And then they're trying to blame the poor for all this, as if the poor are somehow exploiting the rich by taking out more loans than they can pay. Yesterday, Senator McCain said--he warned that all of this debt was going to be paid by the future generation, and we're exploiting them. But that's not how to think of it at all. When you have a debt that goes to a future generation, you have taxpayers paying to bondholders, just like in the nineteenth century you had the western states paying to the eastern states. So what you've done is given $12 trillion to the richest one percent--or ten percent of the population, and you've indebted the economy and the government to them for the next hundred years. You've created a new class of ruling families.

And Obama has--by doing this, he's broken with every president in history. Whenever the debts have exceeded the ability to pay, they've been written down to the ability to pay, either through bankruptcy or through conscious government write-down. But instead of writing down the debts, he says the creditors are not going to lose money, despite what Mr. Roubini said. They may have lost money, but they will be made whole by the government. And that's crazy. That's why every economic chart you see, there will be a gradual rise and then a sudden collapse. Everything is turned into a vertical fall. Prices, international shipping, employment, profits, they've all hit a wall. And there's no way that the economy can recover when people have to pay interest and amortization instead of buying goods and services, or companies will have to pay their junk bond holders instead of investing in new equipment.

Incidentally, suckers, executive pay caps are cut.

| APF | 12 Feb 2009

Lawmakers removed the provision without explanation in closed-door talks this week. Hoelzer said several senators had questioned whether the provision was legal, since Congress had not limited the bonuses in approving the original legislation last October.