How can America afford to pay for Medicare for all?

I don’t know - How can America afford to go to war with Iran costing approx. $1 billion a day?

Money’s always there for war, isn’t it, Mr President?

Picklebobble2 · 61-69, M

🤔.....and big bank bail-out packages

😖 Sorry ! I meant to say 'Troubled Asset Relief Programme'.

🤔 And the odd 'stimulous package'.

Next one somewhere around the next election i should imagine

dancingtongue · 80-89, M

@sunsporter1649 We wanted individuals graded on their individual credit ratings, not on arbitrary red lining of whole neighborhoods and communities based on race/ethnicity. That is not what the banks did. The flipped to the opposite extreme and started handing out mortgages like M & Ms at Halloween.

sunsporter1649 · 70-79, M

@dancingtongue The banks accused of “racism” by the Obama administration include banks that were previously praised by non-political government agencies for their success in minority outreach and lending to minorities in regions in which they did business. For example, the Obama administration is suing Cardinal Financial Corp., even though “the FDIC in the past gave kudos to Cardinal for its lending practices. Justice is now accusing Cardinal of failing to open branches and achieve racial loan quotas in counties that its federal regulator never before contended should be the focus of its lending,” arguing that it was not enough for the bank to make loans to minority applicants who applied for loans, and that it had an affirmative duty to open new branches in heavily-black areas it had never done business in before.

The Obama administration’s demands suggest it learned nothing from the financial crisis, which was caused partly by “diversity” mandates and affordable housing mandates that encouraged lending to people with bad credit scores who later defaulted on their loans. Banks were under great pressure from liberal lawmakers to make loans to low-income and minority borrowers. For example, “a high-ranking Democrat telephoned executives and screamed at them to purchase more loans from low-income borrowers,” The New York Times noted. As The Washington Examiner noted, the government also “encouraged riskier mortgage lending by minimizing the role of credit histories in lending decisions, loosening required debt-to-equity ratios to allow borrowers to make small or even no down payments at all, and encouraging lenders the use of floating or adjustable interest-rate mortgages, including those with low ‘teasers.’” The liberal Village Voice previously chronicled how Clinton administration housing secretary Andrew Cuomo helped spawn the mortgage crisis through his pressure on lenders to promote affordable housing and diversity. “Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.”

Financial analysts at major investment banks have recently recognized that these government mandates played a bigger role in the financial crisis than previously thought. Former financial executive Ed Pinto has chronicled how the government promoted the risky non-traditional mortgages that defaulted in huge numbers. A recent book co-authored by The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson chronicles how federally-promoted lower lending standards spawned the financial crisis, and put minority borrowers into homes they could not afford.