This is nothing to celebrate, unless another trillion
Posted By: in Govt spending/debt makes you happy.nm on 2009-01-10
In Reply to: 10 more days -- still counting..(sm) - Just the big bad
nm
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A trillion here, a trillion there, why doesn't congress take a pay cut? nm
x
She still didn't say you couldn't celebrate the 4th
You said that she wanted to take away your right to celebrate the 4th which was a lie. You are obviously the liar here.
You sound like someone in the second grade. You are wo what am I. Pathetic.
Celebrate Obama's presidency!
In "celebration" of this stimulus and a month of his presidency, let's see if Obama has lived up to his promises. I will let you score your president.
Here are the 7 promises.
1. Make government open and transparent.
2. Make it "impossible" for Congressmen to slip in pork barrel projects.
3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public. (Even Congressional Republicans shut out.)
4. No more secrecy.
5. Public will have 5 days to look at a bill.
6. You’ll know what’s in it.
7. We will put every pork barrel project online.
Who wants to celebrate a "religion" that hates
--
Hey! I'll celebrate St. Patty's Day witcha!
:)
Haven't posted in a while but HERE TO CELEBRATE Obama!
Happy days are here again
How much is $1 trillion?
Million...billion...trillion. We get so used to hearing these words that they have no meaning. They even sound alike, so we forget how much larger a billion is than a million, and how much larger a trillion is than a billion.
Imagine that you're holding ten $1 bills in your hand. Lay them down on the table one at a time at a rate of $1 per second. 1...2...3...4...etc.
Okay, you've now just spent $10 in ten seconds. To spend $1 trillion at this rate would take you 32,000 years,laying down $1 every second of every day of every week of every year. Spending Obama's $3.75 trillion budget would take you 120,000 years.
Put another way, the first homo sapiens is thought by evolutionists to have appeared about 110-120,000 years ago. Personally, I don't think so, but let's say he did. If Mr. H.S. had discovered a pile of $3.75 trillion lying around, and if he and one of his descendants in every generation since then had spent the money at a rate of $1 per second, his descendant in the year 2009 could have handed the last dollar to Obama.
I've just received this news flash. The search for the H.S. descendant has failed. In his place, American taxpayers will hand our last dollar to Obama instead. Anyone who believes that tax increases are coming only for those who make $250,000 and up are deluding themselves. If nothing else, the prospect of raging inflation lies ahead, and we all pay sales taxes as a percentage of the price of everything we buy, so if the tax bill isn't in your annual return, it will come through the back door, down the chimney or some other way.
Agree with that but where is the other 3 trillion
Obama's social programs will need minimum of 3 trillion MORE to pay for all those government agencies, deep pockets to oversee all those government agencies, and then more government agencies to oversee those government agencies to make sure they are doing what they're supposed to be doing....yea, right, I'm not falling for it.
3.5 trillion dollars and that's a low ball estimate. where will it all come from after he brings our money back from Iraq? No one wants to address that.
He can't get that kind of money from the 5% rich he seems to have so much bitterness towards, so where will it come from?
Or Obama's 3.5 trillion in taxes
xx
Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion
(Okay. Everyone in Congress and the White House, empty your pockets.)
Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion (Update1)
By Mark Pittman
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it's allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.
"If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that's what they don't want us to know," said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.
The Fed stepped into a rescue role that was the original purpose of the Treasury's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The central bank loans don't have the oversight safeguards that Congress imposed upon the TARP.
Total Fed lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time Nov. 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since Sept. 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren't rated AAA.
'Been Bamboozled'
Congress is demanding more transparency from the Fed and Treasury on bailout, most recently during Dec. 10 hearings by the House Financial Services committee when Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had "been bamboozled."
Bloomberg News, a unit of New York-based Bloomberg LP, on May 21 asked the Fed to provide data on collateral posted from April 4 to May 20. The central bank said on June 19 that it needed until July 3 to search documents and determine whether it would make them public. Bloomberg didn't receive a formal response that would let it file an appeal within the legal time limit.
On Oct. 25, Bloomberg filed another request, expanding the range of when the collateral was posted. It filed suit Nov. 7.
In response to Bloomberg's request, the Fed said the U.S. is facing "an unprecedented crisis" in which "loss in confidence in and between financial institutions can occur with lightning speed and devastating effects."
Data Provider
The Fed supplied copies of three e-mails in response to a request that it disclose the identities of those supplying data on collateral as well as their contracts.
While the senders and recipients of the messages were revealed, the contents were erased except for two phrases identifying a vendor as "IDC." One of the e-mails' subject lines refers to "Interactive Data -- Auction Rate Security Advisory May 1, 2008."
Brian Willinsky, a spokesman for Bedford, Massachusetts- based Interactive Data Corp., a seller of fixed-income securities information, declined to comment.
"Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure," Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Fed's Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News.
'Dangerous Step'
"In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information," she wrote.
New York-based Citigroup Inc., which is shrinking its global workforce of 352,000 through asset sales and job cuts, is among the nine biggest banks receiving $125 billion in capital from the TARP since it was signed into law Oct. 3. More than 170 regional lenders are seeking an additional $74 billion.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would meet congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system.
The Freedom of Information Act obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and public. The Bloomberg lawsuit, filed in New York, doesn't seek money damages.
'Right to Know'
"There has to be something they can tell the public because we have a right to know what they are doing," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
"It would really be a shame if we have to find this out 10 years from now after some really nasty class-action suit and our financial system has completely collapsed," she said.
The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks that handed over collateral including stocks and subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site.
Borrowers include the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Citigroup and New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., the country's biggest bank by assets.
Banks oppose any release of information because that might signal weakness and spur short-selling or a run by depositors, Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group, said in an interview last month.
'Complete Truth'
"Americans don't want to get blindsided anymore," Mendez said in an interview. "They don't want it sugarcoated or whitewashed. They want the complete truth. The truth is we can't take all the pain right now."
The Bloomberg lawsuit said the collateral lists "are central to understanding and assessing the government's response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression."
In response, the Fed argued that the trade-secret exemption could be expanded to include potential harm to any of the central bank's customers, said Bruce Johnson, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle. That expansion is not contained in the freedom-of-information law, Johnson said.
"I understand where they are coming from bureaucratically, but that means it's all the more necessary for taxpayers to know what exactly is going on because of all the money that is being hurled at the banking system," Johnson said.
The Bloomberg lawsuit is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net;
Last Updated: December 12, 2008 11:35 EST
Like the 2002 Bush $1.3 trillion tax cut for the wealthy
decimated the $128 billion FY 2001 surplus, shifted the tax burden to the middle class while he went on a deficit spending spree and brought their ever diminishing numbers to their knees by September 2008? You want me to vote for the guy who backed up these policies 90% of the time, the same guy who has yet to utter the words "middle class" in a public forum during this entire campaign? Thanks, but no thanks. I'll take my chances on the change train.
Obama bailout up to just short of a trillion....
and he has been in office HOW long? lol. Doesn't count the billions we already spent. This is new spending. Talk about spending like a drunken sailor....lol. Hello democratic majority. LOL.
Correct....or the 3.5 trillion dollar social programs
@
Democratic governors seeking $1 trillion bailout...sm
Democratic governors seeking $1 trillion bailout
Obama and his staff receptive to ideas, Doyle says
By SCOTT BAUER • The Associated Press • January 3, 2009
MADISON — Five Democratic governors are asking the federal government for a $1 trillion bailout package, including $250 billion for education and $150 billion in middle class tax cuts.
Advertisement
The governors from Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Ohio on Friday said they have presented their plan to President-elect Barack Obama's transition team as well as congressional leaders.
They said that level of federal aid is needed to deal with unprecedented state budget shortfalls in 41 states and Washington, D.C., that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pegged at $42 billion for the current fiscal year alone.
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle said congressional leaders and the Obama team have been receptive to the governors' ideas.
"That's not to say they've told us this is what they'll do or they're with us all the way," Doyle said. He also said other governors were involved in creating the plan, which grew out of an early December meeting that Obama had with the nation's governors.
Obama's aides and congressional leaders have been talking about a package roughly half the size of the two-year plan the five governors proposed Friday.
A $1 trillion is equal to 6.7 percent of the gross domestic product, the U.S. economy's total output in a single year. A package of that size is likely to draw significant opposition from congressional Republicans and concern from moderate and conservative Democratic lawmakers who oppose large budget deficits.
In addition to the money for education and tax cuts, the governors said their plan includes $350 billion for road construction and other infrastructure projects and $250 billion for social service programs such as Medicaid.
The governors all said their states are facing unprecedented budget shortfalls that will require deep cuts to services and possibly irreparably harm their education systems.
"We aren't crying wolf," Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said. "These are real circumstances, unprecedented situations we are facing."
Ohio's budget deficit could grow to $7.3 billion even after $1.9 billion was cut from its current budget, Strickland said.
A forecast from Global Insight shows that the economy hasn't hit bottom yet.
National economic growth is now expected to drop 1.8 percent this year, rather than increase 1 percent.
The U.S. labor market is expected to lose 3.7 million jobs during the downturn, with unemployment reaching 8.7 percent in the first half of 2010, it said.
That forecast assumes there will be a $550 billion federal stimulus package, roughly half of what the governors requested.
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20090103/GPG0101/901030590/1978
A trillion dollars being spent, 1100 pages
and the American people aren't allowed to look at it let alone the house and senate don't get time to read it? WTFrig is that all about?
Over a $10 trillion dollar deficit today? That didn't happen on O's watch.
Yes, they need to trim down a lot of the programs crammed in the current stimulus package. But I don't approve of McCain's, either. Giving the top 10% a tax break benefits NO ONE but the top 10%. They drink imported wines, buy designer clothes and travel to foreign destinations - how does that benefit the bulk of Americans? It takes $30,000 to $40,000 in gas just to fill up their yachts - who does that benefit? Not us. Instead of "screw the poor!" - how about "screw the rich!"
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