Thanks as always to our host Clayton for posting this item, which falls neatly into place amid an ongoing discussion we've had on the nature of 'social realism' in entertainment products.
This also serves as a sort of bookend, to an economic reality I have long recognized as the underlying hypocrisy and duplicity attending all attempts to better one's lot within the vast system of fiscal activity we know as American life.
On this end, one must undertake to deceive the public sector on the nature of one's 'poverty' in order to cash in on its largesse, or simply to prevent it from digging too deep in one's pockets. But on the other end, if one is to secure the benefits to be found from the financial industry (also known erroneously as 'the private sector'), one is at pains to exaggerate the extent of one's wealth.
A simple way to express this permanent conundrum might be:
Tell one set of lies to 'the government' to keep what you got, tell another to the bankers to try and get more.
My reading of the financial crisis of 2008-09 is simply that it turned out a whole lot of folks had been telling this latter sort of lies for quite some time already, using the financial industry as a kind of source of low-hanging fruit because the bankers hadn't been all that concerned with whether or not a whole lot of incoming applicants for their services had been telling the truth. The results of this particular Big Lie coming into the light were, by some accounts, catastrophic.
I have no doubt at all that some overwhelming majority of those who had lied to the banks to 'buy' a house were also in the habit of lying to various official bodies to try and keep it.
Or as Credence Clearwater had once so eloquently put it:
'But when the Tax Man come to the door,
ooh, the house look like a rummage sale, y'all....'
There is a lot of talk in current circulation in which the term 'corruption' is most often asserted as self-defining, but in which the specific nature of what exactly this corruption consists of is rarely mentioned. For my own purposes, one can readily begin to identify what actions on anyone's part might be accurately described as 'corrupt', based primarily on the question of who is trying to cook which set of books in order to deceive whom:: they are either seeking to exaggerate their assets in order to acquire more assets, or they are trying to conceal their existing assets in order to keep them.
Or both (!), as I suspect is most often the case.
To the extent that either public- or private-sector shenanigans may be defined as 'corrupt', sooner or later the presence of the one kind of deceit, or the other, or both, must be acknowledged.
If you really want to know why it is that so many Americans can live so well but with no visible indication of what so many of those in our midst had ever done to secure such much-envied status, I'd say look for 'both.'
You're sure to find them, especially in the realm of this 'affordable housing' racket: while one set of liars calling themselves 'contractors' is allowed to profit from building sub-standard structures and then pocketing the further profits to be extracted from systematically neglecting to maintain them, another set of liars is pretending to be more poor than they really are in order to move in, whereupon they go right out and apply for high-limit credit cards and loans to buy brand-new cars, just before they sit down to fill out their 'tax returns' and go back to pretending to be so poor they need the government to give them a free house.
Thanks as always to our host Clayton for posting this item, which falls neatly into place amid an ongoing discussion we've had on the nature of 'social realism' in entertainment products.
This also serves as a sort of bookend, to an economic reality I have long recognized as the underlying hypocrisy and duplicity attending all attempts to better one's lot within the vast system of fiscal activity we know as American life.
On this end, one must undertake to deceive the public sector on the nature of one's 'poverty' in order to cash in on its largesse, or simply to prevent it from digging too deep in one's pockets. But on the other end, if one is to secure the benefits to be found from the financial industry (also known erroneously as 'the private sector'), one is at pains to exaggerate the extent of one's wealth.
A simple way to express this permanent conundrum might be:
Tell one set of lies to 'the government' to keep what you got, tell another to the bankers to try and get more.
My reading of the financial crisis of 2008-09 is simply that it turned out a whole lot of folks had been telling this latter sort of lies for quite some time already, using the financial industry as a kind of source of low-hanging fruit because the bankers hadn't been all that concerned with whether or not a whole lot of incoming applicants for their services had been telling the truth. The results of this particular Big Lie coming into the light were, by some accounts, catastrophic.
I have no doubt at all that some overwhelming majority of those who had lied to the banks to 'buy' a house were also in the habit of lying to various official bodies to try and keep it.
Or as Credence Clearwater had once so eloquently put it:
'But when the Tax Man come to the door,
ooh, the house look like a rummage sale, y'all....'
There is a lot of talk in current circulation in which the term 'corruption' is most often asserted as self-defining, but in which the specific nature of what exactly this corruption consists of is rarely mentioned. For my own purposes, one can readily begin to identify what actions on anyone's part might be accurately described as 'corrupt', based primarily on the question of who is trying to cook which set of books in order to deceive whom:: they are either seeking to exaggerate their assets in order to acquire more assets, or they are trying to conceal their existing assets in order to keep them.
Or both (!), as I suspect is most often the case.
To the extent that either public- or private-sector shenanigans may be defined as 'corrupt', sooner or later the presence of the one kind of deceit, or the other, or both, must be acknowledged.
If you really want to know why it is that so many Americans can live so well but with no visible indication of what so many of those in our midst had ever done to secure such much-envied status, I'd say look for 'both.'
You're sure to find them, especially in the realm of this 'affordable housing' racket: while one set of liars calling themselves 'contractors' is allowed to profit from building sub-standard structures and then pocketing the further profits to be extracted from systematically neglecting to maintain them, another set of liars is pretending to be more poor than they really are in order to move in, whereupon they go right out and apply for high-limit credit cards and loans to buy brand-new cars, just before they sit down to fill out their 'tax returns' and go back to pretending to be so poor they need the government to give them a free house.