All Forum Posts by: Steven Gore

I'm on this guy's e-mail list from Chicago and this was the title of his latest article. He's spot on. Why don't more people understand that the Constitution does not authorize most of what Congress does today?

Why are we even having a discussion about giving authority and responsibility for "the economic well being of Americans" to ONE guy- the Secretary of the Treasury?

The whole reason government can spend your money willy-nilly is because of a misinterpretation of the "general welfare" clause >>> http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4412 >>>can you imagine what these clowns (or one clown in say...an Obama administration...) could do with "economic well being of Americans"??? That could mean literally ANYTHING.

The money isn't going to homeowners- it's going to people like Mozillo (Countrywide CEO). It's all dressed up as letting people keep their homes, but in reality this is (another) big corporate bailout.

I agree completely- keep the change. I think if people knew the extent to which (mostly) Democrats were up to their eyeballs in this, Pelosi and the gang would be out like 1994...

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/07/16/Countrywide-Deals-Exposed

The problem this election cycle is the Republicans are mostly RINOs- including McCain, and there's no conservative intellectual core anymore. No Newt, no big ideas...so it's "Crazies to the left of me, whimps to the right". We're screwed.

Bush is making (another) big mistake. The line of thinking that got us into this mess is that the government can act as a backstop for every financial failure.

What's worse is that many all too many people now believe that the real estate bust was the result of an unbridled free market run amok when in fact it was the result of the inherent moral hazard of simultaneously encouraging the "ownership society" through a Federal Reserve policy of artificially low interest rates and government bailouts, quasi-government corporations backing loans, and other tinkering to prop up an otherwise slumping market.

These measures serve not only to subsidize failure- thereby encouraging it; but to make the crisis worse, and the period of recovery a whole lot longer.

The reason the housing market failed is really quite simple- there was never any real demand for housing. It was the government through monetary policy and other inducements that created demand- but that's not sustainable because people with middle-income jobs could not reach into their pockets and continue to make payments for houses that had sold at multimillionaire prices. The government encouraged this malinvestment on a massive scale and eventually the economic fundamentals simply caught up with us.

The idea that the government can now reach into our pockets (at the expense of healthy markets) to find the needed cash to transfer the wealth to the malinvested housing market is dangerous.

Over time the end result is that not only will the unhealthy housing market continue to suffer, but formerly healthy ones also fall into trouble, which is exactly what happened from 1930 - 1933.

There will always be opportunities- but I suspect we're nowhere near the bottom of this hole-- and the government unfortunately continues to dig.

Similar situation occurred in my life. I basically got ripped off by someone I trusted. It IS a gift. For me it was a clean slate, inspiration to think creatively, and to THINK in general about what I wanted out of life and where I wanted to end up.

I put down Napoleon Hill, and picked up books by Henry David Thoreau and took up a new motto: "We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without".

I also put down Robert Kiyosaki and started reading Timothy Ferriss-- his book, The Four Hour Work Week is a neo-American-minimalist manifesto. In a nutshell the premise of the whole book is that TIME is the real treasure, that work is a means to an end, and that your career "what you do" isn't as important as "who you are".

He correctly points out that most people don't actually want to be millionaires, but rather they want what they think only a million dollars can provide.

Way too many "gurus" make a pretty nice living convincing people they've got to make millions and while people have $ signs in their eyes and are looking at the yachts, and sports cars, and big houses in their inspired dreams, they miss the fact that the gurus are taking them for the few thousand bucks they've got.

Why is the genius that can teach you to make $500K a year investing in real estate flying to Chicago in the middle of February and trying to extract $2K from you? Seems to me if I was making $500K a year- I wouldn't be hanging out at some REIA in Chicago in the dead of winter...

To me, financial independence is knowing that my expenses, and future wealth building are and will remain on track even if I never work another day in my life.

You got that right. As I get older (and hopefully wiser) I realize more an more that I don't want about three quarters of the junk I spent 1/3rd of my working life to acquire. There are boxes in my garage at the moment that are full of things that we have moved three times-- but never unpacked.

It makes me sick to think that I gave a piece of my life for those things. Ultimately how you spend your money is how you spend your life. There's a cliche that says nobody on their death bed ever wished they'd spent more time at the office...

You have to be thoughtful, and you have to choose. True financial freedom- financial peace- is to know you can take care of the critical things in life no matter what. It's not about big houses, boats, planes, and cars, jewelry, fur coats, and trips around the world-- though I've had and done my share of all that-- it's about going to sleep at night knowing that if I don't wake up, my family has fond memories of me, that I was there for them while I could be, and that the last thing they have to worry about amid the trauma of losing a husband and father is money.