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Originally Posted by August
Quit yanking my chain. You know that controlling is NOT at all the same thing as being an influence.
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Even if half the process is dictated by their influence? Give me a break. The decisions and actions of the president and the Executive Branch affect the country just as much as the decisions and actions of Congress/the Legislative Branch do.
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Originally Posted by August
A guy who posts all those long messages with the fancy charts and diagrams can not be that obtuse.
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"Fancy" charts, eh? "Long" messages? Like it or not, you're going to have to read these "fancy" charts and "long" messages when you're dealing with debates. That's how the process works. Evidence. It's all about the evidence and facts.
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Originally Posted by August
Congress controls the money.
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And it has nothing to do with the actions the president/Executive Branch make... lol.
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Originally Posted by August
Congress votes in new laws.
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Votes in? Only when there's a veto by the president that sends it straight back to Congress. The president otherwise has the power to sign it into law... or do a pocket veto, but that falls under the aforementioned category.
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Originally Posted by August
Congress is the one responsible for the nations debt. End of story.
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Hate to burst your bubble (well- ok not really "hate"), but you have a lot more to blame than just Congress for the economic meltdown. The appropriate citations/sources are attached to the guilty parties listed.
The Federal Reserve, slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
109th Congress, supported a mortgage tax deduction that gave consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses (the .pdf is of the bill Congress and the president agreed to in September 2005).
Home buyers, took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
Mortgage brokers, offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, he encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
Real estate agents, most of whom worked for the sellers rather than the buyers and earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
Wall Street firms, paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
The Bush administration, failed to provide much-needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market due to clamors to deregulate them more to eliminate government influence.
An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
Collective delusion, a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up; a parallel of the thoughts held about the stock market just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 hit (Black Tuesday, that I mentioned earlier).