ledeagenda.com

The Messiah seems perfectly happy lying to us. The richest 2% of Americans will not, and cannot possibly be taxed enough to produce revenue for the Pelosi, Reid and Obama cartel.

From WSJ:

But let’s not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

Do you see where this is going? Obama cannot possibly limit tax raises to just the “rich”. At some point he will try to sneakily shift the debate saying we “all need to do our share”.

So how much is that share?

$25,573.48

Twenty five thousand five hundred and seventy three dollars and forty eight cents for each taxpayer.

That’s $51,146.96 for a married couple.

Fifty one thousand plus.

And another thing to consider: what would happen if we to do try to bilk the rich for 40, 50, 60% of their income? What happens if they go John Galt? It’s hard to tax someone when the leave the country, close their business or simply quit producing the goods that society consumes. Think it doesn’t happen? Then how do you explain all these “jobs going overseas”, businesses closing their doors and supply shortages?

Lower tax rates, less regulations and cheaper labor can be found overseas, and many of those countries are desperately wanting the same economic stimulus that Obama is attempting to artificially create via forced taxation. The already weakened American economy is about to get another one of those wonderful “hand ups, not hand outs” from Uncle Sam.

I ask again- can I please get my invitation to Galt’s Gultch now?

As is typical with the school districts they have set yet another stealth property tax vote during the election off-season and have done little to publicize the vote.

From KTVB.com:

In less than one week the Meridian School District will ask voters to approve a $10 million supplemental tax levy that is set to expire.

Several NewsChannel 7 viewers wondered why there has been no promotion of the election – which is now just days away.

The Meridian School District did not want to raise the amount of the levy in this economy, so they didn’t. But if voters don’t pass the levy – they would actually see their taxes go down.

The Meridian School district holds a supplemental levy election every two years and now the district is asking voters to approve a current levy of $10 million that is set to expire this year– so it requires the same amount of taxes, people living in Meridian have paid the past two years.

Yep, in the height of the some of the worst economic times this nation has ever seen the politicians are trying to keep a tax vote out of public discussion.

Elections like this are the exact reason people have come to distrust politicians, taxes and the system in general. Elections like this are the perfect example of why Idaho needs to adopt uniform election laws so that all election matter would be held on the primary or general election days.

There is no excuse to hide tax votes from the public. It is unacceptable to skirt your responsibility as a public official and not inform people they could lower their taxes in this property tax vote.

Oh, but don’t worry, the Meridian Trustee’s have been gracious to you.

From KTVB:

“The levy is $58 of $100,000 of assessed value,” Meridian School District spokesman Eric Exline said. “Although we know we are going to see a budget decrease we didn’t think it was fair to go to our community and say ‘make up the difference because we know there are a lot of people struggling themselves.’”

Exline says the district has done its part in getting the word out.

Too bad most homes in Meridian start at $250k. That’s an additional $145 to your property taxes.

And who are they getting the word out to? The teachers and school attendants, so they can go vote in favor of the tax levy on their lunch breaks?

Because, as usual, from KTVB:

People who live in Meridian can cast their votes at all schools except for the alternative high schools and middle schools.

The polls will be open next Tuesday from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m.

How convenient for the teachers.

From CNN:

A new national poll indicates that nearly three out of four Americans are scared about the way things are going in the country today.

Seventy-three percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say they’re very or somewhat scared about the way things are going in the United States. That’s six points higher than in an October poll.

Nearly eight in 10 say things are going badly in the country, with just 21 percent suggesting that things are going well. The survey also says that three out of four Americans are angry about the way things are going in the country. But three out of four questioned say that things are going well for them personally.

The poll was released a day before President Obama gives a prime-time address before a joint session of Congress.

Looks like the pollsters finally stopped screening for people who drank the Obama Kool-Aid. Either that, or they are deliberately starting to interject the truth back into their reporting to recoup their lost credibility. Yes, I am saying it’s a media conspiracy.

The media was in the tank for Obama and created news stories to fit their agenda: to get you to elect Obama out of fear he was the only hope. The Messiah. And now, just now, the MSM is surprised when 73% of the people in this country say, “you know, I don’t like how things are going in America”?

What I am concerned about is that the media is going to spin this, as they always do. The MSM will paint this picture that 73% of respondents are “fearful that the government is not fixing our problems fast enough”. And that may be true for some of us 73 percenters. But I am willing to place a huge wager that a vast, vast majority of us seventy-three percenters are “scared about the way things are going in the country today” precisely because we are turning to government bailouts, government bank-ownership and socialism as our answer for this artificially created financial crises.

People are fearful and afraid because our instincts tells us that this whole financial mess smells fishy. We know these bailouts are wrong and violate nearly every principle of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are afraid because when we, the voters, ask around we cannot find anyone outside of the media and Congress that supports this. They are acting without authority or mandate.

So yes, count me as part of this 73% and watch as this fear turns to anger. Because if these politicians don’t start listening to their constituents soon, that is ultimately the next step.

Post your John Galt Oath here. No other comments on the John Galt page will be approved.

The rush begins as people realize fiat currency being mass printed for trillions of dollars of U.S. national debt is inflationary at best, worthless at worst.

Lets put some stories together today, shall we?

NYTimes: Markets Close Lower Over Worries Of Bank Nationalization

NYTimes: Foreign Investors Wary of Long-Term U.S. Securities

WSJ: Let’s Go Back To The Gold Standard

WaPo: U.S. Stocks Erratic On Nationalization Worries

Or how about this little ditty from LaTimes:

Gold has been on a tear since mid-January, when it was trading at $808 an ounce. It isn’t exaggerating to say that some people are turning to gold because they’ve lost faith in nearly everything else: the economy, the financial system, real estate, the stock market.

Precious metals are benefiting from the panic sense that “everything else has been destroyed,” said Leonard Kaplan, head of money manager Prospector Asset Management in Evanston, Ill.

Yes, that’s overstating reality. But with the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 15% this year, it’s understandable that many investors fear that things are continuing to go very wrong.

The factors driving gold “are the same as last year — just more dire now,” said Larry Young, a trader at Infinity Futures in Chicago.

What’s more, in the last two days, the dollar — which competes with gold as a hiding place for worried money — has begun to show signs of cracking. The DXY index, which measures the dollar against six major rival currencies, has slipped 1.7% since Wednesday.

Gold’s rally a year ago halted in part because the dollar began to surge. If the greenback is headed lower this time around, gold could be left standing alone as a haven.

These stories represent a common thread: investors are not liking Obama’s socialist policies are and pulling their funds in the event they have to go John Galt. In other words, the media is lying to you. The markets are not continuing to fall because they are worried that the “stimulus” won’t be enacted fast enough. They are free-falling because the “stimulus”, the socialist takeover of our free market system, has happened at all.

AP: Major Indexes Fall On Stimulus Fears

Gold, guns, diamonds and food reserves I’m telling ya. It’s time to protect your family, even if you have to start small.

Glen Beck- Just How Much Money Is The Federal Reserve Printing?

As feared GM announced that Saturn would be “phased out” as part of its bailout restructuring.

This, from the NYTimes:

The brand that was once hailed as an important part of the future of General Motors now will be part of its past.

G.M. said Tuesday that it would phase out its Saturn brand by 2012. It does not plan to develop any more new vehicles for Saturn, which began 19 years ago as an effort to attract owners of small Japanese cars.

…

When Saturn was started in 1990, as a “different kind of car, a different kind of car company” aimed at owners of small Hondas and Toyotas, its small cars were immediate hits. But G.M. executives decided in the mid-1990s that they needed to support G.M.’s other brands over Saturn, which by then had cost $5 billion.

G.M. did not add any new vehicles to the Saturn lineup for five years, despite pleas from dealers for bigger vehicles. Earlier this decade, G.M. decided to start selling vehicles from its Opel division, with some design changes, as Saturns in the United States.

The Saturn brand is the EXACT type of thing Detroit needs to compete with Honda and Toyota. Your decision has reaffirmed the belief in many that you do not listen to your customers or care about market trends. That you would take an extremely popular answer to the foreign car invasion and kill it off while taking taxpayers money, MY money, angers me to the point of rage.

At a time when you should be investing more into ideas like the Saturn arch-type, a lower cost, reliable and stylistically oriented family sedan, you kill it off? When gas prices and economic times demand a high miles-per-gallon ration ratio you turn away from your most efficient line? At a time when union labor costs are killing your company you axe your only brand line that isn’t unionized? Are you kidding me?

 Congrats GM, you just plain suck as a company. I will never buy from you again.

The pain isn’t over yet.

Starting this month, the second “bubble” of the Adjustable-Rate Mortgages’ reset schedule will begin. This time the pain is not going first-time home buyers, it’s going to be ordinary folks who may have owned their homes for awhile and refinanced into an ARM to take “advantage” of supposed discount rates. Many of these ARMs adjust every six months, and while many have a per-adjustment interest rate max, they have no lifetime max.

And let’s be perfectly honest: as much as Congress has said this stimulus bill is for struggling homeowners, it really will do nothing for Homeowners stuck with the misery and terror of an ARM adjusting two, three, 10 or more percentage points. Most of the bill isn’t even aimed at curbing foreclosures, it is government spending and corporate bailouts. The little that is aimed at homeowners?

From ABC:

A family with a household income of $50,000 will, on average, put $19,000 toward their mortgage. Under the president’s plan they’d pay $15,500 toward their mortgage for a savings of $3,500.

Lenders would also be required to write down a mortgage principal rather than interest rates, with the goal of helping to reduce the chances of default.

The plan would also allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages, but only mortgages closed before the law is enacted are eligible.

Did you catch that? Obama is not trying to stop the root of the mortgage spikes- the adjustable rate- rather he is just trying to force investors to write down their investments.

“From those according to their ability, to those according to their need”- Karl Marx

Obama’s plan to make mortgages affordable does not try to stop predatory lending, but rather suppresses home prices and mortgage balances to overcompensate for the prevalence of ARMs. As is typical with liberals, government is the answer in the form of subsidies, in this case putting taxpayers on the hook for mortgage payments that exceed 31% of a taxpayer’s household income.

But what about making sure this economic collapse doesn’t happen again? There is only one way to make sure that mortgage-backed securities do not come back to haunt the taxpayers a second or third time. Adjustable Rate Mortgages need to be illegal, or at least restricted to home buyers who truly intend to only occupy a home for 4-5 years, or truly, honestly, cannot qualify for a traditional mortgage.

Let’s be clear: while a great option for well qualified buyers in extremely short term housing, ARM mortgages largely serve as predatory lending on those with the shakiest credit history and sketchiest credit history or serve as a “lowest rate” option for homeowners who could otherwise afford a more appropriate option.

A must read in-depth article from the Reno Gazette-Journal

I recognize that not having an ARM-style loan in the market place may leave a very small portion without a traditional option to purchase a home. But I will restate may case: in the vast majority of circumstances ARM mortgages were pushed on people did not read the fine print, could not read the fine print or lacked sufficient fiscal discipline to say “no” to teaser rates. And , in these cases, I would say let the market work. For all of the above reasons, people should lose their homes.

But when these mortgages are pushed so prevalently to the point of breaking our national economy?

Let’s be clear, ARM mortgages were pushed on those who could qualify for a more traditional loan.

The Reno Gazette notes:

Subprime mortgages, which were given to borrowers at higher risk of default than those who meet prime lending guidelines, led the first wave of resetting ARMs in the past two years. These days, the second wave of ARM resets is being led by a different kind of adjustable mortgage, said Bill Uffelman, president and chief executive officer of the Nevada Bankers Association.

“The volume for (subprime ARMs) have really gone down because those mortgages fell out of favor two years ago,” Uffelman said. “So we’re on the tail end of those loans. But we’re now in the front end of the Alt-A loans.”

Alt-A mortgages, short for Alternative A-Paper, were given to borrowers with better credit than those in the subprime category but not as good as those who qualify for prime mortgages. Unlike subprime ARMs, which typically offered an initial fixed payment period of two to three years, Alt-A’s typically offered a five-year fixed period before resetting. The five-year timeline places the peak of Alt-A resets just around the corner: in 2010 and 2011. The Reno-Sparks area is no exception.

The reality, and the ultimate lesson out of this financial mess, is that more traditional mortgage underwriting where 10-20% down is required and where people with less than stellar credit may have a higher interest rate, is the only way to properly fund mortgage backed securities.  It may mean that the role of Freddie and Fannie may need to be there exclusively for struggling or first-time home buyers. It may mean that people will have to rent for a lot longer to save up enough to buy that first home.

But we know this, the easy credit days of the ARMs were based off of faulty assumptions that property values and incomes would always rise. We know better now, and need better standards for ensuring that a home mortgage doesn’t become a local and state government issue. The solution is not more government oversight of banks and lenders, but to simply make Adjustable Rate Mortgages illegal.

That, my dear readers, is an option you won’t have to subsidize.

File this under Government/Media Complex, from WSJ:

About half-way through President Obama’s press conference Monday night, he had an unscripted question of his own. “All, Chuck Todd,” the President said, referring to NBC’s White House correspondent. “Where’s Chuck?” He had the same strange question about Fox News’s Major Garrett: “Where’s Major?”

The problem wasn’t the lighting in the East Room. The President was running down a list of reporters preselected to ask questions. The White House had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the President and who was left out.

Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness. We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors. Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren’t White House favorites.

Few accounts of Monday night’s event even mentioned the curious fact that the White House had picked its speakers in advance. We hope that omission wasn’t out of fear of being left off the list the next time.