I’ve noticed some trends recently that are related to the real estate market and economy peripherally, but are more about the way Americans are viewing the world they live in.
Those trends are: a Pervasive Sense of Entitlement and the related issue of Childish World-view.
The Pervasive Sense of Entitlement to which I refer was evidenced in an article I read yesterday on Yahoo. (I’m really sorry but I can’t find the link.) The basic notion of the article was that Americans may have to get used to a “lower standard of living,” as evidenced by owning one house and having no more than one car payment at a time.
OH GROW UP ALREADY! While there are millions of families who THINK they can afford a home of their own along with two car payments and all of the other accoutrements of life, the reality doesn’t agree with them. When did it become a “right” to have two new cars? It has never been wise to have two new cars – that’s undeniable. But why is that the definition of the “status quo”, beneath which a person is perceived as living at a lower standard of living?
It’s GARBAGE, my dear friends. Let’s grow up a bit and live within our means. How would this financial crisis be different for you if you had no mortgage to pay and no car payments to make? Answer: You really wouldn’t care about it much, would you? Because it simply wouldn’t have much effect on your life.
The related issue of CHILDISH WORLD-VIEW is evidenced by people trying to push off their own responsibility onto others. Example: All of the people who took out STUPID subprime loans, who are now crying to the world for a rescue that they don’t deserve.
Look, if you are facing foreclosure on a subprime loan, I feel badly for you. I really do – I’ve been there and know what it’s like. But you got what you asked for: A property you couldn’t afford. And now you’re about to learn your lesson, because foreclosure is painful.
But wait! Maybe you won’t HAVE TO learn a lesson, because the Child-In-Chief, Barack Obama, is determined to extend our culture of dependency as far as possible by “gently persuading” the lenders not to foreclose on you.
Where’s the logic in this? Short answer: There isn’t any. The person who made a horrible decision in terms of taking a subprime loan will likely make yet another risky financial move in the future, because sometimes it simply takes the pain of failure to learn how to succeed. And the current government policy of “bailing out” everybody who cries “wolf” denies people the opportunity to learn that lesson – and to reap the long-term benefits of it.
I hate to say it, but I think the only answer for our economy is a serious economic cleansing. Lots of company closures. Lots of layoffs. Lots of bankruptcies. Why? For decades, our economy has not been fueled primarily by consumption of fundamental necessities or reasonable extras, but by incredible excess at every level.
In America, we have no sense of delayed gratification. The easy availability of credit has made that time-honored concept a non sequitur to the question of wise financial management. If we want something, we get it, and we get it now. That’s a road to financial devastation, and there is nothing the government can do to stop the fundamental economic unraveling that has to occur.
Contrary to what you think, I’m not heartless. I don’t like the idea of financial challenges. Considering that I’m 34 years old, I don’t have a great frame of reference for weak economic times. Having said that, I see no other way to remove the crap from our system. Barack Obama’s socialist strategies certainly won’t do it. But sadly, a more reasonable leader couldn’t do it either – because our society is all about selfishness and greed. Americans have a pervasive sense of entitlement and view financial matters with the clarity of a 6-year old. And the only thing that can stop that trend is to see the results of it.
I appreciate you and your time. Your comments are welcomed here at RealEstate.BryanEllis.com.
Wow… More than make me angry, this article of yours has made me respect you a whole lot more.
I am a U.S. born citizen but have lived outside the U.S. most of my life, and haved moved back less than 10 years ago. I’ve observed in wonderment many of the things you point about the U.S. culture, and many more that are even sadder.
But the saddest thing about it is precisely what you anticipated: most people will be angry about pointing this out, will be blind to it all, and will probably go so far as to say that these issues are ESSENTIALS to all U.S. citizens and our culture, and that if you don’t like it, you should just move to another country.
But it is they who do not understand that the U.S. has not always (speaking historically) lingered in this vain sense of complacency. The consumerist, pleasure-and-fun-seeking mindset is very recent, and thus through the recent ongoing pains, can hopefully be squashed for good. But we can only hope…
While I may not agree personally with Bryan’s opinion of the new president, everything else I am in total agreement with.
Has anyone ever stood in line at the grocery story behind someone who was wearing $100 tennis shoes and paying the cashier with food stamps? Has anyone ever paid down one credit card with another – and realized that was perpetuating their debt and inability to ever pay off the first or second? Has anyone here ever rolled over the negative equity trading in an old car for another? Does anyone here live in a low-income apartment community, but their neighbor drives a BMW?
I am no economic expert, but I do understand one fundamental thing about our monetary system: money is created through perpetual debt. Banks create money out of thin air based on the promise that it will be repaid with interest, and if you extrapolate that idea from the consumer / banker level to the government / IMF level, it eventually becomes apparent that money doesn’t really exist, but is a figment of collective imagination. The ignorance of this concept has lead to what Bryan is talking about, people living outside of their means due to the excess availability of credit and the lack of foresight to see the inevitable consequences of over-extending themselves.
If the government really wants to make a positive change, it needs to start from the ground up in our education systems. Programs like the no child left behind act are making people financially illiterate and incapable of making sound decisions, as well as propagating ignorance in our country.
I recently read a quote from the Onion, it is funny and sad at the same time because it embodies an idea that seems all too relevant today:
“If you love America you throw money in its hole.”
Although you are mostly right, our society is not about selfishness and greed as you referred,evidenced by the fact that we are hands-down the most generous nation on earth, bar none, when it comes to charitable giving, especially during a crisis.
The problem is big government giving entitlements to people, all of which are unconstitutional,that create a sense of entitlement,and have done so since Herbert Hoover and FDR;LBJ also exacerbated things with his Great Society legislation.
The markets should not be interfered with;they should be allowed to take their course. These bailouts will ruin us financially in a few short years. No one in government is talking about a moratorium on capital gains taxes,lowering the corporate tax to 5% or less,lowering the federal income tax,ending the FICA tax and making it optional,ending/eliminating government programs,downsizing government,etc…(Oh,what I could get done in 10 minutes if I were king of America!)All the talk is about raising taxes and bailouts.Are we government despising Americans,or complacent modern day socialists?That’s the real dilemma.
The mindset of consumers has changed. Before subprime, if a person had bad credit and wanted to get a loan they needed to work to clean it up. After Subprime it was lenders that said ‘oh you have bad credit, no problem we can still give you a loan’.
There are a lot of things that have contributed today’s perfect storm.
SOMETHING needs to be done.
Keep in mind that Obama has been in office for less than 90 days, to clean up after an administration, who sent us to war looking for a smoking gun financing it by borrowing from generations to come. If by saying Obama is inexperienced I am sure this country can use some fresh thinking, just look at what 8 years of “experience” got us.
Or by your suggestion, unemployed, homeless, bankrupt america and then what will the next article read like? Why is crime on the rise in double digits?
I am a bit offended by this article as a whole, and I think it is a bit irresponsible, especially from someone of your caliber, and I think this is the last one I’ll read.
Bryan,
I agree with you. Americans have for too long lived above their means and are extermely selfish and childish about wanting what they want when they want it.. But, here’s the rub. That mindset and those attitudes are what created the mess we’re in.
Did the big banks (urged on by the government over the past 30 years in its many entitlement programs) say “we won’t lend to someone who can’t pay us back”? No.
Did the car companies say “we will make a product that lasts for many years and runs well so you won’t want to buy a new car so quickly” (planned obsolesence). No. The car companies loved it and thrived on the fact that after 80,000 miles you need major repairs and/or a new car.
I’m only picking on those two industries right now because they are the ones now crying and asking to be bailed out. Just like consumers, It was these industries’ own policies that got them into their respective messes and, by the way, created the boom years.
Now, my tax dollars and yes, I pay a lot of them, has to go to the “cleanup” of this mess.
But bitching and moaning and groaning about this is not going to make me happy, keep me healthy, or prolong my life.
I can only be responsible for my own behavior. So, I choose to let others figure out what’s best for them and I will continue do what thinking people have always done — what’s best for me and my family.
Cannot add much to this except for the most part I really agree.
I have seen other economic hard times and some of them were pretty tough, but we as a country moved through them and could have become stronger. Unfortunately, the government didn’t think we should get stronger as individuals and decided we should be better taken care of each time. Huge mistake too many of us went along with each time.
Now we are in a real mess and the government thinks we should become a socialist country, so “they” can take better care of us.
My wife pointed out last night how FDR was really the first socialist president who would be king and after his death, we put in term limits to prevent this. Is our current president the one who will finish his work? Will we come out of this a broken country, with a king instead of a president with his royal court of Pelosi, Reid and the other scoundrels of court?
I see this as a real possibility and one the Childish World View/ We Are Entitled group is really in favor of as a way to make their lives easier. It is time we all ask just how will we really pay for this? What is our “leadership” planning to give away or worse yet take from us to pay for all of their ideas and plans?
Chris B
Bryan, you are spot on in your analogy of the American public having CHILDISH WORLD-VIEW when pertaining to finances and the I have to have it NOW whether I can truly afford it or not attitude. You are also spot on with your analogy of the Non Citizen that is currently occupying the White House. The usurper in the White House has but one agenda and that is to bring all of the Citizens of America to their proverbial knees and have to go to Uncle Sucker, I should say (Uncle Blood Sucker) for everything even the basics of life food, shelter, clothing etc.
Now on to the real estate market and the economy as a whole, again you are spot on with your analogy in that all of those that bought homes or I should say were given homes because the majority put nothing into the house when they signed mortgage loan documents they knew they could not and would not pay should indeed loose the home they should have never had to start with. The banks, auto manufacturers, insurance companies and the elites on Wall Street should be falling on their asses and have to deal with the pain of failure just as those that signed mortgage loan documents they knew they could not and would not pay should be doing.
All in all the American public has created a huge mess for itself and you are right in that the country as a whole needs to allow the garbage to wash itself out. The free enterprise system will do this in short order if we will simply allow the system to work as the system has for over two hundred years. The trouble we will have doing this is that we do have a usurper in the White House and the 535 Napoleons (both houses of Congress) running around Washington that refuse to listen to the sane and rational people of the country called constituents which is actually about 90% of the citizenry of this country. Why the 90% are allowing the 10% to make the rules I have no idea because my voice is very strong and very loud, however mine and your pleas are being ignored.
The Preamble to the Constitution very clearly states that when our government is no longer acting in the best interest of the people the people have the Right and Moreover the Responsibility to Replace that government. The time has come for the Patriots of America to take our country back from the freeloading 10% of this country that think they have no responsibilities for their actions or their lives in general. In other words if they wish to live in a Socialist society there is a plane that leaves America every two minutes to a Socialist country they should board one and never come back we will not miss them!
Darold Reimer God Loving Patriot1st, Conservative 2nd, Republican 3rd
I cannot believe the sense of entitlement that some of my own children have, and it definitely DID NOT come from the way that they were raised.
We lived within our means. We had to because of the size of our family (12) and the limited income that we had. We managed to survive and looking back at I know they weren’t deprived.
So where did some of them get their thinking? I think from school and their peers. A family, living a good example, can only do so much. I agree that one of the first places for change must come from the schools and the liberal education that is crammed down their throats at a very early age. As a former teacher I applaud the parental efforts of home schooling for 8 of my 13 grandchildren.
Until there are changes in the education system, and/or people are educated by the school of hard knocks, we will continue to have a society with that sense of entitlement.
Bryan,
As much as your point has some legitimacy in playing a part in our current financial situation I think it is important to look at several of the underlying problems.
The country is governed by a constitution which has been blatantly misused. Our country through this constitution is to be governed by our governmental structure. Our government created the loan products that were sold to the people which then were repackaged and sold several times further creating a decline in value. The government decided we didn’t need to back the dollar with gold anymore and dropped that standard.
People look to their government for direction in leading their country to a healthy and fair sustainable way of living.
Our farmers and their ability to hold onto their land and produce the food for our country is diminishing.
Our companies have taken their jobs offshore, have not fulfilled their pension and health care obligations and therefore lost jobs and retirement income and very possibly social security. We believed that if we worked hard for Corporate America they would take care of us through these programs.
The way the corporations are laying off their personnel has become inhumane in more instances than not.
It is a known fact that our schools do not teach a curriculum that supports the needed understanding of the many opportunities available to us, one example mortgages. How many borrowers read the entire loan documents before signing and if they did would they understand them. No, they trust in the attorneys and mortgage personnel.
Yes, I agree that we need to live within our means but whose to say what that is with these constant changes as it is affecting the whole world.
It is my opinion that there are a variety of factors that contribute to this countries situation and that we need to revamp the WHOLE system and this can only be done by the people of this great country of ours. Greed and control on all levels contributed to this instability.
I thank you for the opportunity to respond.
Tim Cronin is on target. To better understand how the brainwashing of Americans began a better entrenchment one might go to YouTube and type in “The Money Masters.” The crash of 1929 was created by the same people that created the Federal Reserve, which is not a federal agency but rather a group of member banks that gained control of America’s money in 1913. These evil doers want more power and control by creating a “One World Order” that will give them control of the worlds monies and living standards, etc.
These people eliminated gold & silver backed currency and created phony money called “Federal Reserve Notes.” With this also began the dumbing down of Americans because it would be the toughest nation to covert to total dependency. The “Money Masters” control most politicians nowadays and get them to support their programs. Presidents, like Cronin mentioned, are/were put into office using illegal means paid for by BIG money.
G.W.B. and Obama are merely puppets doing what they are told.
The mindset of Americans was CREATED and, being human and like sheep, they were attracted to the bait of an easier lifestyle, etc. It won’t be much longer until our abused Constitution is totally eliminated so it can’t be used for legal recourse. The tax on personal income is illegal according to the Constitution and people don’t even seem to care about that or our gradual loss of freedoms. Thanks, Bryan! W. R.
I have been reading you blog for some time now and I have this to say to you. Your arrogance is repulsive and I would like to know what makes you an authority on the operations of the greatest Country in the world. At the ripe old age of 34 I am sure you have experienced all of the hardships that people endure in life and have exacting solutions for each situation. In my opinion you are still wet behind the ears and have no real experience in life … you haven’t been here long enough.
The audacity of you to suggest that people who took out subprime loans were stupid is absolutely absurd. You have no idea what people are experiencing and why they have a need to do what they do.
You talk about childish things … I feel that your continuous bashing of everything that you know nothing about is very childish and if you feel so strongly about them then put your name on a ballot, run for an office and make some change happen.
Folks we live in America and we can make any dream we have come true. If I want to own three cars and can figure out a way to do it, it’s my choice and I don’t want to be criticized for living my dream. Not everyone has the same drive that I do but that too is their choice.
As for our new President, we need to give the man a chance to show us what he can do. Our previous president obviously didn’t help or economy and we are at war over “Oil”. Wake up young man there is more to the world than your ivory tower.
Glen B
For now, I’ll leave it to others to respond, and I’ll simply thank you for your comments. However, I’d like to correct something: I didn’t suggest that people who took out subprime loans were stupid. I suggested that the notion of subprime loans is a stupid notion. That’s hard to dispute at this point, isn’t it? — Bryan Ellis
I’m upset too! I agree with some of what you said such as we’re in this mess because we as americans live beyond our means. But I don’t believe its a sense of entitlement as much as its lack of sense: financial, consumer, and social sense among others.
Sub-prime borrowers aren’t the only “evil-doers”. Homeowners in general only buy 1-2-3 houses in a lifetime– that is not a lot of experience in understanding the paperwork and math when compared to lenders who do this everyday. When it comes to sales and earning commissions salespeople in general aren’t exactly innocent in selling product, homes or otherwise. Cases like Daniel Sadek of Quick Loan Funding in Orange County and his association with Wall Street point out the lack of innocence there as well.
As far as consumer lusts lets talk about another street – Madison Avenue. They aren’t the bad guys in this fiasco but they have gone a long way to promote the bad habits ingrained in the consumer psyche about the good life and “entitlement”.
Also, this crisis does effect more than just the subprime borrowers. I have no mortgage to pay and no car payment. As a first-time home-buyer I still chose not to take an easy to get loan only because of the interest reset I could expect in 3 years. (I argued against that reset, quite frankly, many of these loans could have been written differently at the start, instead of now!) The expected payment increase loomed large because my occupation and the entire industry was taking hits from continual downsizing. I made the right call. Same with a car loan. In fact, although I own a car I chose public transportation to work because it was convenient and it saved me time and money while I read the newspaper too. So I made safe, consumer conscious decisions. But as I recall this crisis is also about JOBS, thats the one that got me! All along I upgraded my occupational skills but to no avail. Now with home prices so low what a great opportunity to buy, but with no job – not impossible but unlikely.
Point is, it’s not one crisis it’s many – And it’s not just irresponsible borrowers (A supply of affordable homes where the population justified it, would have averted much of the housing damage in the first place), it was a whole slew of shortsighted money centric, consumer-crazed types. So there, I agree with you. “For decades, our economy has not been fueled primarily by consumption of fundamental necessities or reasonable extras, but by incredible excess at every level”– including lenders, developers, borrowers, city-planners, wall street, madison avenue, consumers, government, private-sector money-managers, and the list goes on!
Wow, Bryan,
I agree with you, but what a response from everyone. I usually keep quiet, but some responses are uninformed.
First, what was just signed into law, is more taxpayer money than all wars in our history combined!
Our last president actually lowered taxes greatly which helped promote jobs and we got to keep more of our money. They will expire soon, ouch! It’s gonna hurt.
Getting back to the socialist bill, not only is it going to be funded by our tax money, our children’s taxes and our grand children’s taxes, they have just robbed the surplus of social security. (Yes, there was a surplus). The health care in this bill will elect a Health Czar, that will determine what you can be treated for by estimating your life span and cost of treatment. The government has decided how long you will live by stating, “the elderly need to come to terms with their mortality”. What?! All this in just a few weeks!
If feelings were hurt by what Bryan said, which is the hard truth, then you are probably who he is talking about . Every individual decision has a consequence, good or bad. If its good you prosper, if not so good, then it should be left up to the individual to either fix or suffer the consequence. NOT the government.
Opportunity, is what separates this country from all other countries. It should be protected.
BTW, is was the government that FORCED banks to approve a certain amount of risky loans, knowing they
would go to foreclosure.
I think everyone should prosper in this country, but you must recognize opportunity, act on it and preserve it.
Brian,
Well done.
I feel pretty much the exact same way.
The sense of entitlement that is rampant in today’s culture is joke.
I can’t tell you how many preforeclosure homes I’ve been in (literally hundreds) but I can tell you that inside, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find that BIG SCREEN TV in the living like an altar.
The easily available credit has pretty much ruined everything. Our parents generation were taught to be deathly afraid of debt.
Today’s culture embraces it as a way to get whatever they want, whenever they want.
It’s got to STOP, and as you suggest, total and complete economic “cleansing” is pretty much the only way.
The idea of sub-prime loans WAS a stupid idea as implemented by the con artist who invented them. Who in their right mind would assume that the value of ANYTHING would go up indefinitely? It was a purposeful scam invented and implemented by the same geniuses who invented CDOs, CDS and other unregulated poison pills to clog the financial arteries of the country. The people who got sub-prime mortgages did not set the criteria for qualifying for the loans, the lenders themselves did. They made the highest rate loans to those in the society at most risk of losing their jobs the soonest and thus defaulting on the loan. They then created unregulated paper to bet on whether or how long it would take for the defaults to happen. Then they leveraged those bets up to 30 times their value. Then when the jobs went away, the Wall Street pimps immediately closed the doors on their mortgage business brothels (e.g. New Century, Option One, Fremont). Of course by then the congress had passed legislation forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase the pools of these at-risk loans. Then the s**t hit the fan because SOMEBODY called the bet and demanded their money from the unregulated bets.
The citizenry of this country has been “dumbed down” to the point that any “forbidden” (socialism, communism, welfare, human rights) word automatically raises a hue and cry from the right wingers and those who THINK they are part of the privileged class. Then your have the jester kings of the right wingers, the Limbaugh’s and BillOs that distort everything, tell outrageous lies and play to the weakest minds and basest instincts of the country. If they and the neo-republi-Con-artists had their way, this country would be a fascist country right now and well on its way to becoming Nazi. (We just missed it by one election).
Bryan you seem to be really hung up on the word “socialism”. Maybe you need to visit a socialistic democracy (e.g. Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and to a point Canada) and see how people in those societies live. In many ways they are FAR superior to this country. If not for socialism there would be no big banks, auto manufacturers, airlines, oil companies, steel manufacturers, factory farms, bomb makers and other big business in this country. They would have failed long ago but for corporate socialism. But of course, that’s corporate socialism/welfare and okay with the obstructionist of the nation standing on the right.
Insofar as your comment about the new president being the “child-in-charge”, where have you been for the past eight years? The Bush administration ran this country exactly like a bunch of super-incompetent, uneducated, silly, mean, cowardly and unpatriotic teenagers. They had no respect for the military, constitution or laws of this country or most of the citizens. But these people got elected TWICE and now some people expect the new administration to clean up “King Augeas’ stables” in 3 weeks and make no mistakes doing it. I personally find those expectations to be childish, unrealistic and somewhat hypocritical coming from people who sat idle and watched their beloved elephants cover the nation in crap several miles deep (580 TRILLION miles deep….that’s right, there’s not enough money in the world to make this go away). These are the same people complaining because the rest of us are now worried about the smell and rotting and want to get the shovels and get to work on removing THEIR elephant’s crap.
Fortunately “You can’t fool all the people all the time” and the majority of the country woke up but still did not wake up soon enough to avoid the train wreck that blind capitalism has wrought. Those talking about the bail-out will result in this being a “broken” country need to wake up….the country is already broken!
For my money, I agree with you Bryan on one thing…..let’s do it one more time like the republiCons want to do it. Let the banks, auto manufacturers and everything else fail and while we’re at it, eliminate all taxes for everybody and everything. Then, when the next election is held in an apocalyptic America, that will be the 100% end of the obstructionist, selfish, stupid and fearful leadership some of this nation love so much.
Then the rest of us can get on with rebuilding what’s left of the country.
It appears that our current leadership in D.C. has decided that its highest priority is to bring back the gold standard by destroying our currency. I don’t object to the gold standard so I suppose I should be grateful to all our socialist leadership for ushering it in even faster than the prior massive spending leadership was capable of doing. The current philosophy in D.C. is pretty much summed up as, “Milk every crisis for the last ounce of the political agenda/pork that we can get”. There only stands one question in the fray, will the leaders that we have anointed break the system to the point where capitalists can no longer function. I suspect not. Without that powerful engine we would be reduced to re-using medical syringes much like the collapsed Soviet Union was. Even Communist China sees the value of capitalism.
What our leadership in D.C. thinks they (we) can afford boggles the mind, from Medicare prescription benefits, to endless wars, to banker bailouts, and enough pork to wipe out all the little pink critters on the entire face of the planet.
What the public thinks they can afford boggles the mind, from massive houses, pricey cars, and toys for as far as the eye can see.
Capitalism isn’t perfect but without it D.C. is toast, and the public with it.
I believe the more that D.C. tries to fix the real estate market the more money investors will be able to make (by actually solving the problems and healing the harm that the government helped create). If we have to share a bit more in taxes while doing bigger and better business I would consider it the price of admission. I still want to play.
I vote for capitalism. I believe it will survive although it will receive ever more regulation and tax burdens. The government is rarely the solution but their solutions almost always create opportunities. Yes, our leaders appear to wants to have a big-o-flock of dependent child-like adults. Yes many American non-youths want to play the part of that dependent child. So What!?
As long as the game still functions, I say let the adults play and play to win!
OOO-RAH!
To Glenb80, GuyO and others with a leftist agenda,
What a bunch of crap. If any of you had any training in economics or even the hard facts of some people’s lives, you would not put out such stupidity.
It does not matter anymore who started this or whose fault it is or why our current administration is doing nothing helpful about it. I can give you a huge long article starting with Hoover/FDR and coming up to the present to explain exactly how this happened, whom is truly responsible and none of the article will have any opinion in it just cold hard, verifiable facts. Much more than most of the drivel I read, laced with emotion and no real facts or understanding of what is happening and why.
I do not care one wit for someone’s opinion; I only care about the facts. Where have most of you found your history? Do you even know what history is? There are two important items in my life, the dictionary, and the history books. When you put these two together and read them, study them and understand what they are for, all this other crap makes you very mad.
Every person who is president makes mistakes; every person I know that has lived for more than two weeks has made mistakes. What matters now is what is next? If we are in debt then should we see about spending more money, and I mean a lot more money to see if that will work to get us out of debt?
Sounds like a pretty idiotic idea to me, if it does not sound idiotic to you why is that? What model are you using to make the idea of spending more money than any time in history the right one?
Why is it that every time taxes have been raised employment goes down? Will anyone actually answer this is in a subjective manner with real facts?
If anyone wants to be angry at Bush about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, then find Frank Church and be mad at him. If you do not understand why he is a crux of the issue then maybe you should learn some history and who gutted the CIA so we had to rely on foreign intelligence instead of our own, it is hard to make good decisions when you do not have good information but all the other countries you are allied with tell you “Yes, Iraq is very dangerous and needs to be stopped.” Has that all been forgotten? Why yes it has!
Obama is nothing more than a politician who has lived his life with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has never had a real job and is a perfect example of what we were warned about three decades ago.
The warning had to do with communism and it was this “America will not fall from an attack from the outside; it will fall to the attacks of its own people from the inside.”
Can any of you that are so rampant against the idea of Capitalism, Bush, and Bryan tell me who spoke these words? My bet is no and they are famous words, well discussed in the past.
Obama is just like most of the people calling for all of us to be put on the government teat. Why do for yourself, why take any responsibility for yourself or your decisions if you can blame someone else? The current agenda is one of destroy what is good about our country and adopt what is not good about other countries.
Obama acts like a junior senator and lets Pelosi and Reid tell him what to do. He has no balls and if you think he does then why won’t he own what he suggests, instead of all the lies and missteps he has made already. All I hear from the left is crying and take care of me. The right is bad, the right is evil, the right is always wrong. Most of the truly big mistakes in this country have been made by the left not all of them but most of them.
When he starts doing what he promised he would do when he was running for office then I will listen maybe. I do not like him, my liar radar goes off every time I see him and until it stops going off I will not like him.
We need less politics in this country and a lot more thinking from people that have not been caught for criminal acts like most of Obama’s Cabinet. If you or I did any of the things these jerks have done, we would be in jail, where they belong. What makes them so damn special?
Chris B
Chris,
To put it in the words of the court jester Rumsfeld, “My, my, my… I guess I struck a nerve”. If there is anyone stupid on this blog it is you. You sound like you are about 16. What I see and hear from you is more of the dogma from your high priests, who have been proven wrong time and time again. The “famous” words you chose to quote are exactly right. “America will not fall from an attack from the outside; it will fall to the attacks of its own people from the inside.” Guess who the attackers are…..the repubicon conservatives who have shown that they really know now to run an economy into the ground! So far they have destroyed the financial markets because of greed coupled with extreme naivety (we can trust Wall Street) and incompetence. They have severely weaken the military pursuing a bankrupt ideology and shown extreme incompetence in THAT pursuit and a lot of other issues based on their extremist views of what capitalism can do. There’s more than one way to destroy a people and their society…..”Starve the beast” (bankrupt the federal government….another REALLY stupid conservative republicon idea). Learn the truth about your leaders…….http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Here’s the bottom line. The right wing idealogy and methods “ain’t worth s**t”….bankrupt…comical….adolescent. The republiCONs (not the republiCANs) LOST the last election and probably/hopefully the next one because they act and sound like a bunch of losers in a panic. On second thought, the current leaders ARE a bunch of losers in a panic. Another quote for you, “You can’t fool all the people all the time”. Sadly, this is what the republicans have come to. Look at the shameful way they are attempting to throw Bush under the bus. Your leaders have no moral compass or sense of loyalty. How anyone could line up behind these prostitutes is beyond imagination. You conservatives have some SERIOUS housecleaning to do before you start inspecting other houses.
Insofar as your statement “If any of you had any training in economics or even the hard facts of some people’s lives, you would not put out such stupidity.” Again you expose your inexperience and myopic view of the world. You don’t know what perspective someone brings until you ask. Here’s my perspective….I was raised in rural Kentucky to a very poor (but 100% republican) family that moved to the city, I have a degree in business, served 12 years in the military, have started and run several businesses, was the president of one of the largest Republican organizations in my state (when the people running the party were REAL republicans and the smart people were at the top, not the fools and incompetents running it now…”Pills” Limbaugh…”Michael Steele you da man”…please), have been to 90% of the lower 48 states, traveled to most of Europe and have been on this earth for 60+ years. I quit the republicans and became indepenent because the voices of the smart republicans started to be drowned out by the blowhards and liars.
Chris, YOU can’t tell ME anything about anything involving life experiences. You MIGHT be able to teach me something about real estate investing.
You need to calm down. We pray for you.
Ever think “It is impossible for so many smart people to make so many stupid decisions in Washington?”
Consider this — the financial crisis is being whipped into cream by those who want one world currency, and the control that implies.
Thanks Bryan for the courage to tell the truth.