To be considered a bank, you have to be chartered as such by the Federal Reserve. S&Ls and credit unions are chartered too, but their charters are different. There used to be two kinds of banks, commercial banks and investment banks but, some time ago, the laws were changed so that one bank can be both things. After the last financial crisis, when some of the biggest banks had to be bailed out, there was some talk about re-separating the commercial banks from the investment banks, but I don't think that anything ever came of it. For people like you and me, there is no significant difference between an S&L or credit union and a bank. They all take in deposits, loan out money, and provide checking accounts. If we were big shot wheeler dealers, we would be more likely to use banks than the other things. I'm not sure why, but it probably has something to do with the size of the loans they provide and their intended purpose. If we were borrowing millions of dollars to buy out another company, we would need to go to a bank while, if we just want to buy a house or a car, our local credit union would do just fine.
Although our current government is far from perfect, most of us right wing nuts believe that you guys want to make it worse, not better. Therefore, gridlock is better than sliding further down the slippery slope to totalitarian socialism. I suppose it might be possible to slide back up the slope too, but that's not likely to happen any time soon. It's like somebody said in Alice in Wonderland, "These days you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place."
Once before you challenged me to identify what time in political history I would like to go back to, and I couldn't do it. The best I could come up with was to say that it's not so much where you are as it is in what direction you are heading. Like back in the days when the ink was still wet on the constitution, they had slavery, but lots of people were working to abolish it, so there was reason to believe that the future would be better than the present. Nowadays, all we've got to look forward to is "another day older and deeper in debt".
Take poverty, for example. Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty way back in the 60s. Since then, lots of money has been spent on numerous programs, but what has been gained? According to your own liberal people's statements, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider now than it has ever been, an increasingly smaller number of people have an increasingly larger share of the wealth, and the "middle class" is fading away. It looks like they are losing the War on Poverty, so what do they propose to do? Why, just spend more money on more programs! I think that, if it were possible to spend your way out of poverty, we would all be rich as kings by now.
So what do we do about all those poor people? You said something about feeding the poor, but all that does is perpetuate the cycle. Some of my conservative colleagues want to just cut them off cold turkey, but that won't work either. If you regularly put out food for birds or other wildlife, they become dependent on it and, if you suddenly cut them off in the middle of winter, a lot of them won't make it till spring. If you care about these creatures, but don't want them dependent on you, wait until summer when their natural food is abundant, and then wean them off gradually.
Since the War on Poverty was declared, I have watched the employment situation in this country slide steadily down hill. What they need to do first is restore the good paying jobs that we had in the 60s, then they can talk about getting people off of government assistance. Don't tell me that it can't be done, if they can put a man on the Moon they can do anything!
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