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Originally Posted by ocinteeni
I just wanted to add to the debate between hankhavelock and traceycoxx, the socialism going on in America only in miniscule ways is it redistributing wealth to the poor from the rich and middle class. Almost all governments have a social welfare system to care for the old and needy. However the real distribution of wealth, that is what truly makes America socialist, is the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. What I mean by that is examples of things like the tax brackets where by percentage middle class and lower pay more per income than the rich. Also the recent $700 billion wall street bailout has been said by many to be such an example of this. The claim being that the goivernment will give this money to "the rich" ,whoever they are I do not know because it never has been clearly spelled out, and then the American people will have to end up paying for it in taxes.
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The reason for the $700 billion bailout is because Carter started the Community Reinvestment Act, which forces Fannie & Freddy to make loans to minorities, regardless of whether they are able to pay it back. This was supercharged during Clinton's administration. Financial institutions began getting rated by how many loans they gave to minorities. A higher rating meant more business for them. Obviously this kind of BS can't go on forever, and Fanny & Freddy were in jeopardy of folding as well as many financial institutions. The $700 billion is to keep these companies from going under. Because if they can't make loans, our economy comes to a halt. So the reason we have to do something so socialistic like grant the treasury control over this huge amount of money, and take over these financial institutions is because socialistic practices created this huge mess in the first place. And these institutions make up half of the lending companies in the US. So doing nothing is not an option.
That we have to do this at all really pisses me off. But I want to know what they're going to do to fix this so it doesn't happen again? Are they going to tell these companies to go back to making good business decisions with these loans? Or are they going to continue to make bad loans to these people? If they do continue to make bad loans to minorities, then effectively, the government is providing housing to the poor at the rest of the country's expense. If that's not welfare redistribution and socialism on a grand scale, then I don't know what is.