They weren’t selling loans, my uninformed friend, they were selling securities, bundles of junk mortgages, rated AAA by the organization who sold them and backed them as AAA.

[quote=Frosty]

Absolutely correct! Michael Lewis wrote a book on it.

Nobody knew nuttin’ about the amount of risk they were taking and one company guaranteed the bundles of bad debt were AAA, backing them themselves.

They’re gone now.

Nobody understood the ris; they only understood the profits. One man did figure it out eventually, and when the crash came he made four Billion dollars.

Most contemporary estimates for the carrying capacity of the Earth under existing conditions are between 4 billion and 16 billion. Depending on which estimate is used, human overpopulation may or may not have already occurred. Nevertheless, the rapid recent increase in human population is causing some concern. The population is expected to reach between 8 and 10.5 billion between the years 2040 and 2050. In 2017, the United Nations increased the medium variant projections to 9.8 billion for 2050 and 11.2 billion for 2100.

From Wikipedia on Human Overpopulation

(Snip)

The recent rapid increase in human population over the past three centuries has raised concerns that the planet may not be able to sustain present or future numbers of inhabitants. The InterAcademy Panel Statement on Population Growth, circa 1994, stated that many environmental problems, such as rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming, and pollution, are aggravated by the population expansion.] Other problems associated with overpopulation include the increased demand for resources such as fresh water and food, starvation and malnutrition, consumption of natural resources (such as fossil fuels) faster than the rate of regeneration, and a deterioration in living conditions.

AND...having cut certain rates in half as you show, and the low rates generally (tax rates used to go as high as 90%) what is the result, you ask?

What we are doing is creating a two-tier society of haves versus have-nots.

Take Jeff Bezos, now worth $160 Billion! Most of this monkey is useless to him; you can’t possibly spend $160 Billion in your lifetime. Impossible, even if you buy skyscrapers.

When Jeff passes, as we all do, he will leave his wealth to...someone. Whom and How Many doesn’t matter. Those people will never have to work, never have to study, never have to contribute to society, and will spend their lives moving between their various homes, traveling the world, and buying $20 thousand stereos for each of their homes.

Unless they are financial idiots, they will leave more to their heirs than they inherited.

One hundred and sixty billion dollars is a lot to leave, so we may assume Jeff will divide his wealth among several people, family members, friends, colleagues, etc. It will not be an easy decision to spread the occasional billion dollars to various people.

There are now 540 billionaires in this country—including several multi-billionaires. Sam Walton left, I think, 100 billion among his five children.

Suppose those 540 billionaires leave their fortunes to four heirs; that’s over 2000 nobles, 2000 do nothings, 2000 members of a new aristocracy in this country.

Remember the inheritance law, the “death tax” as the Republican like to call it, is eliminated in the last tax bill.

In the next generation, the 2000 nobles leave their wealth to four again, and we now have eight thousand nobles.

Each generation the wealthy grows by perhaps 400%, and soon we have an inequality among our society that cannot be tolerated. Can you say French Revolution?

America has functioned well as a Middle Class society, everyone works, everyone participates, everyone shares.

We no longer have that kind of society.

Things will get worse, not better.

In the longer run, we are faced with profound inequality, racial and class rancour, division, class was, and eventually Revolution.

The only antidote is progressive taxation with a high tax rate on the wealthy.

Otherwise, we have revolution simmering on the back burner.

Sorry, you are incorrect.

A police officer sees two men walking down the middle of the street and advises them to use the sidewalk, then ends up killing one of them.

By any ratiomal judgement, that is incompetent police work.

Any competent, responsible officer controls the envoirnment of the confrontation, and disarms the hostility that is common in many instances,.

I know you will disagree because you already have an outlook that must be favored, but any experienced and honest officer knows what I say is true.

Police routinely give tickets to drivers who break the law, arrest people with drugs, and other criminals, and usually the arrest is absolutely without incident.

I have a nephew-in-law who is a Texas State Trooper, and he routinely arrests carriers of drugs without incident, excepting only those who are ON drugs, where occasional onfrontation occurs.

Wilson was an incompetent officer working for an incompetent Chief in a tainted and abusive system, the main characteristics of which were racism and abuse of the black population for civic profit.

I’m sorry, but you are in error. We are beyond the number of people the earth can support. I’m sure someone with more knowledge than I will pipe up and confirm what I say.

“Many people have overcome dismal upbringings - brutal upbringings. There is no way of knowing what the future will hold for anyone.” Yes, but that is your error. You say we are missing many Lincolns, many Washingtons or Jeffersons, many Churchills etc. because of abortion, but it is the overcoming of upbringing—many of which are brutal—that builds the character that saves us all.

“There is no way to know what kind of people have been lost through abortion or to know whether they would have been happy and productive members of society.”. Yes, this is true, though more limited than you think—read the above point in your own words.

BUT...what we do know, and we see it every day, is the brutal life we sentence people to forcing them to bring unwanted pregnancies to term, to deliver unwanted children they can’t or won’t support.. Working women, especially those whose incomes are vital to the family, young girls—too young for any reasonable parenthood—single women for whatever reason, rape and incest victims, loose women who suffer repeated pregnancies, women already the mothers of large mayflies, and on and on—these are doomed by accidental or unwanted pregnancies.

We know many of these should not be having sex, should not be having unprotected sex, but reality is reality, and...sex happens.

In anticipation of your promoting adoption, read below:

U.S. ADOPTION & FOSTER CARE STATISTICS

According the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services[1]:

On any given day, over 437,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Over 117,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, four years for an adoptive family.

More than 65,000 youth in U.S. foster care live in institutions, group homes, and other environments, instead of with a family.

In 2016, 51% of the children who left foster care were reunited with their families or living with a relative; 23% were adopted.

Of the over 56,000 children and youth who were adopted in 2016:

52% were adopted by their foster parent(s) and 34% by a relative.

25% were age 9 years or older.

Of the families who adopted children from foster care, 69% were married couples, 25% single females, 3% single males, and 3% unmarried couples.

92% of the parents rely on adoption subsidies and/or vital post-adoption services to help meet the children's varied, and often costly, needs.

In 2016, 20,532 (8%) aged out of the U.S. foster care system, and a majority left without the emotional and financial support necessary to succeed in life that other children can receive within a family.

Without these vital supports, they will fare poorer as a group in postsecondary educational attainment, employment, housing stability, public assistance receipt and criminal justice system involvement.

70% of all youth in foster care have the desire to attend college, yet nearly 25% of youth aging out did not have a high school diploma or GED and only a mere 6% had finished a two- or four-year degree after aging out of foster care.[2]

All children who left foster care in 2016 had spent an average of 19 months in care.


http://www.ccainstitute.org/resources/fact-sheets

You may believe that, and that’s fine. I suspect you are in the minority in your beliefs.

At any rate, we do not make civil decisions or civil policy based upon your religious beliefs, or the beliefs of any others.

“Congress shall make no law.....”

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

It’s a New Day in American Politics. Ferguson Is No Exception.

By Zak Cheney-Rice


The year 2019 marks a sea change in American politics. More than 100 new members of Congress were sworn in on Capitol Hill on Thursday, including 67 freshman Democratic representatives, introducing President Donald Trump to divided government for the first time in his tenure. The new House majority will seek to obstruct key parts of his agenda, most immediately by refusing funds for his U.S.-Mexico border wall. Just as Trump’s election in 2016 was seen as a rebuke of the Obama era, the blue wave that engulfed the November midterms can be understood as rejecting his first two years in office and curbing his heretofore unchecked power.

But locally, a different sea change has been underway for years. Voters dissatisfied with their local prosecutors — who in several high-profile cases have shielded police from accountability by declining to charge them for killing unarmed black boys and men — have sent old officials packing in favor of more reform-minded replacements. New top prosecutors in places like Cook County, Illinois, and Orange and Osceola Counties, Florida, have taken office on vows to curtail their predecessors’ more punitive practices, especially concerning black and brown people. Nowhere was this more apparent than in St. Louis County, Missouri, where former Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch guided a grand jury into declining charges against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, a black teenager, in 2014.

In August, McCulloch was primaried into early retirement by Wesley Bell, a fellow Democrat and black former Ferguson city councilman. Bell ran on a reformist platform that included ending cash bail and the death penalty, and “[resisting] the Trump administration” by limiting local cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Since his swearing in on Tuesday, he has wasted little time demonstrating his intentions to fulfill his promise to “fundamentally change the culture” of the office that his predecessor held for 27 years. On Wednesday, he suspended two McColluch-era veterans, Ed McSweeney and Jennifer Coffin, pending termination hearings, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He also fired Kathi Alizadeh, the main prosecutor who presented evidence to the Wilson grand jury, and who famously submitted to jurors an old statute asserting that police are justified in killing unarmed suspects who flee the scene of a felony. The statute had been ruled unconstitutional in 1985. “Despite Mr. Bell’s rhetoric about building bridges with career prosecutors, he has apparently decided to suddenly discharge three dedicated public servants in his first hours in office,” Ed Clark, president of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the union that represents two of the impacted attorneys, said in a press release calling for their reinstatement.

Bell’s shake-up seems practical as well as symbolic. Though the ex-councilman has not made public why he chose to take action against these three prosecutors specifically, McSweeney claims his suspension is retaliation for a Facebook post he wrote criticizing the incoming prosecuting attorney. “County voters will soon regret what they did,” McSweeney reportedly wrote after Bell’s victory and McCulloch’s ouster. Alizadeh’s seems more symbolic, given her involvement in the case that threw Ferguson into chaos and cemented its residents’ lack of trust in the prosecutor’s office. But both send a message. The speed and intentionality of Bell’s moves herald his desire to show the public that St. Louis County is entering a new era of criminal justice.

These changes, though significant, are dwarfed by the tragedies that have marked Ferguson these past four years. Brown’s death and the Wilson non-indictment sparked rioting in the St. Louis suburb in August and November 2014, the root causes of which were laid bare in a Department of Justice report published in March 2015. The report found that “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices [were] shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs” — which, in turn, drove police to generate funds by stopping, harassing, and ticketing Ferguson’s majority-black citizenry. Municipal courts augmented these efforts by issuing a staggering number of arrest warrants — 9,000 in 2013 alone — often stemming from minor infractions, like traffic tickets. Fines mounted and jail stints lengthened for those who could not pay, resulting in an environment where both blackness and poverty were functionally criminalized.

In the time since, three young St. Louis-area residents whose activism — or proximity to activism — played key roles in bringing these issues to national attention have died. Darren Seals, 29, was found shot and incinerated in his car in 2016. Danye Jones, the 24-year-old son of activist Melissa McKinnies, was found dead in October, hanged by a bedsheet in his backyard in what authorities deemed a suicide. In November, 31-year-old Bassem Masri, who broadcast many of the protests to the wider public via his storied livestream, was found unresponsive on a bus and declared dead at a local hospital hours later. His cause of death remains undetermined. The number of young people who have died in the course of this sordid saga makes optimism a tall order, even with McCulloch — arguably its greatest villain after Wilson — finally out of a job.

But the fact that McCulloch is gone at all signals the possibility of voter-driven change. Organizers have spent years mobilizing residents to pay greater attention to prosecutor elections across the country. The result, in Ferguson, is the ouster of a man who refused to hold a killer accountable in favor of one whose official policies include no longer prosecuting marijuana cases where fewer than 100 grams are involved; not prosecuting people who fail to pay child support; and not requesting cash bail on misdemeanor cases, to name three. Whether Bell’s tenure meaningfully slows the momentum of the carceral apparatus that drives law enforcement in St. Louis County and beyond remains to be seen. But shifting a dynamic once defined by powerlessness to one rooted in influence suggests that accountability to black Missourians is not a pipe dream. Residue from Ferguson’s waking nightmare may still hang over the foreseeable future — the image of Brown’s dead body lying in a hot cul-de-sac for hours, ashes from the fire tearing down West Florissant Avenue, and the protesters dead too young remain indelible. But a St. Louis County prosecutor who is accountable to black voters more than arguably anyone, who has held the office before, is worth savoring. The arc of the moral universe may not organically bend toward justice, but sometimes, it can be bent.

But the fact that McCulloch is gone at all signals the possibility of voter-driven change. Organizers have spent years mobilizing residents to pay greater attention to prosecutor elections across the country. The result, in Ferguson, is the ouster of a man who refused to hold a killer accountable in favor of one whose official policies include no longer prosecuting marijuana cases where fewer than 100 grams are involved; not prosecuting people who fail to pay child support; and not requesting cash bail on misdemeanor cases, to name three. Whether Bell’s tenure meaningfully slows the momentum of the carceral apparatus that drives law enforcement in St. Louis County and beyond remains to be seen. But shifting a dynamic once defined by powerlessness to one rooted in influence suggests that accountability to black Missourians is not a pipe dream. Residue from Ferguson’s waking nightmare may still hang over the foreseeable future — the image of Brown’s dead body lying in a hot cul-de-sac for hours, ashes from the fire tearing down West Florissant Avenue, and the protesters dead too young remain indelible. But a St. Louis County prosecutor who is accountable to black voters more than arguably anyone, who has held the office before, is worth savoring. The arc of the moral universe may not organically bend toward justice, but sometimes, it can be bent.


http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/new-st-louis-county-prosecutor-wesley-bell-fires-employees.html

You add a specious arguement of your own to an errant one.

There are NOT more than enough resources fo feed everyone in the world. Your are wrong there.

Whatever great persons we have lost through abortion (and that is a questionable issue) the number is infinitely small compared to instances of forced poverty, dismal upbringing etc.

Good point. Thanks for sharing.

Brings some reality to the discussion.

It’s a thought.....

This is the most ignorant man I have ever read!! Unbelievable. Absolutely, friggin’ unbelievable someone can be so ignorant, so dumb,

This man’s stupidity takes my breath away.

Run for the hills.

He wears a uniform as if he were in the US Military; THAT’S a scary thought.

Do yourself a favor: Ignore him!!

Are you serious?

Do you have a brain?—Wait, we already know about your brain, don’t we? Sorry I brought it up.

Read this:

In the summertime in the northern hemisphere, the Earth is farther from the Sun because of the ellipse in its orbit, but the angle of the Earth's tilt points the hemisphere towards the Sun, making the days longer. The Sun's angle is also higher during the summer months than the winter months.

Why are days in the summer longer? - Quora


Why Are the Days Longer in Summer? | Mental Floss
Mental Floss › article › why-are-days-lon...

Actually, though, the Earth is tilted 23.4 degrees! (A circle is 360 degrees.) This tilt is the reason that days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. The hemisphere that's tilted closest to the Sun has the longest, brightest days because it gets more direct light from the Sun's rays.


Why Are the Days Longer in Summer? - MSN.com
MSN.com › kids › grab-bag › ar-AAwrcFo

Apr 4, 2018 · Actually, though, the Earth is tilted 23.4 degrees! (A circle is 360 degrees.) This tilt is the reason that days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. The hemisphere that's tilted closest to the Sun has the longest, brightest days because it gets more direct light from the Sun's rays.

You know that Earth's seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth's axis. When the tilted North Pole points toward the sun, the Northern Hemisphere has summer. It gets more of the sun's rays. At the same time, the South Pole is tipped away from the sun. The Southern Hemisphere gets less sunlight. It has winter. Six months later, the Earth has traveled halfway around the sun. The tilted North Pole points away from the sun. The Northern Hemisphere has winter. The Southern Hemisphere has summer, because the South Pole is tipped towards the sun. But why are days longer in summer?
 
Again, the answer has to do with Earth's tilted axis. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. At noon, the sun is high in the sky. When it is summer in the northern hemisphere, the sun is at its northernmost position from the equator. Because the sun is .....

Canned stupidity—keep ignorance fresh for years.

Instead of propaganda, why don’t you try thought?