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Ways We Can Fix This Giant Mess

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One specific thing we can do, and this is something that John McCain has said for years now, is to lower the tax rate on business. We have the second highest business tax rate in the world, second only to Japan. Lowering it by 10 points would have a huge impact.

Gene Sperling
Adviser to Hillary Clinton Campaign and Senior Fellow at The Center for American Progress

People are going to see communities that were coming back spiraling down. In a solid suburban, middle-class neighborhood, the housing prices are causing pain, but when we pull out of the economic downturn, that community will likely still be standing. But a cluster of foreclosures in urban communities can fill it with the signs of urban blight—vacant properties, which are associated with crime—and could lead to a quick downward cycle that may not be so easy to repair. There's been disturbingly little attention paid to empowering local government authorities to help save these neighborhoods. In Senator Clinton's stimulus plan, we put in a $30 billion emergency housing fund for state and local governments to go beyond counseling and foreclosure prevention and buy up vacant properties. How can you have a housing-led recession and have no housing-based remedies?

I think the policy world is moving our way. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has spoken of purchasing vacant properties and reselling them to provide low-income rentals for people who may indeed end up losing their homes. Minneapolis isn't doing so bad fiscally, so they're offering people $10,000 incentives to move into areas where there have been foreclosures. Where these funds are used well, there could be very significant savings and prevention of long-term damage.

Bob Lutz
General Motors Vice Chairman

I'm not an economist, but after the rate cut you saw a sharp rebound in the stock market. And all of a sudden, Bear Stearns went from $2 to $6. That shows you that it's a very delicate thing right now. If we have some stability in the stock market and easing in the credit markets, we'll steer through this fine. We're looking for a rebound in the second half of the year. We don't see a recession. I don't think we're in a recession now.

By the second half of the year, the mortgage meltdown will have been absorbed by the system. I read a story recently that said the good news is that houses in the Detroit area are starting to sell, but the bad news is that the prices are very low. We're probably reaching the bottom and we're at the restart point, where people are buying houses again. We're in a part of the country where this hit early. If the Detroit area is starting to sell houses, that's a good sign.

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Posted By: getzel @ 04/11/2008 10:58:30 PM

Comment: War ends We win: when we pass a law that makes the minimum price of gasoline at the pumps: $1.75/gallon; billion dollar/million barrel per day ethanol stills will not be built without protection from OPEC monopoly pricing rusting out our new stills.

The ethanol investors do not build ethanol distilleries because monopoly OPEC would lower the price to rust out their billion dollar million barrel a day ethanol still. Brazil is energy independent: ethanol; All their cars come built running on ethanol; Archer Daniel Midland made millions on $1.00 gallon ethanol in the 1990s; that trumps any canard/invalid objection to ethanol. Use Cellulose ethanol, not corn ethanol.

This will balance the trade deficit, create full employment, bring down the price of fuel, break the monopoly on the pricing of fuel, balance the USA government budget, create less pollution, make the USA energy independent, and end the war because we will stop funding the bad guys everyday at the gas pumps..

Intelligence analyst: Getzel

Sharia people are at war with The West because Arabs, Persians, & Sharia people believe Islam can not survive against a free market, free speech, republic with: womens rights & no honor killing: murdering women is legal in Sharia.

Arab, if only Israel: is only an excuse, propaganda, for Islamic terror; as we see that wherever the Mohammedans bump against another culture the Mohammedans say the same thing they say about Israel. In India: same thing, in Kosovo: same thing, In Israel: same thing. In Darfur: same thing. In Thailand: same thing, the Philippines: same thing. Wherever the Moslems are contiguous with another people: The Moslems say the same thing they say about Israel: If only: Sharia and no freedom of speech to criticize Islam
Posted By: sivere @ 04/06/2008 3:46:49 PM

Comment: The fed and the investmnent banks created this mess, now thety are patetd on the back for keeping it from outright exploding. Ok, the Fed has done a decent job in recent weeks to save us from doom, BUT THEY ALSO CREATED THE MONSTER to start with.

The Fed encouraged derivatves, which now sit at $516 trillion dollars, dwarfing the world's GDP. When they needed more paper to feed the derivatives monster, they created the subprime crisis. They screamed for paper, and paper, and mortgage lenders gave loans to anyone who cuold sign. This fed the bubble for a while, but then collapsed.

Please see siv0.com. We need to TakeBackTheFed.com.
Posted By: loanmod @ 03/30/2008 4:02:22 PM

Comment: The banks should be outsourcing their loss mitigation efforts to companies that specialize in reaching out to homeowners, like MIZNA ( loanmod.com ) and NACA (naca.org) . These companies can save banks hundreds of millions of dollars by guiding/counseling homeowners, and processing loan modificaitons.