"Let's Do the Time Warp Again"

I awakened in a time warp this morning.

The president has warned Iran to quit doing stuff or that there would be "serious consequences". Cheney wants to bomb "limited targets", terrorist training camps.

Then I read that the president says that the reason there are so many bad mortgages is that the contracts signed by economically illiterate people are too complicated and that people should know what they are signing, i.e., blame the victim for the predatory lender's irresponsibility in lending sub-prime mortgages to people they knew could not afford the financial instruments being sold. He then said that the federal government should not intervene to provide liquidity to this market, i.e., provide easier credit to lenders so that they could reflect this in lower interest rates to people being forced into default.

See how this works. Corporate predators should be free to offer loans that are sure to fail at 20% of all originations, with contract language that is incomprehensible to the borrower. The disclosure at the closing barely meets legal muster, and the lender says, "well they knew what they were getting into, the signatures on the disclosure prove it". Then the bankruptcy laws were changed making it more difficult for a family in trouble to go to chapter 7, leaving foreclosure as the only pathway for the consumer and banks to work things out. Finally the president says it is the fault of the borrower, many of whom can't read beyond 8th grade level to try to figure out contract language that would be a challenge for a Philadelphia Lawyer.

Next the president says that a gas tax to fix infrastructure is off the table despite the fact that there are 27,000 bridges rated as structurally deficient in America, despite the fact that the total bill to fix all deficient and obsolete infrastructure in America is estimated to be $180 B (equal to 4 months bill for the war in Iraq). Of course if the Highway Trust Fund was actually used to build and maintain our highway infrastructure, which it is not, were to be used for its intended purpose, maybe the existing gas tax would have been sufficient to have fixed the bridges and roads anyway.

Then the president says that the way to fix America and make our businesses competitive in the global marketplace is to, ta ta, reduce American corporate tax rates!

So I awoke this morning to read my local paper, and I find that the problems with mortgages is that the victims are to blame.

Then I read that Iran is really the reason there is an insurgency in Iraq, and that if Iran would only quit being the bad guy, Iraq would be free to become a democratic oasis in the desert, a beacon of hope to the entire middle East. And we need only throw a few bombs at Iran to solve that problem.

Then we would not turn to the logical source of funding to fix our functionally obsolete infrastructure, fees on the users of that infrastructure to keep it safe and in good repair.

Then we find out that the way to fix America is to give big corporate more tax breaks, which then shifts a measurably larger share of the tax burden to the middle class or since pay go is not in order in America, to our children and grandchildren, in effect, a generation skipping tax burden on your progeny and the middle wage earner.

For 7 long years, this has been the Bush mantra. We really are in a time warp.

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