Dow falls 500 points



The economy is fundamentally strong.

__________________

You're joking, right?

__________________


Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

indeed.

This is great half this country is poised to elect McCain while this is going on.

__________________

We can't afford any more Neros at the helm, clearing brush in Crawford while the economy burns.

Trouble is, I don't think O or Mac or our completely useless Congress have what it's going to take to whip some *** and right this ship.

__________________
Walgreens has basic financial calculators for sale for $1.79. Send one to your Congressional representative for Xmas, this year!

you may be right. But IF I had to pick, It would not be the guy who said again today that we have a "fundamentally strong economy."

How bad does it need to be before Mac gets there is actually a problem with the sips current course.

__________________

Admitting any fault is un-American.

Modern American political theory 101: Try to ignore or dismiss the cracks in the foundation, and be the last one off the accountability train when it collapses.

__________________
Walgreens has basic financial calculators for sale for $1.79. Send one to your Congressional representative for Xmas, this year!

Wall Street is not itself the economy.

Unemployment is still fairly low (hovering around 5 percent), there is still economic growth, and inflation is still significantly lower than it was during Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Of course, there are just too many things happening for it to all be coincidence. I think there are people intentionally trying to bring the economy to its knees so that the people will beg the government to take control, thus opening the way to global governance.

Then again, after that 500-point fall the Dow went up again somewhere around 100 points and is now down (as of 10:16 Eastern Time) around 166 points.

More than 20 years ago I told friends that we were in a credit-based economy and that it would one day collapse. We're starting to see the collapse.

It's time for America to stop running a credit-based economy and get itself on a solid financial footing. Here's what I propose:

Let all these different companies collapse. They made bad business decisions and deserve to bear the consequences.

Have the government (after taking the money from these various companies and their corporate heads) cover the losses incurred by pension plans, IRAs, and small-time private investors and urge switching the investments to precious metals, government bonds, and safer investments.

Cut federal spending by 10 percent (and by 5 percent every year thereafter for the next 10 years).

Cut taxes by 10 percent across the board for each of the next 5 years while a flat-tax system is developed and put into place.

Eliminate unfunded federal mandates to state and local governments.

End the drug war (because of its extensive costs).

Bring the troops home and stop engaging in military operations overseas.

End all foreign aid.

Pay off the national debt.

Re-negotiate trade deals so that there is a trade balance (as close to one as possible) with each trading partner.

End the Cuba embargo and open up trade negotiations with Cuba.

__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Instead of bailing out all these investment bankers the government should bail out the investors (like the vast majority of people who have their little retirement accounts) and let the investment banks fail.

What we're seeing is what happens when you run a credit-based economy.

It's time to invest in precious metals.

__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

I know next to nothing about high finance, or what to do about this stock thing, but I do know that the people who should have seen the bubble burst coming like a freight train, and were supposedly entrusted to regulate these industries never get held accountable for it. No, we ALL get to pay for the bad decisions of the elite in this country.

Telling people with no money or credit they can buy half-million dollar homes is just mind-boggling. I had no idea nobody in this country could add, and that there were so many greedy rubes. But that's what you get when we let the markets run wild. In five years, this will be forgotten, and mortgage bankers will be squealing to be de-regulated again, freed to do the same damn thing, AGAIN. After all, how dare we tell them their investments are bad? Sorry, but it IS our business, and it's our own fault we allowed you scum to wreck everything.

If it were up to me, that industry couldn't fart without regulators signing off on it.

And yeah, I am kind of intrigued by ideas about reinstituting the gold standard or something like it. That makes more sense to me than an economy based on futures, credits and speculations.

__________________
Walgreens has basic financial calculators for sale for $1.79. Send one to your Congressional representative for Xmas, this year!

You know the last person to say that the economy was fundamentally strong during an economic crisis? President Herbert Hoover.

Note to McCain, Herbert Hoover is not the person you want to be quoting about the economy.