How have you suffered???

General General Discussion
21

How have I been?

1992 to 2004 - Spent my time working for IBM, then AT&T when our divison got sold off. Last day of employment was 31 Dec 04, my department had been outsourced to The Republic of Slovakia
1 Jan 05 to today - Started my own business. First year sucked. Second year was good, 3rd year we were going like gang busters, this year everything was great until June. The market that I serve (surveyor of commercial real estate) dried up suddenly. My clients have all circled their wagons. They say no new possiblity of business until 1Q 2009 at the least. Yeah I’m looking for another job until the market rebounds.

Any of this Bush’s fault? Not that I can see. I did enjoy the daylights out of the tax cuts though. They did make a big difference for this middle class family. What do I see as causing the doldrums: 1) Well how can you ignore the housing crash, which its foundation was laid under the Clinton admin. 2) The economy is cyclic. Everyone went from trying to make a quick buck during the dot-com era. Its bastards like Bernie Ebbers of World Comm and Ken Lay of Enron that did the damage then (under a Clinton controlled SEC). Well everyone wanted a new way to make a fast buck. So they jumped into residential real estate, (the conditions for which were set up under Clinton).

However I will say that as a fiscal conservative Bush has been an unmitigated disaster. Yes he cut taxes, but then he increased spending :confused:

22

Does the frog in the pot of water ever know that it is suffering as the temperature continues to rise?

Under the Bush administration in partnership with Congress (Democrat and Republican) the warfare state is destroying our economy. We have not seen an increase in taxes to pay for these adventures but the printing press has been running wild diluting the value of the dollar. Without the assistance of the Federal Reserve we would be paying for these adventures through direct taxation. But instead, every dollar that I earn and put away for my future is constantly being devalued by the most evil of taxes, inflation. So have I suffered from having the property that I have earned continually stolen from me? Yes.

23

define “suffered”…

i am probably in a worse position now than I was 5 years ago, but I blame that as much on fisically irresponsible Americans as I do the government…

i finished law school, my wife residency, and we relocated back to near our families at the beginning of the housing crunch to Northern Virginia…Prince William County to be exact…

At the time I bought a house for $600,000…two years prior the same homes had been selling for close to $900,000…so i thought I got a good “deal”…

today, the same homes sell for in the $350-400 range…

Prince William County has the highest foreclosure rate in the southern region…i have a friend who is a foreclosure attorney, he says he just sits at the Prince William County courthouse running “auctions” that no one ever attends…

the government, Democrats and Republicans alike, have attempted to fix this problem by “bailing out” the miniscule number of people who got into bad loans and went into foreclosure…

they have yet to address people like ME…and there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of us…i have never missed a mortgage payment…i don’t have a bad loan…i am financially able to make my payments…but…can I, or the people like me, take advantage of the government promised better loans and lower interest rates? Hell no…and why? negative equity and a burning desire to continue to do the right thing…i am now $200k in the hole on my house…who would re-finance that loan, at least not without me walking in with a really big check… no one, thats who

the practical effect is enormous restraint on free trade…my wife was offered a very sweet job back in Savannah (where she did her residency)…can’t go…we are “house poor”…no way I take a $200k loss on my house…couldn’t if i wanted to…

so the government once again addresses the “squeaky wheel” while ignoring hard working people doing the right thing…and for the record, I KNOW there are people in my neighborhood that bought at the $900k stage…

and for those of you that want to sit and judge and say these folks picked a bad time to move, you are ignorant of the D.C. area, and the sectors that work here…its extremely transient…and you go where the work and money take you…Prince William county, even with the crash, has grown from just over 100,000 people from when my Dad left the Air Force to live year to over 1,000,000 people now…thats in 20 years…

so yes, I am a bit pissed off about it…i’m an attorney, I know the law…its sad when its very close to reality that I would be better off if I STOPPED paying for my house, took the massive credit hit foreclosure, asset seizure, a short sale, and possible bankruptcy would bring, than doing the right thing and continuing to send the check…

but I blame Barry Obama for that as much as I blame George Bush…and Bush doesn’t want to take my M82A1…so fuck you Barry

24

Just from the perspective of a foreigner, who has to get a new passport almost every year because of the new US regulations on submitting photo and as much data as possible, isn’t it a bit narrow view to just focus on gun ownership while other civil rights have taken a major nosedive? I really don’t wish it, but here in Europe so far every measure for such diffuse agendas as “homeland security”, “against terrorism” over the years has just put a burden on the normal citizen (excellent article on the situation in GB). Lets pray that a future president (Obama?) doesn’t take all these new competences (or redefinitions of torture) and turns them against gun owners…

25

I have more than doubled my net worth despite a divorce in which I gave more than half the assets to the ex. I am not in the energy business and I have never been in the middle east or Asia.

Jimmy Carter’s presidency on the other hand was very painful…

26

BINGO. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

27

There are much bigger drains of Federal dollars than “warfare state.” Non-Discretionary spending (ie, welfare and other “benefits”) make up most of the Federal Budget.

And inflation is just now edging up really so the last 8 years under GWB have been mild inflation wise. The devaluation of the dollar was not by inflation but by those who assumed the worst for the economy and factored that into the price of the dollar. They were pricing the dollar based on potential, not actual, facts on the ground and the general “feeding frenzy” the media has caused against GWB about all his “failures of policy.”

28

Well, at some point, people need to take personal responsiblities for his or her own action. When you buy a house you can’t affort, drive a hummer with your heloc, take vacations using your credit cards, eventually the house of cards is going crash down on you. When you allowed the FED to use your tax money to pay JP Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearn, and sit idle while congress authorized unlimited fund to pay Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac investors (foreigners), then well you should suck it up and suffer when the next great depression arrive.

29

I think it is very interesting that the Dems blame Bush for everything even though they control the House and Senate. Bush’s approval rating is low but their’s is much lower, but they scream about the war which they will not stop funding even though they act like they want to. Bush took office staring down the barrel of Clinton’s 8 years of bad economic policy. Clinton rode the policies of Reagan into the ground and passed off to Bush. We are doing pretty good considering. Our energy problems are a direct result of the Dems stance on drilling and refining, and don’t forget about coal and nuclear plants.

Oh yea! How am I doing. Pretty good considering all the issues we are dealing with in South Florida. Housing market is in the toilet, hurricane insurance is through the roof (no pun intended), auto insurance is very high and gas and food prices are way up. I am still living comfortably though.

30

you’re talking about a much smaller percentage of people than you actually think, though…

I can AFFORD my home…most of the people in my predicament could afford it when they bought it, and can afford it now…thats not the issue…

however, when a small percentage of fiscally irresponsible people, and a sinking economy have put us in a situation where almost 20% of ALL HOMES (not just ones in the last 2 years, ALL) in the West are in a negative equity situation, we have a problem…

its certainly a paper problem…negative equity is only really a problem if something happens and you want to sell your house…for the hundreds of thousands of people that can afford their mortgages (like me), and their cars (all but 1 of mine are paid off), and their vacations (i put everything on my credit cards…i get thousands of dollars cash back a year…i also pay them off every month), the problem is more about a restriction of freedom

there are only 3 ways to get out from under negative equity

  1. wait for the market to improve

  2. pay your mortgage down

  3. enter the rental market as a landlord on one end and a rentor on the other

a lot of people don’t want to do this…so what we have done, in essence, is restrict the free flow of people throughout the country, because they are tied to their homes…one of the things that feeds and builds the economy is the ability of any sector to move work where it is needed and cheap, and bring appropriate labor…

when roughly 17% (according to a recent zillow poll) of ALL home owners in this country have negative equity, thats a huge restraint…and keep in mind a couple of things

  1. the places with the huges hits (LA, Phoenix, NoVA, etc.) have an even higher percentage

  2. this is also where a higher percentage of the people that can move about and increase free trade in less developed regions are…(need a doctor in rural Kentucky? i know they do…they are screaming for them…can’t get them…they pay better salaries than bigger cities, lower cost of living…sure there is a quality of life issue, but a big part of the problem is people can’t leave where they live)

  3. the restraint is on “homeowners”…they aren’t generally mcdonald’s hourly wage employees…they are the highly skilled blue color workers, and the white collar sector…and now almost 1 in 5 of them in this country are tied to negative equity…

its a huge problem, and to dismiss it as people that were financially irresponsible is naive…the percentage of homes in foreclosure is tiny compared to the percentage bought…the percentage of homes with negative equity is enormous…in NoVA you are now at the 6-7 year mark…meaning the housing market has recessed so much that homes bought in 2001-02 are beginning to slip into the “upside down” side of things…and its worse in other parts of the country…

if you go compare times of huge economic downturn with the amount of negative equity carried by homeowners, you will see an enormous correlation…

and why? well a huge part of it is perception…

as a family, my wife and I are making more money now than we did in 2006…our mortgage payment has not change…but we are now way upside down on our house…realistically, we should have more money to put in the economy (expenses stayed relatively stagnant, income greatly increased)…but we don’t…we save…because we worry about the amount of negative equity in our home…and 1/5 of Americans feel just like I do…

but the “bailouts” that occurred…they dealt with the foreclosures…because they were “UP 63%!!!”…yeah…to .18% of all homes in America in foreclosure…thats right…1 in 537 as of February…and yet 1 in 5 has negative equity…ain’t addressed that at all…

.18% of Americans got in too deep

31

one of the downsides of Democracies is that they tend to promote the politicians who promise everything to everyone and not the responsible leaders. Also, they tend to promote reactionary leaders instead of proactive ones.

32

God, aint that the truth…i watch Obama and I think

“So this is what the Pied Piper looked like…”

33

The war in Iraq has been insanely expensive, especially considering what we were told it would cost…I mean when you misplace billions of dollars it’s hard to say that it’s been well spent.

But as this illustrates, http://www.concordcoalition.org/learn/budget/federal-budget-pie-charts the war isn’t the worst, far from it.

34

And the chart just lists “defense” which is a lot more than Iraq/Afghanistan…

I wonder what “Income Security” is. Probably a euphemism for welfare / transfers of wealth.

35

It certainly sounds like pretty words for welfare. I have very little doubt that it’s spent by the department of labor.

36

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007

Based on this, if I understand it correctly, WoT spending above and beyond the base DoD (which we assume they would spend anyway) was about $120B in 2007 including supplementals. About $180B in 2006.

37

Give it time.

38

I had heard an Obama speech on the radio where he talked about how Americans are “suffering”. I thought the choice of terms was rather odd. I would like to meet him and ask his definition. I’d also like to ask him truthfully what he’d like to do about it.

The fact of the matter is that somebody has to “suffer” in order for others to excel. It’s the fuel that makes one excel. You’d think that he would know this since he didn’t exactly come from a bourgeois background, and that’s likely what drove him to excel at politics (like him or not, you have to admit he’s done a great job at politics).

I find the current Democratic rhetoric to be a throwback to the old “chicken in every pot, car in every garage” promise, and it scares me. Obama isn’t campaigning on a platform of giving people the opportunity to put a chicken in their pot and a car in their garage, he’s campaigning on a platform that these things should just magically appear simply because someone wishes they were so.

Who is John Galt?

39

He used the word “suffer” to invoke an emotional reaction from the liberals he was speaking to.

To the thread, I am much better off.
I was laid of in the 2000/2001 telcom/dot com bubble burst.
I got a much better job 2 years ago, difficult but higher pay.
I bought my first house 18 months ago, I was also diagnosed with leukemia about the same time.
Due to hard work and education both my wife and I have good jobs and good health insurance.
I got top notch care, I can’t say enough about the folks that cared for me.
I’ve been in remission since Feb of this year.
I’ve gotten some good bonuses this year, again due to hard work.
I’m healing, been training since May, and going to ride a 100 mile bike ride in 3 weeks and have been raising money for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society.

Oh, and I just saw the economy grew by a bit over 3% 2nd Qtr while the euro zone and Japan contracted.

AND

We now have Heller Vs DC that will make it harder for new gun control or AWB.

I’m going f-ing outstanding!

EDIT: We have done very well in Iraq, much better than I thought we would when I saw the insurgency start in the summer of 2003.
I can’t believe that we haven’t had a major attack since 9/11. I can’t believe we have AQ on the ropes.

40

I left the Marine Corps as a Sgt with a high school education and am now making a bit over 6 figures. With regards to universal health insurance, I found out that if you work for a living, you’re fine.