The Madness of the Crowd
October 2011
The “Occupy Wall Street Movement” illustrates a certain type of thinking. Its blindly related to “The Affordable Housing Act” passed by Congress in 1996 under the name of “The National Homeownership Strategy”. (see more)
The National Homeownership Strategy encompassed parallel regulatory and legislative reforms during 1994 and 1995. Examples include:
- The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was revised to force lenders to make loans to uncreditworthy borrowers as a cost of doing business
Public demand ensued. Huge public demand. Everyone was hopeful, hopeful that their loan would be approved, hopeful that their appraisal would come in okay, hopeful that their full price bid would be accepted.
Many people outbid even full price home prices!
The pressure was on banks to loan – we wanted our houses! We wanted our loans! Money flowed fast and prices went up.
Question: Was that Wall Streets fault?
Why is that? - Was that not the work of Congress?
Unleashing a buying opportunity and flooding the economy with giddy success?
Then fed chairman Alan Greespan termed it “irrational exuberance”.
“Irrational” being the key word. And now that group thinking intends to occupy Wall Street.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
The “Buffet Rule” is the “flat tax”!
The “flat tax” system, so often called for by republicans, is now being promoted under a new flag by president Obama titled the “Buffet Rule”.
The Buffet Rule will require taxpayers making over one million dollars to pay the same percentage of income as as the rest of us working folks. Which means the millionaires will pay the same as everyone else – otherwise called a “flat tax”.
Most of our readers were “A” students in high school. So they know what that means. If you were a “C” student or didn’t pay attention to percentages, then let me explain.
It means that the wealthy will pay more.
If your tax rate is 50-percent and you make $10,000 dollars – then you pay $5,000 dollars.
If Mr. Buffet’s tax is 50-percent and he makes $100,000 – then he will pay $50,000 dollars.
That is a flat tax.
The funny thing (sick, really) is that republicans have long sought a flat tax. And democrats have resisted it calling it “regressive”.
Now, republicans are bad-mouthing President Obama’s “Buffet Rule”.
So, basically, democrats are now promoting a flat tax and republicans don’t like it.
What a twisted world politics makes.
Earth and Moon photo by Jupiter-Bound Space Probe
This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. It was taken by the spacecraft's onboard camera, JunoCam. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
- Carl Sagan - In a lecture in 1996, the same year as he passed away, Carl Sagan shared his thoughts on a similar picture taken by the 1990 spacecraft Voyager 1