[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

In IN, however, excessive property taxes have been a huge issue and supporting a constitutional limit on property taxes is damn near mandatory to being elected to a statewide office.

Eurgh.... We know how well that's worked out for California....

Originally Posted by Arles

However, in a bad or poor economy, any small activity to penalize investment scare people off. Right now we need to cut the cap gains rate because people aren't investing.

I think people aren't investing because the investments on offer seem very risky at the moment, not because of the cap gains tax. Lowering the cap gains tax may take away some of the cost, but takes away none of the risk. Were this a stagnant market I think your argument would be correct.

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"[/b]

Oh I hope so. If the Republican Party becomes solely (or mainly) the party of Palin, nationwide, we'll be looking at a future where the GOP has lost its electoral relevance and might even possibly see a third party arise, finally.

Originally Posted by Grammaticus

At the end of the 90's, the tech stocks took a dive when Clinton sued Microsoft attacking successful business models. This caused uncertainty in the market and constriction occurred.

While a monopoly is certainly a successful business model, it's also the achilles heel of pure capitalism, in that it effectively destroys the competition model upon which capitalism rests. Arguably Clinton's pursuit of Microsoft was to remove this threat to capitalism from Microsoft in what has become a very important sector of the economy.

So basically Clinton was a defender of free market capitalism. Blows your mind, eh?

Originally Posted by Grammaticus

Every bear market has its trigger. I think the Microsoft suit triggered the NASDAQ drop in 2000.

I subscribe to the idea that due to the significance of the year changeover (from 1999 to 2000) the volume of portfolios being rebalanced, and investors of all stripes taking the calendar opportunity to lock in gains, caused the initial "instability" which was actually a halt in accelerating gains. This in turn caused more people to look at the fundamentals of the companies in which they were investing and OH MY GOD THEY HAVE NO REVENUE OR PROFIT took hold.

Originally Posted by sterlingice

Mac summed it up really well in his post. Along with his suggestion that banks should be forced to hold some of the loan, there's a much bigger problem here. Sure, lost mortgage money would have hurt banks. But not like this. The bigger problem is that banks turned around and were allowed to leverage that money for a whole order of magnitude more of borrowing (10-15X!) and that's really why we're in the crapper.