Back door to debtors' prison

It is common knowledge that there are no debtors' prisons in the United States. Wikipedia says "In 1833 the United States abolished Federal imprisonment for unpaid debts, and most states outlawed the practice around the same time."

But it would be reckless to conclude from this knowledge that one need not worry about being jailed or imprisoned as a consequence of not paying the bills. At Making Light, commenter Magenta Griffith points to an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "In jail for being in debt." It recounts a number of recent cases in which debtors have found themselves behind bars.

The amounts can be small. $35 is the amount in one case.

A sidebar asks "Is jailing debtors the same as debtors jail?" Not quite. The trick is that the collector has obtained a court order. Failure to appear in court is the offense for which the debtor is jailed. The sidebar explains,

"We have created a de facto debtors prison system in the United States that is largely unconstitutional," said Judith Fox, a law professor at Notre Dame Law School. "In some parts of the country, people are so fearful of arrest they are scrambling to pay money they might not even owe."

In states such as Indiana and Illinois, people are being locked up for not making court-ordered payments. Known as "pay or stay," it can mean days in jail and multiple arrests for the same debt. Some legal experts say the practice is unconstitutional because the arrest is directly linked to the failure to pay a debt.

In Minnesota, the issue is less clear because warrants to arrest debtors are issued for disobeying court orders, such as not filling out a financial disclosure form and missing a required hearing, not for failure to pay debt. So long as someone fulfills the court order, they can avoid incarceration.

All too often, debtors are not aware that a court date has been set or a warrant issued.

An article at Walletpop about the Star-Tribune piece received 100 comments, some of them substantive.

The NY Times had an editorial about the practice last year.

Al Gore: pretty good with some numbers

Numbers with dollar signs attached.

With other numbers, not so good.



Millions of degrees at the Earth's core, indeed. John Derbyshire checks the numbers. He's a climate con artist, that's all. It would make sense to follow his lead on investments … just as it would to invest along with George Soros, they are the same, after all … provided that you took the Louis XV attitude towards the future: "Après moi, le déluge." Does he imagine that the millions that he is amassing from his climate con game will protect his grandchildren from the apocalypse that he predicts?

It's a good thing to be rich. It's not a good thing to get rich by scaring people about the ManBearPig that's coming to get you!

Video: a few more Democrats lying about Fannie and Freddie

Because these people should get a lot of exposure.



Includes Barney Frank on "safety and soundness." What did Franklin Raines do to earn close to $90 million in bonus pay? If he's that good, he ought to be President now.

Bank failures were caused by government

Peter Wallison's piece in the WSJ has a snappier title:

Barney Frank, Predatory Lender

Almost two-thirds of all bad mortgages in our financial system were bought by government agencies or required by government regulations.

The left cannot have it both ways, blaming the private sector for subprime lending while absolving the government policies that created the demand for subprime loans. If the financial crisis was caused by subprime mortgages and predatory lending, the government's own policies made it happen.

Wanna bet they can't have it both ways? That's logic. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis don't use that old-fashioned stuff any more. They'll have it any way they want it.

Seriously, read the whole thing. And don't blame the banks, or "deregulation."

And speaking of Democrats and mortgages: here's a video that would be funny if it weren't so sick. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee left the room to avoid voting on a subpoena for Countrywide Mortage records.

Bank of America, which has acquired Countrywide, has said it will release the information about the “Friends of Angelo” program as soon as it receives a subpoena. But that would require a majority vote by the House Oversight Committee, something that is very hard to achieve when the majority party walks out on the vote, as Hodes and his colleagues did on Thursday.

No shame, no oversight. None so blind.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Your money in the Age of Obama

Where is it? Is it in here?

If it's in that Obama savings bank, you are going to need one of these 16-digit calculators:


to figure out whether it's worth anything.

Barney Frank wants to roll the dice again

Barney Frank in 2003: "I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing…"

In the WSJ this morning: "After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development."

That last one was so much fun, he wants to do it again.

Thanks to Veronique de Rugy at The Corner, who also links to some discussion at CNBC.

Not deregulation, but bad regulation

Via Veronique de Rugy at The Corner, Niall Ferguson in the NYT Magazine:

It is more than a little convenient for America’s political class to blame deregulation for this financial crisis and the resulting excesses of the free market. Not only does that neatly pass the buck, but it also creates a justification for . . . more regulation. The old Latin question is highly apposite here: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who regulates the regulators? Until that question is answered, calls for more regulation are symptoms of the very disease they purport to cure.

Related: Barney Frank bullying a hedge fund. That was back in October, though, before the change in administrations. Now that the President is doing the bullying, the old Latin question will be even less likely to receive an answer.

And some comments at Althouse.

Obama reveals tax increases

TigerHawk, in The audacity of tax: As bad as you thought they would be, calls the proposals "hideous." It's not just that rates are going up. There will be rates in places where there never had been rates before, and reporting requirements that never had been required before. All the Joe the Plumbers in the country will need to spend more time with paper work, less time with pipes. That will lower productivity of everything but paperwork. It will even lower productivity of tax revenue, by applying a reverse Laffer Curve.

Now we see what the doubling of the tax-enforcement funding is all about. An IRS agent (or at least an audit) for every taxpayer! Other than the Nomenklatura, who will cheat on their taxes and receive Cabinet appointments.

If the main goal of the Obama administration is to fight global warming by reducing America to Haiti's level of prosperity, while sequestering large amounts of carbon in filing cabinets, these proposals are a good start.

What Obama has in mind for Israel

It does not look good.

The Wages of Moral Equivalence.

Read it all, it's short.

Then this: Nuclear Weapons, Israel, and the Obama Administration.

And this: Obama's green light to attack Iran.

Then go buy some Israel Bonds. The investment might help them free up some money for defense.

Update More at NRO:

In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn’t fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.… By making his bed with countries that have no serious interest in democratic values, the president has made our world a much more dangerous place.

It seems the US has joined the UN Human Rights Council, a highly bogus body.

Fannie and Freddie want some more

Funny how billions just get lost in the trillions being tossed around in Washington.

Media Still Covering Up The $400 Billion Fannie And Freddie Scandal (FNM, FRE)

This morning, Fannie Mae (FNM) announced that it had lost another $23 billion in the quarter, and would have to call down $19 billion more in taxpayer support. It also said that it would face losses as far as the eye can see.

Do you know how much we've committed to backstopping Fannie and its partner-in-crime Freddie Mac (FRE)? $400 BILLION! Back in February that was doubled from the original $200 billion.

They just won't quit. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

The human mind simply cannot encompass numbers that big. Bill Whittle takes a stab at it in this PJTV video, "Mountains of Money." Still, boggle is about all that one can do. The politicians who are slinging this money around like spaghetti at a food fight do not comprehend the numbers, either. The difference between them and normal human beings is that they don't even try to comprehend, so they don't boggle!

This could begin in Washington

Reuters:

Obama seeks to double tax law enforcement budget

President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.

Considering the number of tax cheats in Congress, and the high number of Obama appointees with tax troubles, it would make more sense to start looking for better compliance close to home. Just a few extra bucks for the Washington bureau might bring in a fair amount.

Related, at Inside the Asylum: Cuba: Obama got it wrong; Iran: Obama got it wrong; now … the Netherlands: Obama got it wrong.

A timeless work of art

Received in email, the following:

Carey Orr in the Chicago Tribune, 1934. Click to see it bigger.

Everything old is new again, right down to the "pinkies from Columbia and Harvard." There is a little about the cast of characters here. The fellow down in front there, writing up the plan, looks like Trotsky.

Butterfly effect: Spitzer, Greenberg, and AIG

If Eliot Spitzer had not been such a self-aggrandizing, aggressive grandstander of an A.G., would AIG have had it better the last few years? If Spitzer had not forced the long-time CEO from his post, the timeline of the last few years would be different. Could it possibly have been worse?

Charles Gasparino in the NY Post: BLAME SPITZER: HIS AIG PROBE TRIGGERED FIRM'S BIGGEST MISTAKE.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Spending cuts, drop from the bucket style

So if the bucket is too heavy to carry, and you take one drop out of it, well, that's gonna make a difference. And then if you take another drop out of it, sooner or later, that adds up to …

The Heritage Foundation has come up with another of these great graphics, similar in impact to the one in the tea party post. They did not get it from the WaPo this time, either. It's by John Fleming of their staff:



(If that link doesn't work, there is an archived copy at Iterasi.)

Can you see the proposed cuts? The tiny black dot way up at the top.

The WaPo article linked by Heritage quotes Obama:

"None of these things alone are going to make a difference. But cumulatively they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone. And so what we are going to do is, line by line, page by page, $100 million there, $100 million here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money."

It also quotes Greg Mankiw:

Just to be clear: $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Paul Krugman does some arithmetic:

Let’s say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration’s first term. That’s still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year’s federal spending.

This amount is no more than "ground noise and static." So who does the President think he's kidding?

Thanks once again to Glenn Reynolds, and to Mark Hemingway for the Krugman quote.

Update: Ezra Klein thinks the President is kidding the voters, who are too dense to figure out the numbers. And this is a good thing, because it's a smart way to get headlines. Lefties do these things for the benefit of The People, who are so thick that they must be deceived for their own good. Revolting, and revealing.

XKCD hits the news media on the same kind of thing.

Confirmation of an expectation

I asked a couple of financial types the other day, "Do you think the banks will ever become private again?" They said something along the lines of, "Sure, the banks will pay back the loans and everything will be normal." I asked that question because I had heard that the government was refusing offers of repayment. I couldn't think of specifics at the moment, though, so let it pass without following up.

Now Glenn Reynolds points to Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion, where William Jacobson cites the Financial Times and Forbes to say that some of those bailed-out banks will not be allowed to repay those loans.

I'm tempted to quote the whole thing, but the comments are good, too, so I'll leave it there. Well, maybe just a little:

It is one thing for the government to lend money to banks to help the banks survive. It is someting quite different to use the lending to maintain control of the private sector when the specific borrower-bank no longer needs the money. And the greatest irony is that many banks which didn't want or need TARP money took it at the insistence of the feds, and now they can't pay it back.

This is the sort of "fascism" that Cody Willard was talking about, that led Jon Stewart maliciously to misquote him following the Tax Day Tea Parties: the penetration of private enterprise by the tendrils of government.

Alternate title: Here it comes.

Update: And from Megan McArdle, No Parting from TARP: "Once you take the King's Shilling, apparently you've enlisted for life--and your Congressional drill sergeants reserve the right to change the rules of your employment at will."

More at Reason: Is the Government Acting Like a Payday Lender?

Arrows, daggers, whatever it takes

A little while ago, this:

Browner appointment is "an arrow aimed at the heart of the American economy"

Now, this:

Cap-and-trade plan will sink Michigan

President Barack Obama's proposed cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions is a giant economic dagger aimed at the nation's heartland -- particularly Michigan. It is a multibillion-dollar tax hike on everything that Michigan does, including making things, driving cars and burning coal.…

The goal, according to the president's budget outline, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide to 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Doing so will drive up the cost of nearly everything and will amount to a major tax increase for American consumers.

But Gaia will be happy.

FDIC in trouble?

Feb. 25: FDIC Chair(person) Sheila Bair laughs, says "your money, if you're below our insured deposit limits, you're absolutely safe, no matter what." (1:36 into the video.) How jolly.

March 4: Bloomberg: Bair Says Insurance Fund Could Be Insolvent This Year. So they'll have to raise the rates they charge the banks. AP:

The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has warned that the fund insuring Americans' bank deposits could be wiped out this year without the money the agency is seeking in new fees from U.S. banks and thrifts.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair acknowledged, in a letter to bank CEOs, that the new increased fees and hefty emergency premium the agency voted to levy last week will bring a "significant expense" to banks, especially amid a recession and financial crisis when their earnings are under pressure.

"We also recognize that assessments reduce the funds that banks can lend in their communities to help revitalize the economy," Bair wrote.

But given the accelerating bank failures that have been depleting the deposit insurance fund, she said, it "could become insolvent this year."

"Without substantial amounts of additional assessment revenue in the near future, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero or even become negative," Bair wrote in the letter dated Monday to the chief executives of the nation's 8,305 federally insured banks and thrifts.…

March 5: Bloomberg: FDIC May Cut Emergency Fee on Banks, Group Says. Raise the fee one day, lower it the next; does anyone have any idea what they are doing? They're winging it.

Senator Dodd, known for his financial acuity, has introduced legislation to "increase the FDIC’s borrowing authority from $30 billion to $100 billion." Given this expansion in borrowing authority, the agency will be able to cut back on the one-time emergency fee to be charged the participating banks. (As far as most people are concerned, that's all of them.)

The House may vote today on legislation to expand the FDIC’s borrowing authority from $30 billion to $100 billion and make permanent a $250,000 deposit-insurance limit authorized under the financial bailout legislation Congress approved in October.

Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, plans to introduce a companion measure that will also raise the borrowing authority to a permanent level of $100 billion and temporarily increase it to $500 billion through Dec. 31, 2010.

Oh yes, just a few more billions, there's nothing out of the ordinary here. Billions and billions, all coming from the newly bottomless US Treasury.

What's going on here? Bair appears to be angling for a higher post in the Obama administration. Is that why she's trying to start a run on the banks? As part of an administration plan for Planned Impoverishment? Or as Doug Ross asks, "Did Obama intentionally nuke the economy?"

Update, only a few minutes later: Bill Quick says

Once the obvious implications of this sink into the markets and the media, I expect all hell to be out for lunch. If an appendage of the banking industry like Chris Dodd is being instructed by his owners to increase their credit line by 1700% (!!!), it’s a dead (pardon the term) giveaway as to what shape the bankers think their businesses are in.

And once the general public understands this, bank runs wouldn’t surprise the hell out of me.

Santelli update

There are a couple more Santelli clips at Liberty Maven, via Instapundit.

(I would have added this to the other Santelli post, but that has now become uneditable. I now have two posts with embedded MSNBC videos, and both of them are uneditable. This might be a pattern. I'll add a "Santelli" label, to bring these up together.)

Santelli speaks up

Someone, Rick Santelli of CNBC, is trying to speak truth to power. Of course power does not like hearing it. Let's get all the clips together. I dare say there will be more.

His initial outburst, on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange:



For comments, Althouse.

Robert Gibbs does some spinning, in a distressingly condescending tone, for a sympathetic and appreciative White House press corps:



Matt Lauer and Steve Liesman try to trivialize Santelli on the Today show:

Those are from Hot Air, where there are many comments.

And Chris Matthews, who thinks that people are facing "disclosure." (2:36 into the video.) Maybe he is thinking of all those Cabinet nominees who had trouble with disclosure of, say, tax records. Matthews has already disclosed the thrill he gets from hearing Obama speak, so his objectivity is not in question, that is, his bias is on his sleeve. (Or his pants!)


By way of Gateway Pundit, who has comments.

Santelli: "In America, contract law should be sacred." Makes sense to me. Matthews calls him "Ebenezer Scrooge," and says "You're up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity." That's enough to make me wonder if Matthews has a contract with MSNBC, or if he does this TV work out of the goodness of his heart and whatever spare change he can find under the sofa cushions in the green room.

I enjoy listening to Santelli's Chicago vowels, as he speaks for truth, justice, and the American way. There's a website promoting the Chicago Tea Party (they plan to throw derivatives into the lake), and a Santelli for Senate campaign button. Roland Burris is looking likely to have a very short Senate term of service. Governor Quinn could establish his independence from the Chicago mob by appointing Santelli. He will not do that, of course, but he could, and it's entertaining to think about.

Update: Roger Kimball has a couple of comments at PJ Media: On the Gibbs remarks, My favorite American; On the Lauer-Liesman interview, Reinventing liberal guilt.

Investment report from Dr. Boli

Defying sluggish economy, existential despair up 285%