Paul Ryan and GOP fiscal hypocrisy

Agreed, but your party has a history of cutting taxes WITHOUT cutting spending, which is a recipe for a deficit.

I think its wrong when I have to pay about 25% of my income in taxes, while the guy paying $150,000 a year is paying 20% of his income.

I agree with much of this. Everyone should pay something. But retirees and the disabled getting by on $1200 Social Security checks and the working poor living below the poverty level should have to pay less, maybe 5% to 10%. 20% is a lot when you aren't making enough to pay all of the bills.

I see an iPad in your future . . .

All of the home games. And we keep cold beer in the chest just for you, although I tend towards Wild Turkey and cola at football games.

 

Read it again. If $150,000 a year is 20% of income, then his income is $750,000!

 

It was a part of the housing bubble and crash. But it is far more complex than one You-Tube sound byte.

In short, Fannnie and Freddie had a program to extend loans to low-income people, but it was heavily regulated. But The Republican Congress in the late 1990's and early 2000s began to deregulate everything and soon investment banks were allowed to acquire debt instruments and entire traditional banks without proper hedges. Variable-rate mortgages were extended to everybody and soon only 6% of federally-backed mortgage loans were going to low-income families. Affluent people began borrowing huge sums to buy mini-mansions beyond their means and the investment banks did not properly insure that borrowers had the means to repay them. There were no more regulatory authorities to curb them and so a bubble rose and eventually burst with dire consequences.

A rush to de-regulate caused the financial crisis. De-regulation is good sometimes, it really helped the struggling railroad industry to recover in the 1980's. But ill-considered deregulation of the already successful and extremely greedy investment banks was a huge mistake.

 

Errr . . . what?