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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Ok, can we get political for a second?
I know nobody really likes to get into politics on here, but I don't think we have discussed the whole Occupy Wall Street thing here. What are your thoughts on it? Do you think the momentum will continue to pick up? Do you think any real change will come about from it?
It seems like on one side you have the protesters who are fed up with the state of our economy, bailing out of banks, lack of job opportunities, etc.
On the other hand you have the people who are basically saying "stop complaining and be thankful for what you have" and that if you want to be successful you have to work for it and not depend on the government. So where do you stand?
I have mixed feelings and am somewhere in the middle-as usual.
Re: Ok, can we get political for a second?
I agree. I also think people are frustrated, for a variety of reasons and are using this as an outlet with no singular agenda or precise demands. Yes, things suck. What else do you have to say?
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I on board with it.
I think you're right that they don't have a clear set of demands/complaints but I think that's OK for now.
I think the general complaint is that corporations have too much influence on our political system and this is having bad effects throughout our society and country. I think they are just trying to raise consciousness at this point and bring some light to this issue.
What exactly are the demands of the Tea Party?
I can definitely get behind some of the things they are mad about. Yes, I think its wrong that banks get bailed out. I think its wrong when huge corporations have mass layoffs but their CEOs get million dollar bonuses. I'm just not sure how congregating on Wall Street is going to change things. Why aren't they doing more in DC and demanding to talk to their elected clowns?
If you have seen the "I am the 99%" website, its pretty depressing. However {puts on flame suit} 90% of the people seem to be complaining about the fact that they have student loans. Well-what did you expect? Did you not know how much your education was going to cost you when you made the decision to finance it? I get that there is frustration upon graduating from school and not being able to find a job and being loaded with debt....but how is your student loan liability someone else's problem?
I think they are fine for now. I agree with most of their general goals/objectives (although they are certainly aiming high, aren't they?) and I think they're just kind of epitomizing the general feeling that is very common right now of "being mad and not wanting to take it anymore."
But I think you only have a limited time to just protest. you have people's attention, now what are you going to do with it? the Tea Party was able to appeal to more conservative politicians who ran as Republicans, yes, but as Tea Party Republicans and were able to push some of the more moderates out. These protestors would actually do well to follow that example. Run some candidates, become more of a grassroots political campaign and less of just protesting-in-the-street, etc.
I asked DH to explain the protests to me because I thought I was missing something. None of the protestors seemed to be on the same page so I thought I didn't understand why they were protesting. I get that they are upset/frustrated but they need to have the same agenda to strengthen their efforts.
Re: the SLs. I think there are two schools of thought there, one I agree with and another I don't. The one I don't agree with is that "we" (our generation, those with SLs, I dunno) were promised that if we did everything right and went to school and got degrees we would get well-paying jobs, and so the SLs would be worth it. Like I said I don't agree with this - the holes in this theory are visible from a mile away - who promised you? What constitutes "doing everything right?" Getting well-paying jobs? etc etc. It's a sense of entitlement that just ticks me off.
Oh wait I lied. I guess there are three schools of thought (in my opinion) and I'm not sure I agree with any of them.
the second one that I sympathize with but dont necessarily agree with (since DH and I pay 1600 a month in SLs) is that without SL payments, you would have a generation with a lot more disposable income. The amount of SLs that we have (as a generation in general,and specifically for H and I) impacts when we can buy houses, get new cars, spend money (ie stimulate the economy) and so. It's going to have long-term effects. Now H and I went to law school so we are okay with our loans, we knew we were going to have them and they'd suck. My brother went to medical school and has significant SLs and same deal. So its kind of a "they suck but what did you expect" mindset for us at any rate.
But there are movements to help people dealing with all sorts of other debt - CC debt, mortgages, and I mean, let's pay billions to failing banks and car companies. So I think some people with significant SL debt see that and kind of have the attitude of "well where's mine?" Is it right? No and I don't really subscribe to that school of thought. But I can see the process behind it.
The third school of thought as I see it is much more problematic. Sometimes SLs are TOO easy to get with little education about interest rates (mine weren't set in stone until after I graduated, when they locked in at 7%. My brother's loans from undergrad are at like 2%. How were we supposed to know the rates would skyrocket like that?) You are also given little education about the repayment plans, what your payments will look like, etc, or it is purposely hard to find. I took out over 100k in SLs for law school and I think for more than half of that I just clicked a box that said "accept" and I signed the Master Promissory Note, which was not as indepth as you might expect. My GradPlus loans? My lender asked me how much I wanted. It is a huge business for these companies (which makes sense at 7% interest.) And the data post-graduation for employment is hopelessly skewed. Everyone says "well you should know that X" well everyone who bought a house in 2006 should have known that eventually the market would burst, you know what I mean? And I mean people take out 200k for undergrad degrees for careers where they will be paying those loans back forever. So I think student loans are too easy to get with too little education/information required, similar to mortgages several years ago.
So like I said I knew what I was getting into with law school loans so while I complain about them (1600 a month!) I'm not really complaining as in 'I shouldn't have to pay these." It just sucks ha.
Oh and also, as long as higher education costs keep spiraling upward at the rate they are, student loans are going to become a bigger and bigger problem because it will just become one of the only ways to afford school (particularly grad schools such as law and medical schools.)
I agree w/ Remy about a lot of the "We are the 99%" complaints being from 20 somethings w/ high student loans - I feel bad, but seriously, did you not realize there aren't alot of jobs for BAs in History and English and MFAs in Creative Writing? Unfortunately, its not in the schools interests to tell students how employable they will be with these kinds of degrees. They should have researched the career options better (and I am in the same boat, I should have taken a better look at my post grad options too).
I don't understand why people find it so hard to comprehend that the protestors have a broad range of complaints. Does everything have to fit into 5 bullet points or its too disorganized to bother trying to discern.
and to piggy back on Becky - the tuition for college and grad schools keeps rising, but the education or employability of the students for that tuition isn't necessarily rising. They keep builiding more fitness centers and better dorms, etc. but is that improving education?
You just described my good friend who went to school for yeeeeeeeeeaaaaarrsssss....and now works in a restaurant. She was one of the ones posting on FB about student loan forgiveness.
It's the damn rankings. Schools want to be the best campus, newest facilities, etc. It's about marketing .Which I don't fully blame them for but at the same time I'd rather see professors' salaries increase.
Because it comes off as "My life sucks!" "Hey! MY life sucks!" "Mine too!" which is not helpful. I feel like I'm going to get screwed over by SS but I'm not going to join their masses and think that something is going to come of it. You can only *** and moan so long before you actually need to do something about it.
And I DO think there's some personal accountability for choosing a low-paying major. You can't simply follow your passion and expect someone to pay you a high wage for it.
Student loans suck but you mitigate their impact by performing a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis. If you aren't eventually going to get out what you put in, don't do it. If someone was blind-sided by not getting as much out of an Ivy League art-history major as they put in, the onus is not on Wall Street or the Federal government or the tax payers or whomever. That's on their failed risk assessment.
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I think they are just posting personal stories as illustration - not OMG, my life is so hard. Just, "I'm an example of a person who got screwed by the "system" and this how."
I agree with you to a point, but the cost benefit analysis is not necessarily a skill that is taught to young people - at home or at school/university either. And, if you spend your childhood and education just being pushed and pushed to go to college, go to college, go to college, nobody seems to tell you what to do after that. Granted I went to college in the early 90's, but I NEVER had an administrator or academic advisor discuss career plans with me except in the vaguest terms and I have a poli sci degree FFS.
Not to mention people are taking their own bailouts like strategic defaulting and bankruptcy. Normally these things killed any financial future you had but these days, I've seen them working as strategic tools for certain people.
And I know this might get me torched for being insensitive but at some point, bailing out individuals who got themselves into a mess by making questionable decisions (decisions which, in this economy have turned from questionable to just plain bad) infringes on the rewards that should be reserved for people who make good decisions. Make no mistake, I know that not everyone's sad situation boils down to their own decision-making but a lot of times it does. You can help people out to make up for a crappy starting spot, you can help people out to keep things better for everyone, you can help people out simply for the good of mankind but at what point do you stop helping people out because they did things that are their own fault? At what point does that marginalize the reward for being smart or working hard? I think we're at the point where those are critical questions.
Our Share of the Harvest:How a couple cooks from a CSA share. Pick Up Day Week 15
Well in response to Mary's point - its not like foreclosures and short sales are something new, they just have become infinitely more socially acceptable. Which is another problem that I think goes to our society at large - not paying your debts has become something almost....I dunno...not "cool" but I guess just acceptable. You don't want to pay your SLs? Okay you go into default. You don't want to pay your mortgage? Okay you go into foreclosure. These things are no longer the rarities I feel they once were (or were once made out to be at any rate.) I feel like several times a week there's a post on MM about how someone wants to walk away from their mortgage because they have just outgrown the house or its no longer ideal or something. So it ties back into personal responsibility but also how our society's values have changed.
But also re: personal responsibility - I definitely think it's important and I certainly feel that I have it ha, but I think the cries of "take responsibility for yourself!" overlook the fact that a lot of these "deals" are designed to limit what you know. A poster on PCE has a quote from Elizabeth Warren about credit card agreements that I think is pretty dead-on in terms of how hard they are to understand. do you think that's an accident? Of course not. I don't want to say "they are trying to screw the consumer" because that's too extreme and personal responsibility does play a large part. But it's also not like the system is designed to help you be aware of what you are doing when you sign on the dotted line, which is where I think tighter regulations come into play. (And before we start saying how its still their responsibility and if you dont know you shouldnt sign or you should make an effort to educate yourself, in a country where people dont know who the Vice President is or don't think that Medicare is a government-run program, I'm not really surprised that people aren't doing tons of research before getting a new credit card because omg free money!!!! Cash rewards!!!)
Isn't this the million dollar question indeed!
I think for many politicians, when it comes to mortgage help, bank bailouts, etc, there's a sense of "lets wipe the slate clean and start again." Some people are in crappy spots completely of their own making, some were pushed there by other forces with some help of their own, etc. - but I think across the board for many people there's a sense of "things got really really screwed up, let's just start fresh."
the problem with that of course is that you can't start fresh. You can't just say "well you got screwed with your mortgage so you dont have to pay anymore." (I am being extreme in my example) - because what then with the people who played by the rules and saved for a significant DP (or are waiting to buy.... ::raises hand::) the more people you "bail out" the more people are going to say "i want mine." That's where issues like the SL forgiveness come into play - why do they get help with their debt but I don't? Why do they get help with their CCs but I don't? and so on and so forth. It does become a slippery slope as much as I hate that term sometimes because eventually you are rewarding those who made horrible decisions even when they knew those decisions weren't good.
Unfortunately when you bailed out the people who had the one of the biggest roles in this mortgage fiasco - the big banks - it becomes hard to say "them not you." Or at least it is not politically popular, esp as the economy continued to slide after the bailout and for many people got worse.
I like the idea of the protests in that I'm pissed off by a lot of the big bank/corporate related stuff that's gone down. I'm a little dissapointed (but not surprised) by how they are actually turning out. My views: I think the "too big to fail" mentality of our government is f'd in the head, and I think recent court decisions giving corporations advantages over consumers is wrong and I think that corporate funded lobbying is totally out of hand. But I'm not on board with just generally protesting "corporate greed" because really - what does that even mean? It's a company. It exists to make money. It's like protesting human breathing. It's silly.
This kinda confuses me. Maybe I'm misreading. But don't you think that if there were huge protests of young people voicing their displeasure with SS that maybe politicians wouldn't be so terrified of touching it? The only group that is screaming about SS is the freakin' AARP. And everybody knows that their members vote. Maybe if more people our age were loudly and publicly pissed off about it, and actually got their butts into a voting booth, somebody would actually get the balls to do something about it.
Can you imagine a politician running (and winning!) on a platform of real SS reform where the voices of the people who are going to be screwed by it actually drown out the voices of old people who are convinced that we're going to take their checks away? We're almost there, finally - but it took our country teetering on the brink of bankruptcy to even get the politicians to talk about it. We might have fixed the problem a long time ago if there was some balance to the issue - if the people on our end actually got off their butts and made their voices heard outside of facebook. Anyway...my long and rambly point: sometimes protesting (in general) is doing something about it.
But these protests in particular? I'm not convinced that these are actually doing anything, and I don't think they will do anything until they find a candidate or an actual workable platform to support.
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Yes, I meant if I took my one cause that I was pissed about and joined all the other people with their own causes they are pissed about on Wall Street. A one-protest-fits-most approach is just asinine.
An organized singular voice demanding SS reform? THAT would get some attention, particularly if there were action items suggested by the protesting group. I'd be in on that.
Similarly, I think maybe you'd get SL/higher ed reform if this occupy WS stuff was at all organized/unified. As it is, it seems like a flash mob temper tantrum.
Our Share of the Harvest:How a couple cooks from a CSA share. Pick Up Day Week 15
You know that the banks have paid back most of the TARP money- right?
As of April 2010 $169B of the $245B "loaned" to various banks along with GM had been repaid (more accurately bought back from the gov't) I don't mean to sound like a b!tch- but if you compare that repayment record w/ all of the 99% stories, well, frankly, extending more credit to these people is a bad idea. I have no problem with re-working the tax code, but I do have a problem with outright loan/credit forgiveness.
Just as I don't think that the death penalty is an effective deterrent to crime, I don't think forgiving people loans, is a good way to teach fiscal responsibility.
I agree with Warren Buffet, I think the mega-rich should pay more taxes- just let the current tax breaks for the mega-rich expire and have their rates go back to what they were in the 80s/90s.
Having worked on Wall Street, including one of the too-big-fail giants, I get it, and the fact that several of the banks are too big to fail is scary, but would it be any safer to have government controlled banks? or is that basically what we have now in those too-big-to-fail institutions?
I have serious issues w/ the influence lobbyists/special interest groups have in Washington, but I don't see the financial industry as the root of all evil. I have a much bigger issue w/ the fact that Monsanto execs basically have a revolving door of employment w/ senior positions in the FDA, oil companies getting subsidies, etc.
For disclosure purposes, my DH works for a bank. One that is rather conservative in terms of credit, but it did sell some assets to the gov't as part of TARP and it has bought them all back.
Ah, ok. then yes, total agreement.
My Goodness...another food blog. Featuring: Macarons from a old post with a photo taken by my mom for a break from my crappy food photos!
I agree. I think they are a little disorganized, but if you look around the country this is going on in almost every major city.(look on FB, there is an Occupy any major city) That has to show the politicians something. There are thousands of people protesting big corporation bailouts all over the country. It makes me feel good that this is going on. Someone needed to speak up. Do I think they need a clear agenda..yes. Are they getting a point across...yes.