Congratulations to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They’ve united the American people in one thing – their complete disdain for Congress.
Gallup.com has the devastating details:
Americans’ assessment of Congress has hit a new low, with 13% saying they approve of the way Congress is handling its job. The 83% disapproval rating is also the worst Gallup has measured in more than 30 years of tracking congressional job performance.
The prior low approval rating for Congress was 14% in July 2008 when the United States was dealing with record-high gas prices and the economy was in recession.
Congratulations to Harry and Nancy. They say that records were made to be broken, so it’s nice to see that you guys were able to beat your own previous low. But we think you’re just getting started. If you can just cram this Omnibus Spending Bill through Congress, we have a feeling you can set another new record next month.
Source: Gallup.com
This post was last modified on December 16, 2010
View Comments (6)
This explains it very well!!! Why the government is untrusted and disliked!
Understanding Derivatives-a Primer!
Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit.
She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar.
To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.
Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers' loans).
Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit .
By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages.
Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively.
A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit.
He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!!!
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS.
These "securities" then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as "AAA Secured Bonds" really are debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb!!!, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.
One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi.
Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts.
Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Heidi's 11 employees lose their jobs.
Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%.
The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank's liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.
The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the BOND securities.
They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds.
Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.
The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, nondrinkers who have never been in Heidi's bar.
Wow, were do you go from here?
It's really hard to trust or like the very people one sees on a daily basis purposely undermining and destroying one's homeland. I'm actually suprised that the approval rating is as high as it is, however, it does indicate one good thing--we now have a good statistical understanding of what percentage of our population are traitors.
Slightly more complicated than that. This is really just an extreme version of what has always happened in America since the fed gov't started really gathering power.
Everyone wants their piece of pork with the cost spread around to the rest. Its a pretty good deal if you are the one recieving (think Steel Cos and Unions, Car companies, corn farmers etc.) but it doesn't work when EVERYONE is in on it because there is utility lost in the transaction.
If I take $1 from every citizen and give myself $250M then its win-not loose enough to notice. (There is about $50M of notional utility gone, BTW).
So apply this many many times. Everyone is worse off and everyone is pissed off. However, nobody is standing up to give back their pork first.
Since Americans are rationally ignorant of politics, game theory states the political winners will always be the pork getters. Therefore, I posit the only real solution is collapse and rebirth of our entire system.
If you still want to save it, tell your congress-douche that you don't want other people's money and get others to do the same (good luck with that).
YT, your idea has some merit, if not a lot of traction; however, I'd rather go back to original intent and restart from there.
"Congress-Douche". I really like that. Can I use that from now on? It is so appropriate. Leads to other accurate words like, Media-Douche, Legal-Douche, etc.