Well it took a long time but sometime late November or early December I finally finished the shed that I started building at my parents house back in July. There were times when I didn’t know if I would be able to do it, but I must admit I was pleased with how it turned out.

A pot of gold. No an SUV.

See it here also.

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).

Lisa and I wanted a piece of art for our living room that would go above our couch. Prints can be nice and more affordable than original art work but just don’t have the same feel. Original art work can be expensive and hard to find, especially when you need a big piece. So I decided I would give it a try. I bought a big canvas, some paint, and three small canvas boards. Played around on the small canvases with some color and design. I didn’t really like any of those, Lisa liked one. Next I started on the large painting. So I went to work on it. I got some color combinations that I liked, but it didn’t quite come together on the painting. So then I put some more color on, and started over. This time the colors worked and I liked the basic design. It is not quite what I would have liked it to be but all in all I would have to say I am very pleased. So far your viewing I present to you my first painting (first one not done in a class).

Strong Tower

Paraphrase from a Thomas Sowell article.   

So just how much money is $1,000,000,000,000.  Well if it were seconds it would be before people were reading and writing.  That’s right a trillion seconds ago was before the Roman Empire or the Chinese dynasties.

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.