State Budget Woes Create a Black Hole for U.S. Stimulus Funds

nice. I don't see too many ridiculing the current tactics, however.

 

The housing bubble did not create this mess. The subprime lending, lax requirements and the foolish lending of ARMS is what got the ball rolling, which in turn created the housing bubble. The prices of the homes have little to do with it and more to do with people who couldn't afford the house payments in the long term.
How is this any different than C4C? Encouraging people who can not afford new cars to go into further debt.

Government on housing market: Hey, lets lower lending standards. Poor people deserve to own houses too. After all, housing prices always fall and rarely go down. Whats the worst can happen?

Government on C4C: Hey, we will pay 20% down on your new car and you give us your paid off car. That 20% off will reduce your payments by a whole $35 a month. Poor people should be able to afford new cars now. Whats the worse can happen?

 

Schiff did such a great job with his predictions that he steered his clients into investments that all got obliterated in 2008 even more so than the US - foreign markets.

 

yeah, except

this isn't an idiot proposing logical fallacies based on circumstantial evidence from other countries. This is well-founded information directly from America's own bureaucracy. Think, people, think. If states are not even prepared to balance their budgets a couple of years later with the stimulus gone, imagine what would have happened if the stimulus had not occurred at all. Lost in this picture I think, is the worst case scenario that we would have multiple states running large deficits which just CANNOT happen; they're not allowed by law. They would have to cut spending by tons on things like education and healthcare and they would have to do it NOW. Even the most libertarian among us should concede that the large-scale dismantling of several essential social programs in a short frame of time (under duress and without enough time to consider all the possible ramifications) would spell disaster. Social chaos. Hell, if the cuts are bad enough, riots.

An example from our dear friends in California on how state deficits can cause utter ruin...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-01-15-schwarzenegger-california-deficit_N.htm

 

While you're at it, why don't we blame Robert Kiyosaki for poor housing investment advice? Even he had enough sense to get out of the market a couple years back.

Bottom line, Schiff is not Nostradamus. He gave cause and effect. He can not tell you the unknown. As he states, if we continue the deficit spending, we will have hyperinflation. If we have hyperinflation, then foreign markets will skyrocket. His portfolios we're dishing out 20%+ returns, so naturally people flocked to him. The Sheeple are the ones that get burned.