850,000,000,000/50,000=17,000,000

Give me 850 billion dollars and I can give 17 million people $50,000. Yet the current plan is going to create or SAVE a paltry 4 million jobs.

I don’t feel very stimulated.

UPDATE: $790,000,000,000 / 300,000,000 = $2,633

How about this? Give every citizen $2,600.
If you take out those under 18 you could give all adult citizens $3,400 (of course some people under 18 have jobs and you could probably include them with a small reduction in the check each person would receive).

Article from the NYT 1999:

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.  [Emphasis Mine]

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

But could we have seen this coming?  I mean who could have guessed this.  Another excerpt from the article.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

But surely this was necessary to help more people buy a home.  I mean before this program minority home ownership was on the decline or at least stagnant, right?  Don’t forget, the government is here to secure the inalienable right to home ownership.

Home ownership has, in fact, exploded among minorities during the economic boom of the 1990’s. The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent and the number of Asian Americans by 46.3 per cent.

Classic Senator Clinton on the economy.   Article here.

“We also have to reward work more,” Clinton told a small group of Ohio residents today. “and by that, I mean, I have people in New York working on Wall Street as investment managers, as hedge fund executives. Under the tax code, they can pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes on $50 million dollars, than a teacher, or a nurse, or a truck driver in Parma pays on $50,000. That’s very discouraging to people.”

You just feel like, ‘wait a minute. I’m working as hard as I can.’ All those people you see in your law office. They’re working as hard as they can and they feel like they’re just getting further and further behind,” Clinton said. 

Excuse me, the president doesn’t set wages.  How much control do you really think the president has Senator Clinton?  Give me a break.  She would be a colossal disaster.

So who really pays taxes?  Check out the numbers.

Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2005 (U.S. Treasury Estimate)

@ The Corner makes a good point.

But this disaster talk leaves me cold. McCain wouldn’t be my first pick. Then again, none of the candidates were really my first pick. But I think the notion that, variously, conservatism, the country or the party are doomed if he’s the nominee or the president is pretty absurd.

I don’t know how “healthy” a McCain presidency might be for conservatives but I agree a lot of the hysteria is not necessary and actually myopic.   The president is only one person in our government.  Powerful, too powerful, but still just one person. 

Somebody needs to say it! 

According to Thomas Sowell the Horatio Alger myth is more reality than myth.

When we talk about “the rich” and “the poor” we mean rich and poor human beings, not rich and poor statistical brackets. Yet politicians and the media treat people and statistical categories as if they were the same thing.

Check out these numbers.

The even bigger joker is that taxpayers whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1996 had a 91 percent increase in incomes by 2005.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the top one-hundredth of one percent — “the rich” or “superrich” if you believe politicians and the media — had their incomes drop by 26 percent over those very same years.

 Brackets don’t move the people in the brackets do.

You can check out the numbers for yourself in a November 13, 2007 report from the Treasury Department titled “Income Mobility in the United States from 1996 to 2005.” You can find a summary of the same data in a Wall Street Journal editorial that same day.

These are not the only data that tell a diametrically opposite story from the usual political and media story that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

A previous Treasury Department study showed similar patterns in individual income changes between 1979 and 1988.

Moreover, a study conducted at the University of Michigan, following the same individuals over an even longer span of time, likewise found most people moving from income bracket to income bracket over time — especially among those who began in the bottom 20 percent.

The University of Michigan Panel Survey on Income Dynamics showed that, among people who were in the bottom 20 percent income bracket in 1975, only 5 percent were still in that category in 1991. Nearly six times as many of them were now in the top 20 percent in 1991. (emphasis mine)

Read the article here.

Pat Buchanan today. 

To stave off recession, the Fed appears anxious to slash interest rates another half-point, if not more. That will further weaken the dollar and raise the costs of the imports to which we have become addicted. While all this is bad news for the Republicans, it is worse news for the republic (emphasis mine). As we save nothing, we must borrow both to pay for the imported oil and foreign manufactures upon which we have become dependent.

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.

We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called “isolationism.”

And the chickens of globalism are coming home to roost.

I have not been nearly as critical of or even concerned about globalism as many others have but Buchanan makes a good argument for realism.  We simply do not have the resources to continue spending at this clip either domestically or abroad. 

Last week, Moody’s warned that if the United States fails to rein in the soaring cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation’s credit rating will be down-graded within a decade.

Our political parties seem oblivious. Republicans, save Ron Paul, are all promising to expand the U.S. military and maintain all of our worldwide commitments to defend and subsidize scores of nations.

Democrats, with entitlement costs drowning the federal budget in red ink, are proposing a new entitlement – universal health coverage for the near 50 million who do not have it – another magnet for illegal aliens. Moody’s is telling America it needs a time of austerity, while the U.S. government is behaving like the governments we used to bail out.

Its hard to imagine any candidates actually cutting spending, including Ron Paul.   He votes against all spending but it doesn’t stop him from putting earmarks in the spending bills for his district. 

This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches.