I mean I know the details of the bail out are being worked on so we don't really know them all, but will it be like the government actually owns the mortgages on all the defaulted homes? Or does mae & Mac still own them? I understand the ramifications if we don't do the bail out, but I'm not quite undersandiing what happens when we do & I'm not finding much online..probably because I'm not using the right criteria.

Answering part of my own question..

this is a decent link..

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac takeover and conservatorship - Impacts and Outcomes

Someone posted this on another forum. I found it very interesting. Sorry, I know it's long and would just have posted a link, but there was none.


The End of an Era

by Gary North

This investment era began on Monday, August 16, 1982. On Friday the 13th, Mexico had threatened to nationalize all foreign banks and default on its debt. That weekend, the world's central bankers were meeting. They agreed to start pumping in new money. They negotiated new terms with Mexico. On Friday, the 13th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average bottomed at 777.

The week of September 14, 2008, will go into the textbooks as the end of an era. It marked the end of the investing public's confidence in the Powers That Be.

When the Dow Jones fell 504 points on Monday, September 15, in response to the failed bailout Sunday night of Lehman Brothers Holdings, it was obvious that the public's faith was shaky.

On September 7, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, acting on his own authority, nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nothing like this had ever been done in American financial history. Presidents have done things like this in crisis periods, but never a lame-duck Treasury Secretary.

One week later, Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America, Lehman went bankrupt, and Paulson justified this on the basis that he did not want to bail out another company or a pair of companies. It was intended to sound inspirational. Here was a man who had transferred $5 trillion of mortgage liabilities to the Federal government on his own authority the previous Sunday. Yet here he was, valiantly informing the public that enough was enough: there would be no government bailout.

Fast-forward 48 hours. The Federal Reserve released a press release at 10 p.m., eastern daylight time, that it will loan AIG $85 billion in exchange for 80% of the company. This is the biggest bailout in American history. There was no discussion of it in Congress. The next day the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 449 points.

What reversed the fall was an announcement on Thursday of a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers' expense. If Congress approves of this, there will be more emergency requests. Call this $700 billion a follow-up on Tuesday's $85 billion. This was a world away from Sunday's assurances that there would be no more bailouts.

The people in charge are riding the whirlwind. They have pulled us on board.

What I find amusing in retrospect is that on Monday, the government asked Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to pony up $75 billion to lend to AIG. They ignored the opportunity. What was Paulson thinking of? A loan to a near-bankrupt giant? How? Goldman Sachs shares had been $240 in November 2007. Down they went, month after month. On Wednesday, Goldman Sachs shares fell to $100, then recovered to $115.

This was a follow-up on an equally preposterous scheme on Sunday. Paulson had assembled 10 financial institutions to bail out Lehman. One of the 10 institutions was Merrill Lynch. Before the bailout was nixed by Barclays Bank, Merrill Lynch had gone out of business as a separate institution. Paulson was so out of the loop that he did not realize that not only could Merrill Lynch not come up with $7 billion as its share of the proposed bailout, it would cease to exist as a separate institution before the day was over.

If ever there was a man who is out of the loop it is Treasury Secretary Paulson. Yet he was CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was Treasury Secretary. He saw no signs that Merrill Lynch was about to go belly-up.

To give you some idea if how far removed from reality Paulson has been for months, read his September/October article in Foreign Affairs. This is the most important journal of opinion in the United States and probably in the world. His article is a long discussion of trade with China. There was not a word on the looming collapse of America's banks.

The story of the merger is amazing. I saw the CEO of Bank of America interviewed on Monday. He gave a cheerful assessment of what a great idea it was for Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch for $50 billion in BofA stock. Understand, this is the man who oversaw the purchase of Countrywide Financial. So, when he gives cheery analyses, I tend to be a bit skeptical.

He went on to say that he got a call from the CEO of Merrill on Friday afternoon. By Saturday, they had discussed the merger in person. On Sunday, the two completed the merger. Neither of them had discussed this with their boards of directors. There was no warning to investors in either company that a merger was required in order to save Merrill from bankruptcy.

On Monday, Standard & Poor's rating service dropped the Bank of America from AA to AA–. At the same time, the stock market rendered its vote of no-confidence. On Friday, Bank of America shares sold at $34. The stock opened at $28 on Monday morning. By Monday's close, it sold for $27. Yet the CEO assured us that this was just a terrific merger that would be beneficial to both organizations.

It was obvious by Monday afternoon that the investing public was not buying any of it. It had just had one weekend surprise too many. It was clear to the public that the people at the top did not have a clue as to what was taking place. They did not know how to solve the problem.

Then, late Tuesday night, the Federal Reserve issued its press release. There was no discussion by Bernanke. There was no discussion by any senior FED official. There was a statement from some unnamed Federal Reserve staffers who assured the public that this was not the nationalization of AIG. Yet it was obviously the nationalization of AIG. It was a nationalization comparable to the nationalization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. That nationalization was called a conservatorship.

The leaders of American finance apparently believe that the secret of saving the financial structure is through word magic. If they re-name what the bailout process is, somehow it will be palatable to the investing public.

Lehman has gone bankrupt. All of its assets, totaling $639 billion, will have to be sold into a market that is in crisis mode. No one knows what market value these assets possess. No one knows what degree of toxic waste is in the asset column of Lehman's balance sheet. We are going to find out very soon.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

Pt. 2

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, EMERITUS

The public has been trained to believe that the people making the decisions at the top of the American financial system are masters of the universe. These were the best and the brightest. They had invented all of these wonderful new contractual obligations that made billions of dollars of profits for their companies. It was going to go on forever.

Then, like toppling dominoes, the masters of the universe were exposed as bunglers of the universe. They took their severance pay of tens of millions of dollars each, and went off into the oblivion that is reserved for ex-masters of the universe.

These stories kept coming before the public, beginning with the forced sale of Bear Stearns in March. One by one, the organizations that supposedly are at the heart of American financial capitalism have been exposed as barely functional operations that have been run by men who did not have any understanding of the new finance.

All of these leveraged securities had been designed by mathematical geniuses. So had Long-Term Capital Management, which went bust in 1998. The problem is, the heads of these organizations are not mathematicians. They took the word of a bunch of "quants," who had no experience making money, that these incredibly complex contractual arrangements would make above-average profits, year after year, and not expose the issuing organizations to gigantic risk. In other words, they trusted mathematicians and computer geeks with the future of their companies.

Anyone who has dealt with computer geeks knows that some of these people have trouble balancing a checkbook. They are whizzes at constructing arcane codes that nobody understands. It is even worse with the mathematicians. They thought that you can evaluate risk in advance and shield yourself against risk by establishing co-party agreements. AIG wrote $447 billion of these agreements. No one knows how the Federal government will pay off any of them in a market collapse.

Meanwhile, all over the world, these agreements are now coming due. The bankruptcies have forced the contractual parties to come up with the money to pay off the people on the other side of the contracts. The trouble is, there is no mechanism, no court system, no nothing that is able to enforce these contracts. The organizations have become dependent upon them, trusting in their liquidity and their enforceability to protect them against downside moves of the market. Lots of luck to everyone who believes that the person on the other side of the contract is going to have enough money to pay off that contract. Lots of luck in dealing with his lawyers.

The entire system is unraveling. Nobody has a handle on it. Nobody knows how many agreements are out there, or how much money is at risk, or how many bankruptcies we can expect. All that the experts know is that this system has been designed by mathematicians and computer geeks.

The people in charge of sorting out the mess are tenured, salaried economists who work for the Federal Reserve System and the Department of the Treasury. These are the fellows who were not good enough at mathematics to become mathematicians. Yet these are the people who are expected to produce a cure for the developing catastrophe that is threatening the capital markets of the entire world.

Why should anyone have believed that the people in authority knew anything about the system which was being constructed in terms of Alan Greenspan's expansion of the money supply after 1995? Yet they did believe that these people knew what they were talking about. They put faith in these people. Now that faith has been betrayed. The masters of the universe, whether in the private markets that have been subsidized by the fiat money of the Federal Reserve System, or hired by the Federal Reserve System, are now perceived as what they always were: people who did not know what was happening.

THE SKEPTIC WHO SOUNDED A WARNING

One man who knew that they didn't know what they were doing was Dr. Kurt Richebächer. From the year 2000 until his death in August of 2007, he issued a monthly 12-page analysis of why Greenspan had created the largest asset bubble in history. He warned, month after month, that this system would break. He said that when it breaks, it will bring down capital markets all over the world. He had been a German central banker, and he knew better than to believe that central bankers were in any position to administer the capital markets by injections of fiat money. He died in the month that the first crack in the system began.

If you look at any of the stock market charts, beginning in May 2007 until today, you see an interesting pattern. There was a significant fall in the value of shares in August 2007. Then, very rapidly, the market rebounded. All the indexes went back up. They peaked in October 2007, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average for one day went over 14,000.

On November 5, I posted an article on my website to alert my subscribers that it was time to short the American stock market. I recommended that they short the Standard & Poor's 500. I later updated this to include the Russell 2000 index. It was clear to me that when the Standard & Poor's 500 index fell from 1550 to 1500, the game was over. I was convinced that there was no way that the bull market would go back above 1550. I was convinced that what Richebächer had said was accurate, and what Austrian economic theory says about the business cycle is accurate. I believed the stock market was headed down. I have not changed my view.

The stock market really is past the point of no return. I believed that we were beyond it last November. Nothing has convinced me since that time that we did not pass the point of no return in October of 2007. The stock market is down. All over Asia, stock markets are down by 50% this year. I warned my subscribers this would happen, and I told them not to buy any Asian stocks. The Asian stock market went down faster and more sharply than the American stock market has.

NO PORT IN THIS STORM

There is no national port in the storm that has now begun to hit us. This storm is like Hurricane Ike. Hurricane Ike was gigantic in terms of its diameter. It was as big as the state of Texas. Like Hurricane Ike, the financial storm we are in is not yet a Category 3 or higher. It is more like a Category 1. It will not stay a Category 1. It is going to go to Category 2 or 3. And, like Ike, it is going to cover a lot of territory.

Experts now say that this is going to be a mild recession. They have said that it will last six months. These are the same people who said there would be no recession. They did not tell you to short the stock market in 2007. These are the people who have been perma-bulls since 1982. They tell you to have a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds.

The storm is coming. You have been warned that the storm is coming. Those of us who have been critical of Alan Greenspan since 1987, because we knew that he believed he could outsmart the capital markets of the world, were amused to hear him say on Sunday, September 14, that the capital markets are entering into a crisis period that we see once in a century. Thanks, Alan, for you are the engineer who created it.

There comes a time to face reality. The reality is this: the best and the brightest in America's financial institutions were blind as bats. They thought that risk was minimal. They took gigantic risks with the capital of their companies and investors' capital to squeeze out an extra percentage point of return on investments that should never have been made at all. They are matched in blindness by the economists at the Federal Reserve System and the United States Treasury.

We have a lame-duck President, a lame-duck Treasury Secretary, and an academic economist who is running the Federal Reserve System. The best and the brightest in the private sector have been dismissed. They took their tens of millions of dollars and wandered away. Now we are left with tenured government bureaucrats who are in charge of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the largest insurance company in the United States.

CONCLUSION

Investors last week began to figure it out. A lot more investors are going to figure it out. They are going to have two years to figure it out. This is if things go well. They may have three years to figure it out.

Whoever is elected President in November is going to preside over the worst financial disaster in American history in the postwar era. Some lucky soul is going to lose this election.

You had better batten down the hatches.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

We've got 20ish years before retirement, so hopefully our mutuals will have recovered by then.

I agree - people are simply living way above their means. We have so stinkin' much stuff available to us, so much foofy, cushy stuff that we simply don't need. It's not *wrong* to have it, but it seems very few things are reserved for the truly wealthy these days. Regardless of the income level, too many believe they deserve the *best* that's out there. What? There is a new cutting edge cell phone? Everyone from the rich to the poor will have one! We spend ridiculous amounts of money eating out (I say "we" - which actually doesn't include "me"... but I assume ya'll know what I mean). So many of us think nothing of dropping $40 - $100 eating a single meal out at a restaurant like Outback... an amount of money that would pay for several days worth of groceries, and we do it more than once a week! We have laptops and monster-sized plasma tv's and Corian countertops. There is *nothing* we haven't been able to obtain if we wanted to.

We paid off our house several years ago, and don't carry any debt (other than our credit card, which we pay off in full each month). I just *hate* being beholden, financially, to anyone or anyplace. I don't *get* that 'seat of your pants' lifestyle of credit, credit, and more credit... which equates to debt, debt, and more debt!

I have *never* understood how people live in places like California. The cost of a home there just makes no sense to me. Unless you're making a $500K salary ... I just don't see how people got mortgages even for smaller, older homes.

I realize Wall Street and the politicians are not blameless here, but for crying out loud... have we raised a generation of people who feel so entitled to own pretty much whatever life their heart desires regardless of whether those desires are in line with income?

See.... this is why I'm not *for* all these government sponsored programs intended to 'take care' of us. I think the less personal responsibility people *must* have, the less they *will* have.

Wasn't a huge amt of this from the housing bubble correcting itself?

My Mom passed away, her home was in S. Florida. Every real estate agent we talked to gave us different figures on the value of her home. But they all agreed, it had doubled in value in less than a 12 month period. We had months of selling off contents before we could actually sell the home. While we had her estate sale, several people were BEGGING to buy the house to flip, it was insane! We stayed away from flippers, fixed it up ourselves & was able to sell it by owner right at the tip of the market..actually the day of our open house, the front page of the newspaper was "housing market plunging" . Luckily, we sold it within days of that open house! Last time I checked the current value on willow.com had it dropped about 45K. That was over 6 months ago.


What really stinks for me, living in Ohio, is we didn't realize the massive gains..they were slow & steady as should be.. but are still taking a hit on our values.

I'm sure I babbled..and not so sure it really stayed all the way on topic..

There was a lot of cross posting while I was writing mine..

Thanks ham for that article, pretty scary stuff!

I still don't really understand after it's all said & done if the bail out money can be recouped if market values come back or if it's just plain gone.

IMO, there is plenty of blame to go around. Sure, some people bought homes beyond their means but there were also mortgage brokers whose salaries depended on "selling" mortgages. The family wanting a home beyond their means should have been refused a loan rather then being serviced by an individual who, since his/her salary was likely commissioned based, wasn't above tweeking paperwork to make it work. After the papers were signed their responsibility was over and they collected the fee for the sale. The bank who loaned the money for the mortgage sold it to a group who bundled mortgages and the bundles were sold to another company or group of individuals. Everybody made money and no one had a care about the ethics behind the original loan and were happy as long as they had their commissions. There was a lack of ethics and personal responsbility up and down the line.

I live in a house that 6 months ago would have easily sold for $350,000. Now, when I want to sell it, the realtor I spoke with today thinks it will sell for maybe $250,000. I have no other debt and always followed the rules too but I'm out $100,000.

In addition to a society who feels it deserves the best, we have a society made up of too many individuals who have no thought as to how their actions in business impact all of us at some point. Maybe this will be a wakeup call for lots of people.

__________________
Ana
The Republicans have been putting lipstick on a pig for 8 years. Is a pitbull wearing lipstick an attempt to keep us from noticing the pig?

That's kinda of it. . .but Freddie and Fannie were able to gurantee their mortgages to sub-prime home buyers because they were backed by the Feds. . .they were ENCOURAGED to lend to people who really coudn't afford those homes. . .part of that touchy-feely, look everybody can be a homeowner stuff, but they didn't really have to care if those people could pay their mortgages or not because they were federally insured.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

Kolu

This is what my economist friend had to say to your question:


Bottomline is that every taxpayer of this nation will be paying the failed mortgages. It is very possible and probable that taxes will need to be raised to cover this expense. Interest rates will need to be raised too. Logically, it would come down to middle class income taxes needing to be raised, and ideally some taxes on large corporations being raised. Ideally, small business taxes would remain the same hopefully. I would like to think of myself as a fiscal conservative and yet, with the bailout plan, the aforementioned is how I might do things to offset a really f**ked up national debt.

Wait. We can't really offset that, just minimize the damage before China owns the American dollar like they almost do already.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

This is what Ron Paul had to say on it. And the people I know that understand all this have basically said that he is on the money.

Commentary: Bailouts will lead to rough economic ride - CNN.com

(CNN) -- Many Americans today are asking themselves how the economy got to be in such a bad spot.

For years they thought the economy was booming, growth was up, job numbers and productivity were increasing. Yet now we find ourselves in what is shaping up to be one of the most severe economic downturns since the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the government's preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place: government intervention.

Ever since the 1930s, the federal government has involved itself deeply in housing policy and developed numerous programs to encourage homebuilding and homeownership.

Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to obtain a monopoly position in the mortgage market, especially the mortgage-backed securities market, because of the advantages bestowed upon them by the federal government.

Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks.

These governmental measures, combined with the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy, led to an unsustainable housing boom. The key measure by which the Fed caused this boom was through the manipulation of interest rates, and the open market operations that accompany this lowering.

When interest rates are lowered to below what the market rate would normally be, as the Federal Reserve has done numerous times throughout this decade, it becomes much cheaper to borrow money. Longer-term and more capital-intensive projects, projects that would be unprofitable at a high interest rate, suddenly become profitable.

Because the boom comes about from an increase in the supply of money and not from demand from consumers, the result is malinvestment, a misallocation of resources into sectors in which there is insufficient demand.

In this case, this manifested itself in overbuilding in real estate. When builders realize they have overbuilt and have too many houses to sell, too many apartments to rent, or too much commercial real estate to lease, they seek to recoup as much of their money as possible, even if it means lowering prices drastically.

This lowering of prices brings the economy back into balance, equalizing supply and demand. This economic adjustment means, however that there are some winners -- in this case, those who can again find affordable housing without the need for creative mortgage products, and some losers -- builders and other sectors connected to real estate that suffer setbacks.

The government doesn't like this, however, and undertakes measures to keep prices artificially inflated. This was why the Great Depression was as long and drawn out in this country as it was.

I am afraid that policymakers today have not learned the lesson that prices must adjust to economic reality. The bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the purchase of AIG, and the latest multi-hundred billion dollar Treasury scheme all have one thing in common: They seek to prevent the liquidation of bad debt and worthless assets at market prices, and instead try to prop up those markets and keep those assets trading at prices far in excess of what any buyer would be willing to pay.

Additionally, the government's actions encourage moral hazard of the worst sort. Now that the precedent has been set, the likelihood of financial institutions to engage in riskier investment schemes is increased, because they now know that an investment position so overextended as to threaten the stability of the financial system will result in a government bailout and purchase of worthless, illiquid assets.

Using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to purchase illusory short-term security, the government is actually ensuring even greater instability in the financial system in the long term.

The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.

It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur. It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.

The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.

Until the big-government apologists realize the error of their ways, and until vocal free-market advocates act in a manner which buttresses their rhetoric, I am afraid we are headed for a rough ride.[/quote]

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

So, the government doesn't own any of the inventory that came with the mortgages, just the debt for it? & Fannie Mae gets to keep all of their portfolios? Shouldn't any future profits from them go back to the government? I know..I'm dreaming...

& I'm dang straight not an economist...

BUT

Any normal household, after being hit with a massive, unexpected outlay of cash would cut back in other areas, with a democratic congress, how do I know that won't happen?

Perhaps you want to consider the "massive, unexpected outlay of cash" post 9/11 and see how the Republican controlled gov't handled the problem? 1600 + Billion gone. Poof. Kapoot.

You really don't get it do you?

What we are paying in Iraq is pocket change compared to this!!! We are talking trillions of dollars!

And if you want to point fingers. . .all this started with Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 under the Carter Administration and was substantially strenghthened in 1995 under Clinton. Part of that warm, touchy-feely Democrat social agenda stuff. . .

The CRA was passed into law by the 95th United States Congress in 1977 as a result of national grassroots pressure for affordable housing, and despite considerable opposition from the mainstream banking community. Only one banker, Ron Grzywinski from ShoreBank in Chicago, testified in favor of the act. [1] The CRA mandates that each banking institution be evaluated to determine if it has met the credit needs of its entire community.

In 1995, as a result of interest from President Bill Clinton's administration, the implementing regulations for the CRA were strengthened by focusing the financial regulators' attention on institutions' performance in helping to meet community credit needs. These revisions[1] with an effective starting date of January 31, 1995 were credited with substantially increasing the number and aggregate amount of loans to small businesses and to low- and moderate-income borrowers for home loans. These changes were very controversial and as a result, the regulators agreed to revisit the rule after it had been fully implemented for seven years. Thus in 2002, the regulators opened up the regulation for review and potential revision.

Community Reinvestment Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But it's ok. . .it all sounded pretty good to the Kool-Aid drinkers back then too.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

I don't know how that will work. . .I would hope that any profits would be used to offset the debt. I think we "own" it all now. . .profits and debt.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

I wasn't pointing fingers.

kolu said "Any normal household, after being hit with a massive, unexpected outlay of cash would cut back in other areas, with a democratic congress, how do I know that won't happen?"
~ Code for God help us if we are in debt and a democratic controlled administration is in charge.

I said "Perhaps you want to consider the "massive, unexpected outlay of cash" post 9/11 and see how the Republican controlled gov't handled the problem? 1600 + Billion gone. Poof. Kapoot."

The real issue is what the next president and congress can agree to cut back. Budgets are projected ahead for years.

ETA: What I do know is that I am in the group that I believe should be taxed more and most here are in the group I feel should be taxed less. It won't hurt me nearly as much and if those who will inherit from me get less, so be it IMHO.

Uh. . .you kind of were. You said "Republican controlled gov't" then talked about how much money was spent in Iraq . . ."1600 + Billion gone. Poof. Kapoot."

The problem with that is that post 9/11 wasn't a Republican controlled gov't. . .Democratic Congress. . .Republican Administration.

Yes. . .the next president and congress cutting back. . .like not sending an addition $845 billion dollars to the UN.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

As for your ETA, that's good for you, but many people aren't in that position. And we will ALL be taxed one way or another. We have to be in order to pay for this massive debt. . .there isn't anyway around it.

__________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
- George Orwell Animal Farm

The "tax" would be result of the inflation. Prices will start to go way up on necessary items (food mainly)
Inflation comes from the creation of money/credit in the system. The result of that inflation is seen in prices.
This hurts the poor and middle class the most.

This article is long..but well worth reading. This was written in April 2008. I think things have speed up since then.
Hyperinflation Special Report

This is what I'm hearing, though I haven't seen it in print yet. As long as they don't run it like a government program, there's hope to recoup those loses, or at least partially.

I'm working on a migraine or I'd go into the tax thing...maybe later..