Ronald Reagan and GW Bush - financial ignorance

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	FWC: "The depth of our financial ignorance [In America] is startling."
Date:	Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:07:36 -0700
From:	Jas Jain

"The depth of our financial ignorance [In America] is startling."

"Financial ignorance" was made certain by breeding Americans into irremediable dopes in the areas of economics, investments and political system of democracy. Of course, the American gospel was spread to the rest of the world, most certainly to Indians, the backward people in great need of American enlightenment with propaganda being the most effective and the preferred American tool. Propaganda business has taken over India just as it has in America. Hundreds of thousand people make a good living by means of propaganda in America and India.

 

Ronald Reagan and GW Bush have displayed total "financial ignorance" and propagandists like Lying Kudlow and Rush Limbaugh keep pushing the same "supply side" and "tax cuts " fake religion. Propagandist Paul Krooksman preaches another brand of fake religion. They all serve the crooks and that is why they have cushy jobs! Propagandists need ignoramuses, or dopes, and vice versa! And Americans love brand names and cult of personality is very strong now that the cult of God has been diminished.

Jas

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/07/05/100705ta_talk_surowiecki?printable=true#ixzz0sAqjcoNc

The Financial Page

Greater Fools

by James Surowiecki July 5, 2010

Halfway through his Presidency, George W. Bush called on the country to build "an ownership society." He trumpeted the soaring rate of U.S. homeownership, and extolled the virtues of giving individuals more control over their own financial lives. It was a comforting vision, but, as we now know, behind it was a bleak reality—bad subprime loans, mountains of credit-card debt, and shrinking pensions—reflecting a simple fact: when it comes to financial matters, many Americans have been left without a clue.

The depth of our financial ignorance is startling. In recent years, Annamaria Lusardi, an economist at Dartmouth and the head of the Financial Literacy Center, has conducted extensive studies of what Americans know about finance. It's depressing work. Almost half of those surveyed couldn't answer two questions about inflation and interest rates correctly, and slightly more sophisticated topics baffle a majority of people. Many people don't know the terms of their mortgage or the interest rate they're paying. And, at a time when we're borrowing more than ever, most Americans can't explain what compound interest is.
Financial illiteracy isn't new, but the consequences have become more severe, because people now have to take so much responsibility for their financial lives. Pensions have been replaced with 401(k)s; many workers have to buy their own health insurance; and so on. The financial marketplace, meanwhile, has become a dizzying emporium of choice and easy credit. The decisions are more numerous and complex than ever before. As Lusardi puts it, "It's like we've opened a faucet, and told people they can draw as much water as they want, and it's up to them to decide when they've had enough. But we haven't given people the tools to decide how much is too much."
Unsurprisingly, the less people know, the more they run into trouble. Gary Rivlin's blistering new examination of the subprime economy, "Broke, U.S.A.," is full of stories of financially ignorant people bamboozled into making bad decisions—refinancing out of low-interest mortgages, say, or buying overpriced credit insurance—by a consumer finance industry adept at creating confusing products. Such stories are backed up by the numbers. A study by economists at the Atlanta Fed found that thirty per cent of people in the lowest quartile of financial literacy thought they had a fixed-rate mortgage when in fact they had an adjustable-rate one. A study of subprime borrowers in the Northeast found that, of the people who scored in the bottom quartile on a very basic test of calculation skills, a full twenty per cent had been foreclosed on, compared with just five per cent of those in the top quartile.
...