That is sad and unfortunately, true, as the herd of "give me" people grows every year. We will end up as Oregon and Kalifornia are, with looters under a Dumbocrapic flag in office forever, because they have set up enough pig toughs to feed enough voters, to keep in office, until the system collapses and they run for their mansions. As Kalifornians have learned recently, mansions burn as good as ranch homes...

Every statist requirement is not socialism. It is not "semantics" but understanding essential differences in concepts.

They admit it themselves when they don't acknowledge that the reason for tax cuts is so those paying the taxes can keep more of their own money, and instead manipulate the tax code to raise some people's taxes while lowering others and arguing that they don't have to cut spending because an improved economy would increase net tax revenues.

semantics. when you have to get a license apprived just to operate a business, and manage it according to government regulations, whats the difference except that you get to fund it with your own money. Straight up socialism would have no private businesses- they would all be owned by the government and we would all work FOR them.

Term2 said there isn't a "lot of difference between USA and Russian banking" and the "whole banking system in the USA is Based on collectivism".

But Bawny Fwank has been replaced many times over.

We have a mixed system of part freedom and part controls. Much of it is from collectivist premises but it isn't socialism.

In the end all they want is to increase the tax haul. Growing the economy just means we have to work harder and owe more tax

Barney is gone, good riddance.....

So there is private, ownership with private control, (capitalism). Then there is “private ownership” with government control (which is what we have). Then there is government ownership with government control (socialism)

I would argue number two is really socialism in disguise where the government lets us think we are free and gets us to invest our money while the government tells us what to do with it. Of course the lobbyists for the regulated try to influence the regulators to let the regulated make more profits than they would under capitalism. ( the nature of the swamp)

At least Barney Frank is gone and ford Frank is on trumps repeal list

I will check that out, but I still like his take on it. I don't see either party being any use to "the peasants".

I did not make that claim, I did make the claim that government policies and rules created the disaster. I would also say the current Tax "reform" will also cause one, as it disrupts, in a major way, many things people have been accustomed to. Better to go whole hog and just do a flat tax on gross income.

The cpa caller starts at 34 min.

Barney Frank's wreckage was government action. It doesn't make banks "socialist".

All corporations are charters. You don't seem to know how banks actually operate, let alone the good ones like BBT under John Allison. Government mandates, not banks, caused the real estate crash and bank failures. Being regulated does not mean socialism.

He gets it right at about 5:20 with the "Republicans are schizophrenic" comment and how weird their ideas are on cut one, increase another. I haven't had time to listen to the whole thing yet, but good so far.

I cannot disagree with your point here. Banks are so regulated, and manipulated, that one congressman (Barney Frank) imposed his imperial will on the 2 federal mortgage giants, to allow and force them to give mortgages to anyone who had one leg and a hand. People with no inciome, no SSN, no jobs, got mortgages, and then sat in the homes for years sometimes. I saw it happen in Hillsboro, Oregon, where there were upwards of 5% of the homes in limbo because of it. The mortgages they signed were rated junk, and yet both Freddie and Fannie had to buy them and then a whole lot of people bundled them with other "better" ones and sold the toxic packages all over. If you went too deep into them, you died. The really obscene part was dufus Barney then sponsored Dodd Frank, which was a "oops I was stupid" bill to cover it all up. He did as much damage as Felony Pelosi did with Obama Care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financi...

Banks are essentially corporations chartered by the government tho. Private choices are allowed so long as they follow the very strict dictates of the government and the FDIC. If one appears to be failing , it’s taken over by the government immediately.

I would argue that the 2007 financial meltdown was caused by banks ( certainly not every last one) following and taking advantage of government rules. To a very substantial degree the industry operated as if they were owned by the government under socialism.

An interesting explanation of the tax increases in the Republican bill as of a month ago was given by a cpa who called the Mark Levin show: http://audioboom.com/posts/6453720-11... 0:34:00-0:49:34

Banks are private corporations, not run by the state. They make private decisions on investment and lending, under regulations but not state dictates on choices they make. It isn't the Soviet Union. You use government money, too, but it doesn't make you a socialist just like it doesn't make the whole banking system socialist. Compare BBT, the bank that John Allison developed into one of the nation's largest, with socialism.

Who is the clown who 'downvoted' this factual statement.

I am not seeing a lot of difference between USA and Russian banking. Both have fiat currencies, money printing to satisfy the “needs” of the state, and both control the banks through onerous regulations to suit the state, and both have oligarchs running them

The banking system, like everything else in politics, is a mixture. There are strong statist and collectivist elements, but it is still operated by private companies in a market with private business. Lot's of problems but not the Soviet Union.

Oh, I agree 100% that property values do not cause taxes. Government spending is the cause of taxes; and to raise those, they then up your valuation. And I agree that it is not a conspiracy by people who live in cities.

I do point out, though, that as much as everyone individually fell for the lure, it did nonetheless reflect philosophical premises. The assumptions are, that property can only be land (real estate; everything else like machines and patents, books and copyrights being "unreal"). The deeper premise is that land is the source of wealth. For all of our self-selected capitalist American virtues, we still inherited a lot of unquestioned assumptions from Europe of the Middle Ages. So, everyone wanted to own a home with a lawn to mow.