I don't want to vote for any of them! Why can't there be a third party or some other viable choice? I may have to waste my vote and write in a name, but it won't matter much since I live in Utah anyway. The debates were very telling. Obama scares the crap out of me on so many levels. I don't think that being a "maverick" should be a campaign platform for McCain. I'm not sure I want a "maverick" running this country either. They are both liars. I have deep reservations about Palin's ability to lead this country if anything happened to McCain (which is a real concern given his age and health history.) She just doesn't know enough about a lot of things (especially foreign affairs) and I think the learning curve would be too steep. We don't have time or patience for more mistakes and the good will of the world has been exhausted. I don't care how good looking they are, how eloquent they are, how unique and different they are, what sex they are, what the color of their skin is (although I do get hung up on hair styles, admittedly), I just want a good leader who can help safeguard our freedoms and protect our country. It finally boils down to their stands on abortion and given my feelings on that, I may have to go with the platform that is the lesser of two evils. I will never vote for anyone who supports abortion or wants to change the definition of what constitutes a marriage.
Then there is this bright spot to consider - the economy.... I thought this summary was helpful to understand what has happened and why.
"So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and down payment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate home mortgages.
Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and down payment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate home mortgages.
Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult."–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson.
Scary stuff.
2 comments:
Very interesting post, Vonnie. As to the election, I think it may be a matter of "the evil of two lessers," and I, like you, have the crap scared out of me by one of the candidates and his ideas. Though he is an intelligent fellow, he's wrong on about every issue, and he would appoint the wrong type of judges. The other candidate is better, but not a real good choice.
As to the financial crisis, there is enough blame to go all around, and it certainly seems to be time to get our financial houses in order. President Hinckley in a general priesthood meeting some years ago, talked about just that, and I think we're now seeing the prophetic wisdom in that counsel.
There is a man in our ward who is with the Constitution party and will be voting for Mr. Chuck Baldwin. I don't know anything about him, but I agree that the elections should include all the other parties out there. What this friend of ours says is that the folks in DC do not follow the constitution at all, and what we need is to put someone in there that will get us back to limited federal government, etc. or throw the whole thing out and start over if we aren't going to follow it in the first place.
I'm not losing tons with Wall Street, but it didn't ruin my poor little mutual fund. Original Investment $6000 in 2004. Early 2008 it was up to $8300...now it is $5300.
If worse came to worse and you had to move somewhere else because Obama ruined our country...Where would you go? I would pick Thailand.
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