Rick Santelli is a former hedge fund cocksucker who later migrated to the equally devious, unethical and wrong profession of financial journalism. He really is the worst of both possible worlds.
For my right-wing friends that love disseminating conspiracy theories about George Soros and his profiteering from the collapse of world currencies, you should know that Soros Fund Management is also a hedge fund. Long-Term Capital Management was also a hedge fund that required a massive Federal Reserve-supervised bailout in 1998, after it put all of it's eggs in the east Asian and Russian currency basket, which subsequently crashed. Because of the nature of their trading, hedge funds are largely unregulated, despite the enormous potential for destruction that they cause.
Even in the wildly overrated journalism, financial reporters are among the very worst, at about the level of gossip columnists and fucking astrologers. That anyone believes anything these assholes have to say tells you everything you need to know about why capitalism is the mess that it is today.
If you want to take a walk down memory lane, I highly recommend that you read back through what those fucking people had to say about the banking and real estate sectors from 2002 through the middle of 2007. You'll look long and hard before you find them saying anything negative. This is because financial reporters are the most cronyistic motherfuckers on God's green earth. Shit, even political reporters are embarrassed by them.
But the Santelli rant of Ought-Nine was unique onto itself for it's balls-out ignorance and hubristic hypocrisy. If you never saw it, here it is. If you haven't seen it in awhile, you should watch it again.
Remember, that was Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, not quite five months after all of those dumb fuckers were bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP.) There were no populist rants from those people in September of 2008 because they were too scared to fucking speak without shitting themselves to death.
This guy says that Santelli was against TARP, which isn't exactly true if you watch the clip he provides. Santelli acknowledged that the government had to do something, but that it should wait a few days.
And that would have been fucking crazy. Not only was the financial service industry rapidly melting down, it was beginning to take the stock market with it. The consequences of that for the larger public were catastrophic and most people still haven't recovered from them.
Back in the 80's, employers moved from Defined Benefit Packages (which you know as pensions) to investing contributions in 401K plans, which were almost all in stocks. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the market lost over half of its value in a single day. When the GOP started fucking around with passing TARP - and it failed to pass the House the first time - the market bled out even more.
Those 401K lost over half of their value. Some lost closer to two-thirds. If you were anywhere near retirement in the fall of 2008, you were basically fucked.
Because of the interconnectedness of the debt, most through derivatives like credit default swaps, all of the investment banks would have gone down. The ones that weren't directly taken out by the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have had anyone to borrow from to meet their overnight margin requirements. And because the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act allowed them to become bank holding companies, the commercial banks would have started toppling like dominoes very shortly thereafter.
No one who knows anything about anything has ever suggested otherwise. After four years of my asking, people like Santelli have never told me how you maintain a modern civilization without a banking industry. Like it or not (and I hated it) TARP was the least bad available option out there. No sensible person thought there was a guarantee that the markets would have survived another week.
But when the government rather timidly suggested that the banks (which caused the problem in the first fucking place and had just been given tens of trillions of dollars in loans and guarantees) renegotiate the mortgages of the actual victims of the crisis, shitheads like Santelli and his cocksucker friends with their bailout bonuses burning a hole in their fucking pockets had the incredible temerity to get indignant about it on the CBOT floor.
Fuck them. No wonder the Tea Party is so goddamned dumb. They're based on a fundamentally stupid premise. If Rick Santelli was capable of shame, he would've ended his rant by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Yet Santelli can't stop bringing the stupid. Just this morning he was bringing it hard.
Jesus God, the stupid just doesn't stop with this guy, does it?
We're not even talking about ancient history here, folks. We're talking about 1990-'93. The first President Bush increased marginal rates and President Clinton moved them slightly further northward. and you know what? The world didn't end. Innovation didn't stop and capital didn't flee the market anymore than it already had because of globalization.
Look, I know that the tech buble was responsible for the economy of the 90's and the balancing of the budgets (to the extent that they were, which was not at all,) but the modestly increased rates certainly helped
But look at what happened subsequently. The second Bush gutted the rates, fought two wars and dramatically expanded entitlement spending without paying for any of it.
From time to time, you'll see incredibly misleading nonsense like this (which you know is partisan horseshit because it labels the 2000-'01 downturn as "The Clinton Recession," while the 2007-'09 near-depression is called "The Mortgage Crisis" instead of "The Bush Calamity."
The main reason those charts are misleading is because they focus only on the deficits and not the consistently growing debt. Bush and the GOP Congress engaged in a really neat accounting trick during much of that administration. Specifically, the funded much of their crap - and the wars almost exclusively - through continuing resolutions, which bypassed the budget process entirely. That spending went directly to the debt and wasn't reflected in the annual deficits.
To the right, you'll see a chart of the gross federal debt, as opposed to the deficits, that you'll see consistently went up throughout the Bush years. Here's something else you need to know about George W. Bush: He's the only person I'm aware of in human history who actually cut taxes while waging not one, but two land wars in Asia. That was so fucking crazy that even Hitler knew better than to try it.
One of the reasons that the deficit exploded under Obama is because he put all of that spending back on the books. Once you do that, of course the annual numbers will be unskewed against previous years. But dishonest hacks will continue to try to throw that hack trick at you because they think you're retarded.
Even with the massive 2001 and '03 tax cuts, combined with hack accounting tricks that would send you directly to fucking prison of you tried them in the private sector, American GDP only grew by an average of 1.6% during the second Bush administration. Growth under George H.W Bush and Clinton was 2.1% and 3.8% respectively. Even after inheriting a catastrophe, Obama's average growth numbers are likely going to be better than Bush 43's were.
The great Jay Batman said something this week that I've been saying for years and I couldn't be happier that someone finally is joining me in saying it.
Social issues and their alienating power are but one problem the Republican Party must overcome; in order to address the utter lack of credibility it has on fiscal issues, Republicans must realize some very hard truths indeed.
When you have to finance an initiative with the issuance of debt, you are spending money. When you cut taxes and create deficits, the deficit and the tax cut that created it will be financed with the issuance of debt. The tax cut thereby becomes a spending item.
No one seriously argues that financing the purchase of a television or a car with debt in the form of a loan or credit isn't spending; however, Republicans will argue until the sun goes down that a tax cut is not spending no matter how much debt it creates. No tax cut that is unaccompanied by a commensurate cut in spending items should ever be passed into law. You can have whatever you damn well wish to pay for, but as it relates to government spending, it is better to pay as you go than to pay with interest because the government has the unique ability to print money in order to lessen its debt obligations. The net result of such practices is that Americans pay higher prices over time and lose purchasing power in the process.
Santelli knows that you can raise taxes without raising the rates, but he won't tell you that because he and his asshole friends love the virtual welfare that the tax code gives them. And no, I'm not talking about capital gains, dividends, or the corporate rates, which are fine where they are or could even come down some.
The carried interest rate, for example, should be a prime target for raising to regular income rates. Contrary to popular opinion, carried interest isn't capital gains or dividend income. It's essentially a "management fee" paid to the hedge funds and private equity firms by companies that are the targets of leveraged buyouts (LBOs.) It's regular income that was given a cute name that suggests that it's something different by lobbyist bloodsuckers.
If you want to know why Mitt Romney paid only 13% in the years that he released returns from, it's because his income was primarily carried interest from Bain Capital, which he resigned from "retroactively" in either 1999 or 2002, depending on who you believe.
There are other neat tricks in the tax code that can be fixed, too. Did you know that people in Santelli's (presumed) income bracket can claim the home mortgage deduction on second, third and maybe even forth properties?
Pretty much everyone agrees that the real time bombs are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What you probably don't know is that those programs aren't financed with general revenue from the income tax. That money comes from the payroll tax, which for whatever bonehead reason, is capped at $100,000. Get rid of that artificial cap and you can lower rates, thereby creating more disposable income from the middle class and the working poor, while helping the solvency of the programs.
Granted, you'll still need to raise the retirement age, limit benefits and means test both Medicare and Social Security to guarantee their long-term survival, but eliminating the payroll tax cap gives you some breathing room in how you go about doing that.
Santelli started this morning's rant off with a brutally fucking dumb premise. He said “The only people who bring tax revenues to the party are people who work, and the discussion is mainly about the people that are working, that are way at the top.”
No shit, Rick. People who don't have an income are actually pretty famous for not paying the income tax. Go figure.
While I think that taxing the rich is as good a place as any to start, I also know that the numbers don't work if you end there. Barack Obama is being singularly irresponsible in suggesting that they can, just as the Republicans are being overpoweringly stupid in thinking that you can fix this exclusively with cuts.
The middle class are going to have to take it in the nuts, too. Firstly, that's where the real fucking money is. Secondly, those are the assholes that voted America directly into the hole it's in.
Remember the fake budget wars of the 1990s? Back then, the GOP wasn't fighting for cuts. They just wanted to limit the rate of growth. It's well past time for that now. These days, shit - including and especially defence, which is the largest ticket item in discretionary spending - is going to have to be pared down dramatically. And if that has to go, it becomes harder to justify all the goodies in the tax code for the middle class.
Supposed conservatives, just like liberals, have fallen down on explaining the responsibilities that accompany rights. Just as much as liberals have, conservatives have encouraged people - mostly the middle class - into believing that they can vote themselves stuff without any cost to them.
They always assured you that economic growth would pick up the difference, despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary. But not only did those fucking people vote for tax cuts, they voted for higher program spending, too. Remember, George W. Bush didn't lie to anyone about his plans. He was upfront about doubling federal education spending giving hard-on pills to grandpa. And that spending disproportionately befitted the middle class.
Well, as you now know, there is no fucking free lunch, and the waiter is standing by your table with the bill. I'd suggest that you keep your credit card in your wallet because it's maxed out.
As I've said before many times, the U.S debt bomb is more dire a threat than even World War II was. Propaganda aside, there was never a real threat that the Nazi war machine was ever going to occupy western Pennsylvania. But nothing will destroy the American way of like quite like a national default.
That means shared sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to take a hit. It would be nice if the poor and the working poor could be spared, but I'm not sure that's even possible. $16 trillion is, after all, a shitload of money.
If you parse through the tax code and the budget, you very quickly find that the overwhelming majority of it is geared to the wealthy and, especially, the middle class. It's welfare that has been called anything but for far too long now.
Rick Santelli and his well-heeled asshole friends think that if you can get away with not paying the piper, they won't have to, either. But as a nation, you called the fucking tune and one way or another, that piper's getting paid.
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