archBoston Presidential Poll 2012

For whom will you be voting on Tuesday?

  • Total voters
    44
TheRifleman said:
The only reason Architecture Sucks in Boston is because of TAX BREAKS to the developers. NO SKIN in the game. All the developers are looking to do is quick flips, fast cash deals. This adds no value to the city of Boston with this type of mentality.
This type of mentality brings out 3 points
**The Taxpayers get screwed
**Architecture Sucks
**The city skyline & buildings look decrypted & cheap.

Boston is a great city because of its history and the non-profit schools especially MIT & HARVARD and Hospitals. I have to add that the Transit grid was good core for a while. It really needs a massive upgrade at this point.

The city has changed over the last ten- twenty years from the emerging working class city to a corporate political cosmpolitan whos who. It’s amazing how much OBAMA continues to support Massachusetts they do not want to lose control of this state because of Cambridge/Boston. Cambridge might be the innovative area in the country at this point. Kendall Square looks like an advanced society on its own.
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While I agree to an extent on the widespread use of tax breaks, and acknowledge a heavy political hand in Boston, I don't know if the correlation between limited government and architecture exists. By that measure, Europe would have terrible architecture, and granted while much is old, some great new works are in London, Germany, Paris, Spain, the Netherlands.
On the other side, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta don't come close to Boston or San Francisco in architecture, let alone London or Paris.
 
Guest Post: The Icelandic Success Story
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/08/2012 20:08 -0500

Submitted by John Aziz of Azizonomics

The Icelandic Success Story

Emotionally, I love Iceland’s financial policies since the crash of 2008:


Iceland went after the people who caused the crisis — the bankers who created and sold the junk products — and tried to shield the general population.

But what Iceland did is not just emotionally satisfying. Iceland is recovering, while the rest of the Western world — which bailed out the bankers and left the general population to pay for the bankers’ excess — is not.

Bloomberg reports:

Few countries blew up more spectacularly than Iceland in the 2008 financial crisis. The local stock market plunged 90 percent; unemployment rose ninefold; inflation shot to more than 18 percent; the country’s biggest banks all failed.

This was no post-Lehman Brothers recession: It was a depression.

Since then, Iceland has turned in a pretty impressive performance. It has repaid International Monetary Fund rescue loans ahead of schedule. Growth this year will be about 2.5 percent, better than most developed economies. Unemployment has fallen by half. In February, Fitch Ratings restored the country’s investment-grade status, approvingly citing its “unorthodox crisis policy response.”

So what exactly did Iceland do?

First, they create an aid package for homeowners:

To homeowners with negative equity, the country offered write-offs that would wipe out debt above 110 percent of the property value. The government also provided means-tested subsidies to reduce mortgage-interest expenses: Those with lower earnings, less home equity and children were granted the most generous support.

Then, they redenominated foreign currency debt into devalued krone, effectively giving creditors a big haircut:

In June 2010, the nation’s Supreme Court gave debtors another break: Bank loans that were indexed to foreign currencies were declared illegal. Because the Icelandic krona plunged 80 percent during the crisis, the cost of repaying foreign debt more than doubled. The ruling let consumers repay the banks as if the loans were in krona.

These policies helped consumers erase debt equal to 13 percent of Iceland’s $14 billion economy. Now, consumers have money to spend on other things. It is no accident that the IMF, which granted Iceland loans without imposing its usual austerity strictures, says the recovery is driven by domestic demand.

What this meant is that unsustainable junk was liquidated. While I am no fan of nationalised banks and believe that eventually they should be sold off, there were no quick and easy bailouts that allowed the financial sector to continue with the same unsustainable bubble-based folly they practiced before the crisis (as has happened throughout the rest of the Western world).

And best of all, Iceland prosecuted the people who caused the crisis, providing a real disincentive (as opposed to more bailouts and bonuses):

Iceland’s special prosecutor has said it may indict as many as 90 people, while more than 200, including the former chief executives at the three biggest banks, face criminal charges.

Larus Welding, the former CEO of Glitnir Bank hf, once Iceland’s second biggest, was indicted in December for granting illegal loans and is now waiting to stand trial. The former CEO of Landsbanki Islands hf, Sigurjon Arnason, has endured stints of solitary confinement as his criminal investigation continues.

That compares with the U.S., where no top bank executives have faced criminal prosecution for their roles in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission said last year it had sanctioned 39 senior officers for conduct related to the housing market meltdown.

Iceland’s approach is very much akin to what I have been advocating — write down the unsustainable debt, liquidate the junk corporations and banks that failed, disincentivise the behaviour that caused the crisis, and provide help to the ordinary individuals in the real economy (as opposed to phoney “stimulus” cash to campaign donors and big finance).

And Iceland has snapped out of its depression. The rest of the West, where banks continue to behave exactly as they did prior to the crisis, not so much.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-08/guest-post-icelandic-success-story

For Kentxie: This is good read.....This is why you don't bailout failure. The United States should have let the banks fail.
 
Fannie and Freddie Employees Rake in the Big Bucks
By Aaron Task

PostsWebsiteRSSBy Aaron Task | Daily Ticker – 2 hours 23 minutes ago
If President Obama gets his way, a lot of folks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be paying higher taxes in 2013 -- and not just the senior executives.

More than 2,000 non-executive senior managers at the two firms were paid over $200,000 in 2011, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing a new report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Among those senior managers, the median pay of vice presidents was $388,000 while 1,650 "directors" had a median income of $205,300.

Other findings in the report:

The top 90 executives at the two firms took home a combined $92 million last year.
The median pay for 23 executive vice presidents was $1.7 million.
The median pay for 62 senior vice presidents was $723,500.

Always controversial, Fannie and Freddie have become lighting rods since being taken into conservatorship in 2008 and this report is (almost) guaranteed to generate a strong response.

On the one hand, taxpayers are still nearly $140 billion in the hole for the multiphase rescue of the two firms so reports of big salaries is sure to outrage many. On the other hand, the government has become increasingly reliant on the GSEs since the housing bubble burst: Fannie and Freddie guarantee $5 trillion in outstanding mortgages and fund about two-thirds of new mortgage loans, The WSJ reports.

Given their checkered past, working at Fannie and Freddie doesn't have the same cache as it did during their "glory years" in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the firms have a critical, ongoing role in the housing market which means that the government (and taxpayers) have an incentive to ensure the firms are staffed with qualified employees.

"It is absolutely critical that our compensation is competitive in the market," a Fannie spokeswoman tells The WSJ.

Setting aside whether industry compensation itself is out of whack, "the reality is Fannie and Freddie are non-competitive," says John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Markets. "To say they need to keep these executives around is the problem with bailouts more broadly."

Among others, Tamny thinks we'd all be better if the government had allowed Fannie and Freddie to fail.

"Someone with a clue about profits would have purchased them and they arguably would have fired all these employees who are clearly overpaid," he says. "This is why we have free markets so we can get rid of abuses like this — but then again, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don't exist in what anyone would remotely call a free market."

But getting rid of Fannie and Freddie is even harder to contemplate today versus before the housing bubble burst. Just as the banks became "too big to fail" after 2008, the GSEs are more deeply entrenched in the housing market than ever before, as noted above. In addition, Fannie and Freddie have become profitable again, providing a disincentive to lawmakers to rein them in any serious way.

Related: Liquidate Fannie & Freddie: Sheila Bair's Rx for the Financial System (Part 1)

In addition, Tamny notes that dissolving or unwinding Fannie and Freddie today would hit the Federal Reserve, which has become the "size-buyer" of mortgage-backed securities — and is likely to announce an expansion of its bond-buying program this week.

"In my perfect world we'd sell them off and there would be buyers," he says. "But you can't do that because you would probably take the Fed down with it."

Aaron Task is the host of The Daily Ticker and Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance. You can follow him on Twitter at @aarontask or email him at altask@yahoo.com
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And they blame the 1% RICH? These salaries are outragerous for 2 companies that is in receivership from the GOVT from going Bankrupt.

Govt Employees are becoming the 1%

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/dail...RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBHB0A3NlY3Rpb25z;_ylv=3
 
^^ These stories make me wonder if it could work on a larger scale, but I still have massive reservations that an economy the size of the US could do that same thing. So far ever country that seems to have gone this different route and done surprisingly well is, at the end of the day, very small and insignificant. If a larger economy did this and also ended up prospering then I'd give it due credit, but I still believe little countries can do what they like b/c the bigger forces out there, whether toxic or not, can absorb drastic changes in smaller ones, not sure it works the same way for the big ones.
 
Glad to see Daily Caller and the right wing continually harping on their dog whistle issues and digging their own graves. Good luck in 2014, guys!
 
Undocumented parishioners: Drinking the communion wine Americans can't be bothered to drink ...

A "Dedham man" is facing breaking and entering charges after being found lying in an area behind the altar of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End Wednesday morning, surrounded by candles, a bottle of sacramental wine, and a container of the eucharistic wafers, Boston police said.

Jorge Jose Guevara, 26, was arrested on a charge of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony, police said. Guevara was found on the floor inside the front storage area behind the altar surrounded by several battery-operated candles, the wine, and the wafers, police said.

http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/201...e-eucharist/EPQGp30L0Pmo20Hz98IcaK/story.html
 
underground said:
Glad to see Daily Caller and the right wing continually harping on their dog whistle issues and digging their own graves. Good luck in 2014, guys!
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So obviously we can't fault politicians for their hypocrisy, they're politicians - trained contradictions. But are you really behind this woman in what she stands for or are you just defending her (indefensible) position(s) on party lines. Eg: what would you REALLY do if some republican man made up some story about how he was 1/8th black or something.
 
Her "indefensible" position that her parents said she was a Native American, she believed them, and she ended up getting no demonstrable benefits from it? Oh right, the real issue here is <blows dog whistel> QUOTAS!QUOTAS!QUOTAS!WARONWHITEMEN!QUOTAS!QUOTAS!

Seriously, if you don't like her policies, whatever, that's perfectly fine. Just don't pretend "Liawatha" isn't some made up bullshit red meat to rile up the lowest common denominator right wing voter. Or do. Seriously, I don't care if you want to continue being the party of angry rich white men (thanks, Lindsey Graham for being at least being honest about it).
 
Pleas indulge us: Can you explain away her house flipping and her failure to pay the higher tax rate in MA too?
 
My interest in explaining even more pointless right wing talking points is beyond zero.
 
Non-discourse about non-discourse. This is meta, right? If you want to talk about actual policies and not made up controversies, I'm all ears.
 
underground said:
My interest in explaining even more pointless right wing talking points is beyond zero.
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That’s because you're IQ is Zero. Imagine I’m not even a right wing nut. I think both parties, Republicans and Democrats both suck.
 
so it matters zero to you what our elected leaders do personally; is that a fair assessment or is that just another underhanded CRAZY right wing corporate shuckster talking point trick.
 
bosdevelopment said:
so it matters zero to you what our elected leaders do personally; is that a fair assessment or is that just another underhanded CRAZY right wing corporate shuckster talking point trick.
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You're argument is presupposing that any of mud the Brown campaign tried to throw at Warren had any importance, let alone truth. She said she was Indian because her family said she was? Oh the horror! She supports Reagan era taxes on the wealthy while not currently paying that rate? That argument's just confusing, not to mention the fact that most Americans support those rate too.
 
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