Ken's Comments

Excluding Muslims - no, I don't agree with that concept.  First, it is wrong to single out people based on religion and, as a practical matter, how are you going to do it. Where The Donald is right is that the current method for screening immigrants is broken.  What Trump should have said was that all immigration should be halted while the process is fixed and not singled out just Muslims. But if you have any question about whether the process is broken, just watch this video of a Dept. of Homeland Security high official testifying in Congress.  You cannot, after watching this, tell me you have any confidence in the Federal Government's ability to prevent terrorists from entering the country right now. https://www.facebook.com/RepDeSantis/videos/1001434629914597/?theater

I've been good at criticizing what is wrong with the economy, let me take a moment and say what I would have done differently to try to prevent us from getting to where we are right now. The answer starts in the approach - I would have attacked the problem from the bottom up, not the top down. There are a number of steps that could have been taken back when all this started to isolate the economic harm and create a gradual downturn instead of what did happen, which resulted in the economy falling off a cliff. This would not have been without pain, but a lot of the pain would have been absorbed by the lender, borrowers, and investors who took agreed to the risk of pain in the hope of financial reward. However, I think the result would have been fewer foreclosures and less people out of work. Ironically, both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have talked about trying to reduce foreclosures, but neither has any significant accomplishments. That's because th...

President Obama did a very good thing yesterday. He took executives of credit card companies to the woodshed in a private meeting with them. The President then outlined a list of practices he wants to see credit card companies implement. Congratulations to President Obama for doing a very good thing. Credit card companies have long used scads of small print to mislead consumers and to be able to change terms at a whim from those the consumer agreed to at the time of entering into the contract to borrow. These have included shortening payment cycles, raising interest rates, and imposing penalties. The result is that some Americans are deeper in debt merely because of these changes and not because of their borrowing habits. There is a proper use for government regulation and this is it. President Obama has called for clear disclosure of credit card terms, ending the unilateral ability of credit card companies to change the contract terms with little or no notice and, most important...