Weena wrote:
Feds own 30% of US lands, and thanks mostly to hybrid driving people who like the smell of their own farts, it's not used productively.
That's a statistic that gets kicked around by right-wing interests that have a vested interest in making the government the bad guy so they can profiteer unmolested.
30% of US lands...New Mexico? Nevada? Utah? Alaska? Nebraska? Montana? That's what most of that 30% figure is. Hardly prime real estate. Air Force and NASA bases have huge footprints, too.
Besides the abject wasteland that makes up most of government possession are forests and coal fields in the Midwest and Southeast. That's where the controversy starts.
The reason these interests want US possessions broken up and sold is so they can slash-and-burn, or strip-mine, or otherwise cash in on those properties for nothing, and give the nearby populations no enduring benefit.
How would it benefit the American people - anyone but wealthy corporations - to sell off public land for pennies on the dollar so the resources can be swiftly extracted and the land's spiritual and economic value reduced to zero, forever, overnight?
TLDR: You can't compare urban/surburban real estate with virgin land or wastelands.
Is that buying us a future, or long-term prosperity, or just letting a few rich interests line their pockets?
Weena wrote:
Why Fannie and Freddie haven't been shot and dropped in a river somewhere is beyond me.
You could say the same about any banking interest.
Fannie and Freddie get heat for their proximity to the government, but Bank of America and other private banks that passed loans out of greed are at least as guilty. That's private industry - the guys on the other side of the fence from the bogeymen in Congress - and they haven't gotten dropped in a river, or crucified, as particular FUBU denizens prefer, either.
You also overlook that although Goldman Sachs and other derivative investors didn't take handouts directly, they nonetheless benefited immensely - and know it. Their holdings in other companies and derivative investments would have been reduced to zero and pretty much every investment firm would have gone bottom-up if the government hadn't acted.
FnF, BoA, Sachs...they are all involved with the government because they either asked to be - or they made it necessary. Someone made a buck.
It's plausible to at least make the argument that the government deserved blame for forcing banks to make loans to the undeserving. But what you can't blame the government for is that other banks decided to speculate on those bad loans (i.e., derivatives). The reality of the latter negates the former because the overall theme is the same: banks were greedy then bit the hand they begged for feed.