of living in order to bring another billion out of poverty.

If not you can forget all about being a socialist and admit you're on an envy jag.

You have misunderstood Spendi's post. He offered a hypothetical question, stating it in a way that implied that Cyclo and most others in developed countries may have experienced fewer gains in their standard of living while the economies of Asian nations modernized and took their people out of poverty.

I don't think my willingness to sacrifice is incompatible with my belief that international bankers and media tend to 'lift people out of poverty' only as far as it makes them rich to do so.

I still don't understand who I'm supposed to be envious of, in this construction.

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I don't think my willingness to sacrifice is incompatible with my belief that international bankers and media tend to 'lift people out of poverty' only as far as it makes them rich to do so.

People in poverty do not give a **** what the motives of those who lifted them out of poverty are.

You had been castigating bankers you know. You had never considered that they might have done some real good.

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I still don't understand who I'm supposed to be envious of, in this construction.

It was suggested as a possible motive now that your socialism has been ruled out.

Except, they didn't, for the most part. I'll never buy the globalist argument that putting people to work in sweatshops is what we need to do in order to 'improve' their lives.

Cycloptichorn

The U.S. Treasury Department is investigating whether Bank of America, Wells Fargo and eight other major banks may have illegally foreclosed on 4,500 active-duty servicemen and women.

Bank of America has agreed to review more than 2,400 foreclosures of homeowners who indicated they were eligible for relief under a federal law called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, according to the Treasury's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Wells Fargo has agreed to review 871 foreclosures of homeowners who indicated they were eligible under the act. The law is intended to postpone or suspend certain civil obligations to allow active-duty service members to devote their full attention to their military duty.

The other banks being investigated are Aurora Bank, Citibank, EverBank, HSBC, MetLife Bank, OneWest, Sovereign and U.S. Bank.

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., called the alleged improper foreclosures a "flagrant disregard for a law that has been on the books continuously since the First World War."

"If you're wearing the nation's uniform, if you're deployed in harm's way in service of your country, you should be able to focus your entire energy to our nation's service without worrying what's happening in a courthouse back home," Miller said.

The review is part of a larger examination that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is conducting on 4 million borrowers who may have been improperly foreclosed on in 2009 and 2010.

This isn't to say the GSEs get off Scott-free, not by a long-shot, they were as deep into the greed machine as the next guy and deserve some serious jail time along with many others, in my opinion. Okay, then why weren't they solelyresponsible like the Conservatives said? They controlled most of the secondary mortgage market didn't they? Well, no, not really, not of the sub-prime market where the vast majority of the toxic mortgages were. The real TRUTH is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, contrary to what Mr. Wallison claims and once Wall Street got into the act, at their worst owned only 40% of the sub-prime market, that was in 2004. By 2008, they were down to 28%. Further, those that the GSEs did own were of better quality than those that Wall Street owned! The Commission found that by 2008, when comparing a subset of borrowers with credit scores of 660 or lower, the non-GSE institutions were suffering an astounding 28% serious delinquency rate while the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were facing a much more manageable 6%!Doesn't that make you wonder exactly what the Conservatives were looking at to base their accusations on? This is the comparitive analysis that suggested was missing in Mr. Wallison's dissent.

There is no question that the GSEs added "helium" to the bubble, as the Commission phrased it, but it wasn't the "foundation" of it as Mr. Wallison asserts. There is no question the GSEs were guilty of the same unethical business practices as Wall Street. There is no question that the GSEs were part of the problem. But - there is also no question that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as the Commission concluded, was even close to being the cause of the financial crisis as the Conservatives so loudly and frequently claim.

The Conservatives also claimed that in conjunction with the GSE, the Liberal programs of getting low income people into home ownership was also responsible for the financial crisis. Once again, the Conservatives have the numbers against them, once again the Conservatives are wrong. These low and middle income programs come under an initiative called the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that was designed to prevent discrimination by "redlining" by banks; something the Conservatives deny was happening and even if it was, it shouldn't be regulated by the government. The statistic that stops the Conservatives in their tracks here is that only 6% of the sub-prime mortgages had anyconnection to this Act. Again, this is in complete disagreement with what Mr. Wallison tells us the Conservatives believe is the truth. His problem again is that there was no comparative data presented to substantiate his position that I could find.