Slashdot Mirror
National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit
hackingbear writes "The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the US debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe." Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Deficits don't matter. All that matters is that your dogs are bigger and meaner than the debt collectors'.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The largest bit became a one? It overflowed?
So now it's negative?
We're rich! So that's how we were going to pay for the bail-out, SS, medicare, medicaid...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I think I understand now...eventually we're going to get to the point where no computer will be able to track how high the debt gets...and it will simply rollover and the US economy is back, baby!
Why don't they just make it an analog clock? The hands could simply spin around faster and faster as the situation worsens, which would be much more amusing. The numbers are fairly meaningless anyway.
This is the second debt clock. The first version could only count upward, and when the budget had a surplus back in the Clinton years, and the debt began to decrease, the debt clock was shut down. After a year or so, it was then replaced with the current version, which has the ability to count both upward and downward. The downward capability has not been used during the Bush years.
Perhaps they can get a new model that displays the debt in scientific notation -- it could be named the "Cheney Memorial Clock".
First of all, 2.7 in 1989 are worth more than the same amount in 2007. Inflation calculator says 2.7 trillion in 1989 equal 4.6 trillion in 2008.
Secondly, what's really important is the debt-per-capita ratio, and the US population has increased. In 1989 the US population was 246 million; in 2008, it's 305 million.
That means, that in 2008 dollars equivalent, the per-capita debt in 1989 was $18,000, while in 2008, the per capita debt is $32,000.
Yes, we do owe more. But we "only", per capita and in equivalent monetary value, owe about 80% more, as opposed to 370% more, as the original numbers would make you believe.
For 2007, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists listed the U.S. with about 5,400 total nuclear warheads.
So that means each warhead is worth about $1,879,741,432 each.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' [CC] but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Why does this guy hate America so much?
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Now is the perfect time to convert to the decimal system!
National debt goes from $10.2 trillion to only $10.2 billion (10^6) without paying a single cent of it!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Consider repaying $1000/month on your credit card. For many people that might be hardship. For most people, repaying $2000/month is not 2 times as hard, butmuch harder.
Similarly, repaying $18k per person is a lot easier than repaying $32k, by much more than a factor of 2.
Of course that's all academic since nobody seems to be planning on repaying this debt.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
OMG the dollar sign is static... it's the end of the world!!!!
You're right. After the upcoming total economic collapse, we'll need the clock to be able to display the debt in terms of Chinese yuan or Euros. The current design does not allow for that.
I remember when the debt hit 1 trillion dollars in the early 80's. All the talk about how a trillion dollar bills would stack to the moon 3 times over, or something like that. I remember a Johnny Carson monologue where he said, "if you have 1 trillion chicken McNuggets you could reconstruct 3 chickens" :)
I remember that being the first time I every really started worrying about it. I figured its ok, they'll get it under control sooner or later. Well here we are about 25 years later, the only time it has looked like it might be under control was during Clinton's second term. This is really getting ridiculous, the over the last 25-30 years the vast increases have come under the "conservative" Republicans. We have to get this under control or it will eventually destroy our Country.
So hear I am again, really worrying this time, but I figured its ok, they'll get it under control sooner or later.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
My prediction: By 2013 National Debt will = GDP
Total US 2007 GDP: $13.78 trillion
The reason the debt clock has this problem is because it is sensationalistic and does not give us any real information. What we should be looking at is not the debt, but the debt in relation to some other metric, such as multiple of median income, amount per person, percentage of GDP. Using this later metric, Reagan left us with a debt of about 70% of GDP, Bush will leave us with a debt of 80% of GDP, while Clinton left us with a debt of about 60% of GDP. It is interesting to think that Truman, Ike, Kennedy and even Nixon, all worked to help the US future by reducing the % debt. We even have to give carter so kudos for not increasing it as a % of GDP. The scary thing is that during the great depression GDP fell perhaps 20 or 25%. If this happened in the next few years, our GDP might fall to 9.5 trillion, and we might see a national debt of 110% of GDP. This would be like a family with the median of $50,000 having unsecured debt of $55,0000. How they would pay this off would be extremely unclear.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Yes because the Euro is doing so great compared to that dollar right now.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I'm sure they can borrow a "1" from a gas station.
Actually I was thinking that they could put a glass window in the sign and have Ron Paul stand in for the "1".
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
10,150,603,734,720.00 (decimal) = 93,B5F,213,EC0.00 (hex)
Whoever came up with the idea of buying a new LCD clock should be fired for wastefulness.
If you really think the big O and his compatriots in Congress are going to lower government spending, think again.
The idiot Republicans spent like that because they wanted people to think "they cared". Their spending was a poor imitation of Democrats.
In January, you will have the real deal and they can't save money by gutting the military like Clinton did.
Display the count in binary and you're all set!
When Michael Larson was on the mid-1980's game show, "Press Your Luck", the scoreboard only held 5 digits and a dollar sign. When Michael broke the $100,000 barrier, they removed the dollar sign to accommodate the next digit. Sounds exactly like what happened here, except the national debt is no game show.
The debt clock gives a per family portion. ~$86k. Compare that with the median income. Whoo!
not too long ago
dude they stopped counting on April 14, 1994. Did Somebody Say McLiar?.
What "fiscal conservatives"!
But wait, the debt has grown insanely under every single Republican president in the last 40 years.
How could that be?
The Republicans aren't fiscally conservative at all. Every single republican president has spent like a drunken sailor and GWB is the worst of the lot.
The only thing more stupid than Tax and Spend is Spend and Spend.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
If you spend a lot on your administration, to win over voters or do whatever it is you want, then when the Democrat gets into office, he or she will be forced to cut spending so as to create a surplus while keeping the Republican's low taxes, lest they get "tax hike" backlash. At the same time, whenever "starve the beast" fails, deficits don't matter, or deficits are the grease that keeps the gears of the economy going.
Republican politicians like McCain say we're supposed to reduce spending, (in order to reduce national debt, though this step on the flowchart may be skipped depending on the audience), and we also should reduce taxes further, but then how will we get rid of the national debt?
Furthermore, if the Republicans are to perpetually starve the beast and fail, clearly their strategy needs to change. They need to raise deficits so much that the interest itself is as burdensome as the current deficit levels by themselves. That, and if the Republicans are perpetually starving the beast, maybe they should at least be doing so with programs like national healthc----oh, wait.
The preferred method of starving the beast is through increases in the national defense budget, it would seem. John McCain has expressed need for a spending freeze in all areas but that, which would cut off funding for new NASA projects (which aren't entitlements, including Orion, which was approved in a separate bill), while his close colleague Lindsey Graham wants to cut the budget by 5% in all areas but national defense.
Wow! I hoped it would never come to this, but I guess I have to move to China! Even if we never touch the principal, the interest alone is enough that the US likely won't get ahead.
If I owe you a hundred dollars, I have a problem.
If I owe you a hundred billion dollars, you have a problem.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
For some very loose definitions of keeping. I'm not sure I can legally own a pistol in my state.
Sort of a Moore's Law for debt, eh?
Every 2 terms of republican presidency, the national debt increases by a factor of 10. :D
Incidentally, anyone know what 1989's $2.7 Trillion is in today's dollars?
Just because Bush claims to be a conservative doesn't mean he actually is one!
The US has an incredibly interventionist foreign policy, and Americans haven't experienced a free market for almost a century.
Historically, that _is_ conservative. Free markets are a hallmark of classical liberalism. Around much of the world outside the US, politics, that's still what those words mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
Bush has a lot more historical standing in claiming to be a conservative than a laissez-faire National Review follower would, and certainly he's been socially conservative (an area where, as opposed to economics, there isn't a huge difference of opinions over what's liberal and what's conservative).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
A quadrillion dollars should be enough for anybody.
about 1.3599 better
Socialism requires the government to help and assist those with less money.
Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism.
It's a completely different type of wasteful spending. If the bush years were actually socialist then everybody would have benefited and lower income Americans would have seen an improvement--seeing as things have just gotten harder and worse off it's insulting to socialism, as flawed as it is, to call taking from the poor to give to the rich as a socialist agenda.
Actually the debt realtive to the GDP went down which is all that matters.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
let me know when joe sixpack can own a joint strike fighter and a few smart missiles.
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This says $2.7 trillion in 1989 = $4.46 trillion in 2007 (no data for 2008 yet).
And when that (inevitably) threatens to overflow, do it in scientific notation. The Neocons and their supports won't understand it, and hopefully leave economic policy to people who don't think you can fix the economy by praying in public for lower gasoline prices.
I can see it now
American debt: B-u-f-f-e-r-o-v-e-r-f-l-o-w
I'm a god hating, baby aborting, marx reading liberal.
Deficits don't matter. Rather, the existence of a deficit doesn't. Having a deficit and a debt we CAN PAY BACK is a GOOD thing. It means our credit rating is great and that we can extend ourselves in times of crises and be a financial powerhouse in the world.
however, when we're struggling to pay our principle much less the interest, then that's a different story all together.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Because your mother would prefer the counter above her bedroom door to have a sensible number of initial digits (say 6). After a year or so, I'm sure she'll exceed that number, and then she can get a new counter and reduce the font.
After all: 00000000000038483 Blown, does look rather silly, even if that particular configuration would last for ten years!
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
The counter, on West 44th Street near Sixth Avenue, is more visible to those walking west; for those walking east, the sign is already behind them once they walk by the building.
Imagine that. The clock is behind you after you walk past it. Who knew?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
That's the Bush administrations answer to everything though, isn't it? "Just add another zero... let the next guy figure it out..."
Microsoft - The best ad campaign Apple ever had.
My father in law once told me the debt is like a mortage. Being my father in law I didn't correct him, but here...hey it's the internet.
A mortage usually grows in value and you also are paying part of the principal. Neither seems to be true with the debt. I suppose the GDP does grow and with inflation, but I think that's a bit different.
Last time I checked the interest payments on our debt where over 400 billion. That coming close to our highest budgetary item...our defense.
At our current rate our interest payments will be our highest payment. Something we can't even cut. This is like a credit card with your minimum payment being higher then you can even afford.
We have to raise taxes on someone. Sorry to the right wingers...but it can't be helped. We have to pay our way out of this. Even with drastic spending cuts we still have to. The cold hard facts are we have to do both. I'm not a politician, so I can say this. Time we start to listen to reason and not what make us feel good here in the U.S.
Imagine what we could do with that 400 billion every year. It's time to bring it down even if it means a few years of less then average growth. It's time to start thinking about our children. Not in some "make me feel better about my self" fashion, but just in general. I think in the long run it is what's best.
push the on button, wait for the tutorial lady to tell you why there are 6 pedals when there are only 4 directions.
red button activates auto-fire sequence. Be sure to have some shovels ready.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If USA owes this foolish amount of money, but no-one dares to ask for it back because of the military and economic power - then USA effectively owns the world, and might as well just declare itself debt free, and carry on living off the backs of its slaves.
The rest of us aren't going to do anything about it.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
One man's debt is another man's pension fund. Most US debt is held by funds, so I tend to agree with Cheney. The fact is that money is only real when you want to buy bread and milk at 7-11. in truly huge amounts it is just a number in a computer and doesn't really matter.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If a successful college education is worth so little as you claim, that means you're producing too many of them.
Same problem the world over, though.
I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter'
Good so I can keep the house I can't pay for?
realkiwi
So drop the damn 7-segment displays. Surely the US could owe just a tiny bit more and get a big monochrome display with pixels. Leading zeros? Hack them off and bump the font size.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
It has the makings of a civil war.
Woo Hoo! The US army still fights with bayonets and muskets, right?
Historically, that _is_ conservative.
Right, but the meanings have changed. After all, we call the left "liberal" when historically they are nothing of the sort.
"Of course since the debt is growing and growing it takes a bigger clock to measure it each time. Thus solving the problem once and for all!"
Actually, the thing to look at would be the changes in the dollar to euro exchange rate. Which shows that over the past 3 months or so (and especially the past couple of weeks), the dollar has been climbing vs the euro.
If shit ever got so bad here that there was another civil war, I wonder just how much the military would be divided between both sides. Of course, those currently in power would like to remain so, and would order the military to fight for them, but I wonder just how much of our soldiers and other military personnel would take part in that fight.
If it were an extremely asymmetric war, where it'd be the military up against Joe Sixpack, the effectiveness of smart missiles and the JSF are vastly reduced. Used overseas, sure, the public here doesn't care as much, but using weapons like those on our own people, where American families would be the collateral damage, would be extremely detrimental to the military and their side's cause.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I am a near complete libertarian but for some reason the progressive tax never bothered me that much. I think it has something to do with rich people being able to afford politicians and judges, and like you said when things get rough they have to chose to ho;d of the trip to Spain, while a lower earner has to chose to hold off dinner.
I also always wondered about the whole cost of governemt/number of people. A factory owner makes a lot more money by having good roads so his workers can get to the factory then the individual worker makes from being able to get to work.
In an anarcho-capitalist system he would probably still pay more to maintain the infrastructure he profits from, as the company would have to pay the cost of transit in the wages they pay workers or cut deals with the infrastructure company. I don't think the amount paid by rich people would be as steep in such a system, but I still believe they would be paying a higher percentage of their income then the poor.
But political party terminology changes over time. For instance, Abe Lincoln was a Republican, but he didn't hate black people.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Yes, because devoting the resources expended to fix the sign to eliminating the national debt would have solved the problem.
"The clock was put up by the late real estate mogul Seymour Durst in 1989 "
'cause you know, it's the Durst Institute that's responsible for the debt, not a bunch of irresponsible politicians...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
We should be fixing the problem. All we need to do is cut spending and increase taxes.
I, for one, wish you luck getting elected on this platform.
Yep, inflation is the key. If we crank it up say 10 000%, than one day may coin jar will be worth more than the national dept.
We should quit counting the debt. We'll just put it down as "Trillions and Trillions owed"! Genius! :)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Don't forget that the US Military are still a part of the US Population. If there were a civil war, it wouldn't be "population vs armed forces", it'd be "some people in the armed forces plus civilians vs other people in the armed forces possibly plus other civilians".
I don't live in the US, never have, and never intend to; but from what I've seen, I do now think it's at least a possibility, which is both scary and sad. There's a lot of great people in that country - it's just a shame there's also so many that aren't. Extreme corruption in your political system, the core values of the country being eroded, and so many people that are either too stupid or too ignorant (or both) to care. People need to learn from history, and meanwhile the rest of the world needs to pay close attention there to learn from the present - the US isn't the only country going down this slippery slope, it's just one of the most noticeable.
Currently, I live in a country that has gone down slippery slopes before, and almost lost everything for it. Mostly, the people remember, and are informed and cautious. Those who aren't are forcibly reminded when needs be. I'm hoping that this should be a good place to be should the worst happen through the coming years.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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It's not that simple.
1. For a start, it would work that way if the USA were the only market in the world. I do believe that China can also sell to Europe, or to its own damn citizens. I don't think the Chinese would revolt if they could buy good computers instead of exporting them.
The USA survived pretty well by selling its best stuff locally instead of exporting it all, didn't it?
Anyway, the USA has, what, 5% of the world's population? There's a whole other 95% who could buy that stuff.
2. Whatever advantage there may be in selling to the USA, would disappear overnight if the USA decided not to pay, which is (I believe) what the GP was getting at. The whole deficit scheme is, basically, borrowing money from those countries in exchange for their products. If the USA decided to just pocket some trillions of dollars overnight, on the justification that, basically, "our dogs are bigger than the tax collectors'", it would find itself a much less attractive market. Equally overnight.
3. The whole lopsided market situation exists because countries are made to export their raw materials for cents and have to buy high-tech stuff for thousands of dollars. Or, ridiculously enough, lately manufacture that high-tech stuff themselves in their own sweatshops, sell it to themselves, and send the profits to some overseas corporation.
Basically think: you want new shoes. So I send you my permit to raise your own pig, slaughter it yourself, tan its skin, and make your own gloves. Only now you have to pay me for the gloves. I'll even pay you back a few cents for the leather, 'cause that's raw materials and dirt cheap, and charge you lots for the gloves.
And you can't just say "fuck you, buddy" because there are some international treaties and that forbid you from using my patented design and my "Le Moraelin Haute Couture" label. Oh, and to add insult to injury, you designed that design for me too, but I patented it, 'cause I'm the big international corporation with teh moneyz.
And while for gloves that's just a matter of being a fashion victim, for a lot of other stuff it's less black and white.
That's the shit end of the imperialism stick, that those countries get. Mostly because we, the western world, promise to give them a black eye one way or another, if they don't abide by that kind of an arrangement.
Far from being some kind of great help that China would be foolish to cut off, it's a very disadvantageous system for China and a lot of other countries. If they threw it off, their economy wouldn't implode, and their standard of living would go up overnight. Again, they have a billion of their own people to sell that stuff to, instead of selling it to 300 million foreigners. Other than an artifficial financial and trade system imposed on them saying that it's better to sell to an American than to 4 Chinese, there is no real reason why that is so.
_If_ the western world decided to just plunder the existing debts, that might just be the excuse they're waiting for, to get out of that system.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm not sure "civil war" (groups of citizens against other groups of citizens - of course, supported by their respective local governments) is the right model. I think the Founding Fathers were more interested in making sure another "revolutionary war" (citizens against rouge government) could be launched successfully.
Outside of that minor quibble, I agree with your sentiments completely. If the populace is not armed, it's comparatively easy for the military to take control under a rouge government's orders -- about all the populace can do is meekly be herded and live in fear. By allowing the populace to be armed, even with vastly inferior arms as compared to the government, the military must approach each "situation" with lethal force as there may be a bunch of folks in the neighborhood with high powered hunting rifles. While many "follow orders" military personnel would probably accept "herding" defenseless citizens, when they have to blow the brains out of yet another person who looks and believes a lot like their mother, father, brother, sister, neighbor, pastor etc, they are much more likely to at least refuse to follow orders and, hopefully, switch sides.
You don't have to be able to beat your own military, you just have to make them kill you to make them turn from the evil side. And, of course, existing civilian arms only need to stave off the government for a few months -- the people who designed/built/best understand the government's weapons are largely US civilians, many of whom would decide their allegiances are not to some bland oath they took to a "government by name" but to the cause of freedom and democracy. These civilians know the weak spots of the government weapons and also know how to build weapons.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I think analogies are great, because they can be such effective argumentative tools. The other great thing about them is that they can be awfully misleading, because they'll trigger all sorts of unrelated or inappropriate (to the actual argument) intuitions.
Keep in mind that the relationship between a taxpayer, a country, and the government is much more complicated than that between a patron, a bar, and a barkeeper.
First off, I don't consider myself a "customer" of the US government. In my opinion, this isn't how a citizen-government relationship should work.
Next, it's misleading to use beer as the analogous good for government services. We can safely consider beer to be some kind of luxury good, and not a necessity. But what the government provides is in most cases very necessary for us. Water or food or shelter might have been more appropriate here.
This is related to my third point, which is that the richest man in the group can't opt out so easily. Setting up shop in another country isn't as easy as going to another bar, nor will you get the same beer in one place as the next.
And finally, our individual prosperity is in large part dependent on the system and opportunities either created by or opened up by the government. A drinker and his bartender don't have that sort of dynamic, sadly.
Perhaps there are some truths to your argument, but I don't like this analogy at all.
Not that I know of but there's a video tab in the article where you can see the clock running (not live, though).
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
i'm pretty sure the iraqi insurgents are armed with more than just sticks and stones (or pistols and hunting rifles for that matter). so unless you're stockpiling russian RPGs, AKs, black market M16s, mortars, machine guns, etc. it's not going to be the same as Iraq. besides, the reason the insurgency can never be defeated is because we never planned on conquering Iraq and occupying the territory. if there were a civilian uprising in the U.S. it would be quashed immediately by the national guard, and if needed, the army proper.
and by that point there'd be no reason to worry about public opinion; the legitimacy of the government would depend entirely on military force. so there'd be no reason for the government to hesitate to declare marshal law and create a police state. i mean, we're already half way there. any violence that breaks out will just be used as proof of the terrorist threat that exists, thus requiring a moratorium on our civil liberties for the sake of national security.
and it's unlikely that there'll be many soldiers defecting. soldiers are trained to blindly obey orders, and that kind of mentality has been responsible for the majority of military atrocities throughout history. suppressing a civilian uprising under the banner of fighting terrorism is not likely to be questioned by many soldiers. it'll probably be questioned by few civilians.
democracy is defended by words and ideas, not with bullets and bombs. so it's always silly when people rant on and on about the 2nd amendment but vote for corrupt leaders and allow their most important rights to be capitulated. right now the best weapon for protecting democracy is probably the internet and net neutrality. it allows the public to stay informed and get their news from a variety of independent news sources. so instead of fighting for your right to own a handgun, we should be fighting to preserve net neutrality.
As an Australian I can only Marvel at America's national debt. You've all given up on the hope of ever paying it off, which is simply astounding.
If your money is created from nothing at the point of a loan and you want to inflate the money supply then you also have to increase the (exponentially growing) debt at the same time.
Now, if you want the "economy" to grow then clearly you have to increase the supply of money faster than the interest on the debt which is consuming credit, or you get a recession.
Whether the debt is public debt, private debt or corporate debt, is irrelevant. The debt must be created. Or at least, it will be until you run out of people willing or able to take on and service the debt, then the system collapses. Doesn't this requirement for perpetual growth sound like something else?
It is a predictable exponential function and therefore has a doubling time, so yes, you could create a "law" about it.
The national debt, the credit crunch, the stockmarket crisis are all the inevitable result of the way your money is created... Long may it continue.
Deleted
The video (tab in the article) shows the various permutations of the clock. The original looked to be a 5x7 light array for each character (but with lights missing where they were not needed for display). I would venture to guess that those were incandescent light bulbs in the array.
The current version appears to be a 7 segment display consisting of a large number of smaller lights forming each segment. I wouldn't know what these smaller light bulbs are but they could still be incandescent.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
Man, I have to reply to this, because although you may understand the concept, I've had so many people make this mistake around me that it drives me crazy.
Now remember this: THE EXCHANGE RATE MEANS NOTHING. Think about it.....if the the exchange rate meant something, then the US economy would be doing about 106 times better than the Japanese economy right now, but it's not.
The only thing that really matters is the change and general direction of the exchange rate (and even that isn't entirely accurate, since it is possible for both sides to experience inflation at the same time, which is essentially what is happening right now, with the Euro dropping in value against the dollar). So once again, the Euro being at 1.35 of the dollar means very little by itself, despite the fact that two months ago the Euro was 1.6 times the dollar.
Eh. We're all gonna be livin' on the streets soon, so who cares?
Qxe4
Ideal for home defense :)
Requiem for the American Dream
Is anyone else, like me, making plans to move out of the US? Frankly I didn't get us into this mess and I'm not willing to do my part to bail out all those who did. I'm a liberal, not a libertarian, so I don't think taxes are always bad, but when I hear about what they're going to be going to, well I'd rather be paying taxes someplace where they're going to do some good. I hear european countries have high taxes, but they're not sending it all to Wall street, Iraq, and the world's largest military. I'd rather pay twice the taxes I am now if I knew it was going to more worthwhile things, like studying bear DNA.
I have no skill when it comes to convincing people of anything, especially not the average voter. I come across as arrogant, elitist, and condescending, because I am arrogant, elitist, and condescending, and that doesn't convince them of anything other than they don't like me. I give money to different causes to do that, but I myself am not helping my fellow citizen make the right choices.
While I like the place and the people, we've really painted ourselves into a corner. Every other country on earth makes stupid moves, because every person on earth is occasionally stupid, but the US keeps making such BIG mistakes. I feel selfish, or rather, I realize I'm selfish, but I'm not doing any good here, country is going to hell in a handbasket no matter what I do. I'm here for several more years in any event, so I guess there is time for us to shape up, but I'm making new plans anyway. Anyone else?
People from other countries like to avoid being murdered by the American military too; perhaps at some point in the future, the American soldier might extend his circle of care to included mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and neighbours from other countries too?
Requiem for the American Dream
According to dictionary.com, 'insurgent' is defined as:
"a person who rises in forcible opposition to lawful authority, esp. a person who engages in armed resistance to a government or to the execution of its laws; rebel."
Do *you* think it's the right choice of word to describe someone who's defending their country against an invading army? hint: your army. Do you use another word when you're not posting onto a forum which is read by non-americans ? or have you honestly been brainwashed to believe that iraqies have no legitimate right to defend their own country against the american aggressor?
Requiem for the American Dream
"A bit of history: in the mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea to slash income taxes, particularly for people who were "important" to the economy, i.e., very wealthy."
The wealthy are important to the economy. The wealthy and the upper-Middle class business owners are the engine of American prosperity. How many poor people ever offered you a job?
So let's cut this bullshit right now that wealthy = villain.
"At the time there was some belief on the Republican side that cutting taxes would magically produce new economic activity that would pay for the reduced tax cuts. Unfortunately, that never really happened and the nation started to go deep into debt."
Except that increased economic activity did "pay for" the tax cuts. The problem is that Congress increased spending by huge amounts, negating any savings, especially increases in entitlements which, by law cannot be touched during budget cuts. To this day, the biggest item in our budget is not defense (which is one of the few things the Constitution explicitly says should be paid for by taxation), but those damned entitlements. And when the Baby boomers start their retirement peak, we're going to be in a world of crap that makes the current crisis look tame.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It really irks me that people keep mentioning the same facts over and over again. Everyone knows how FRB works. Everyone knows they printed money. Everyone who is going to know knows. So why are you wasting brain power trying to educate people when you could be coming up with solutions.
I saw I story today about Iceland. You may or may not know that Iceland is a sort of banking haven for Europe. Anyway, they bought up a lot of these bad securities based on loans that may or may not currently be bad. Anyway, the story mentioned that the depositors from England and Germany and Europe are coming and wanting their money from the Icelandic banks and they don't have any. And it ended with "poor Iceland, what will they do now that their economy has collapsed"?
It's this type of stupid story that the media JUST LOVE to splatter about. They don't understand that they are CAUSING the mess. Guess what? NOTHING HAS CHANGED IN ICELAND. The farmer still grows his stuff. The geothermal energy is still coming from the ground. The snow is still white and cold. Nothing is different except the assumed value of a few sheets of paper.
Likewise, in America and world-wide, nothing REAL has changed. Yes, there are shysters who make money off confidence, and they are suffering right now. Oh, who's this guy Henry Paulson? The FORMER CEO of Goldman Sachs you idiots! But in reality, we are all still going to work, still producing the little amount of stuff we produce in this country. But we produce everything we need to exist, food, housing, medicine. So, again, I ask, what's the problem? If I'm hungry, can I get food? Yes. If I need a place to stay, is there one? Yes. If I'm sick is there a hospital mandated by law to provide care for me? Yes. So, what's the problem?
Buy local and DO NOT buy gold, since you can't buy food with gold. You can, in very bad times, buy gold with food :) So yes, if they weren't already speculated to record highs by people who saw this whole thing coming 18 months ago, buy commodities. Hell, REAL ESTATE is a great investment right now. If you have cash.. Some lucky asshole is going to swipe all those houses up from the banks. It might even be the U.S. government. And you know, they overpay for EVERYTHING, so if you buy some now, you will see an immediate appreciation. Anyway, these are not bad times if you are smart and not stupid and buy into their stupid panic stories. If you are seriously worried about feeding your family you shouldn't have GAMBLED IT AWAY on stocks.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Two words which American politicians should be particularly worried about; "Chinese consumer". When you hear those two words on American news, you know that China is going to be asking itself what America is good for. At the moment, tens of trillions in IOUs.
e.g.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DA133CF937A25751C1A9659C8B63
Deleted
This is also called corporatism, ie. fascism.
This sig is intentionally left blank
"Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism."
So now confiscating less of their earnings is now "giving them money"? What kind of Marxist bullshit is that?
If you want to make the case for so-called "progressive" taxation, fine, but drop this shitty notion that it's the government's money in the first place. It's not. Money is property, and last time I checked, we still have property rights in this country.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
- Richard Feynman
The cool things is to have windows that bounce up and down like a good tits.
Every 2 terms of republican presidency, the national debt increases by a factor of 10. :D
Debt based money was signed into law by Woody Wilson. I know, I know, this is Slashdot. Never let facts get in the way of a good bash.
Heh. Nobody is arguing that, but that's exactly the crap artifficial system that other countries are forced to adhere to... even when it's against their interests.
The thing is, money is just an abstraction to make the system work smoother. Go back to reading even, say, Adam Smith: the "wealth" of a nation is measured by how well the goods it gets match the needs and desires of its citizens. That's why you live better in the USA than they do in China. You get some of China's goods too, to match _your_ needs.
That system actually does very little for China, though. They get to export some goods to match _your_ needs instead of using them to match their own citizens' needs, i.e., instead of raising their own standard of living.
Even then, it would be a fair trade if they used the dollars they get, to buy things they need more. But the whole trade defficit scheme means they don't. In that relationship, the USA gets more and China gets some IOUs. As in, "I Owe You goods worth this many dollars." If the rest of the world actually tried to cash in those trillions of dollars, the value of the dollar would go down by an order of magnitude or more. Because you just don't produce the goods they could buy with them.
But in the mean time, that market doesn't work like Adam Smith and the free market apologists thought. Instead of being a mechanism by which China gives away stuff its citizens don't need more, and gets stuff they actually need, it's a mechanism by which China gets some IOUs instead of matching its own citizens' needs. As the wealth of nations go, China gets impoverished by that system.
And if, as the GGP was getting at, the USA decided it can ignore the IOUs because its dogs are bigger than the tax collectors', essentially you'd tell the whole world that USA's IOUs are worth nothing. They'd be a lot less inclined to sell you for more worthless IOUs in the future.
But even that lopsided trade is already based on some artifficial conventions that we, the western world, imposed upon those countries. In a lot of cases the goods they "import" to give those dollars back, are produced locally in China. But they must pay a foreign corporation a "tax" on goods produced in China and sold in China. We created an artifficial situation which _causes_ the western markets to be artifficially wealthier. We decided that the goods China has are low worth, ours are high worth, and China can't produce ours unless it's for one of our corporations. Then they can import their own product and pay us a tax for it.
To use a more classic economics example, the whole trade and market theory is based on the following idea: if England is better for producing wool, and France is better for producing wine, then the sane thing to do is raise sheep in England and grapes in France, then trade them. And the money and merchants' greed would be a mechanism for figuring out the exchange rate and making sure each country gets something closer to what its citizens want.
But now imagine a system where we artifficially decided that wine is cheap, wool is expensive, and France is outright forbidden to raise sheep except if it's for an English lord. 'Cause England patented sheep. Well, _of_ _course_ then the English market would be wealthier than the French one. But it's only due to an artifficial system which pumps resources out of France and makes them pay even for sheep their own shepherds raise.
It's a hypothetical example, France would have never bowed to that kind of conditions, but it's not entirely hypothetical for other goods and countries: That's exactly the thing that, say, IP conventions _do_ to poorer countries. They can only produce raw materials, they have to import computers from us. Even if they know how to make a computer, even if the fabs are on their land and staffed by local workers, and even if the damned design team who designed the CPU or chipset are their own people in their own countries. But they can't actually produce it for themselves. They have to beg, say, _Intel_ to build tha
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There seem to be many well qualified people here who can answer my simple question which is:-
What's the difference between Governments guaranteeing deposits in banks, and Governments simply printing more money and giving it away to said banks?
To my simplistic mind which, I agree, has an abysmal knowledge of matters financial, both actions look horribly similar. There is the exception that the guarantee bit uses a mass of double-talking high-tech voodoo to hide the truth of the matter from "the masses", i.e. ordinary hard-working folks who make up the majority of the world's human population.
Do please answer the question, because to me this whole worldwide financial collapse looks like the biggest international corporate fraud since the Fall of Rome. Convince me it isn't.
Better dead than red!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You pay for the SS with "goods harvested" from the concentration camps.
Come on! Its Nazism 101.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We have no idea what, but we are pretty sure about it anyway.
Actually, the thing to look at would be the changes in the dollar to euro exchange rate. Which shows that over the past 3 months or so (and especially the past couple of weeks), the dollar has been climbing vs the euro.
And now, for further enlightenment, zoom out to five years.
It's good to see the dollar climbing out of the hole it fell into over the past couple of years, but it's nowhere near where it once was. I don't think it'll ever get there.
Historically, that _is_ conservative.
Right, but the meanings have changed. After all, we call the left "liberal" when historically they are nothing of the sort.
During the 19th century, classical liberals were most definitely on the left side of the political spectrum. In Europe at least. The migrated to the right side because conservatives died, social democrats took over the left side, and christian parties took over enough social ideas to end up somewhere between those two.
But in the end, the whole left-right thing doesn't work. Christian parties tend to be socially conservative, but economically progressive, liberal parties are economically conservative, but socially progressive, and other parties end up with yet other interesting mixes of ideas.
A two-dimensional Political compass would make a lot more sense.
That analogy is absolutely ridiculous. The rich man is not a goose who poops golden eggs and shares them out of kindness. The rich man's wealth is where everyone else's is: In the bar.
When ten men go to a bar, the first five clock in and start working. The next four buy their own drinks. And the tenth gets a free beer because he owns the place. If ANY of them stop going to the bar, the musical chairs just shuffle around, until there are too few people left to operate a bar. And then it closes. And no more rich man.
You talk as though the rich are the lynchpin of capitalism. They're not; they're a byproduct, and in many cases a sign of inefficiency or poor regulation. The middle class are the lynchpin of capitalism. And they have been slowly disappearing into WalMart, CostCo, and the military industrial complex for the last 25 years. Have you noticed that the steps are getting a bit narrow on your ivory tower?
This always boggles my mind.
Ok now it's at 10 tril. 5 years from now, 25 tril. 50 years from now, 200 tril. Perhaps the curve is slowing down and we says in the newspaper, wow it's slowing down.
100 years from now 450 tril.
I understand there must be a negative effect to the country to be with a deficit. There's constant struggle to balance the money, etc. But what I am getting at is, it doesn't really end.
1000 years from now 2 quad.
And the world spins the same way, we have the same old Oh Henry. When I look at the scale of this thing, from a layman POV (the only POV I have in the finance side of things), I don't see the effect of a deficit.
I am sure there is an effect, but my limited life span does not let me appreciate it.
Anyone shed some light?
Unfortunately it's likely that most of the army will go with their army overlords... as happens in most countries. It's kind of like indoctrination.
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
I'm not so sure about that. I'd think there'd be a fair number that would, certainly... but especially those with family would more likely side with their family allegiances than their superiors. Blood is thicker than water and all that. I don't think either of us could prove it one way or the other, so it really is just my opinion.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Why not be cheap AND get with the times. Do it in hexadecimal. LOTS of room left.
Oh come on, at least tell the real reason why you want hexadecimal: 5318008
You seem to forget who controlled the congress for a majority of that time.
Now for the current crisis, most of it can come to blame upon groups like the Acorn group and other liberals putting pressure on congress and banks to extend low income loans to people who could never afford one. An artifact of that is that a lot more people got loans in over their head and this mess started. It wasn't that long ago that you needed 20% down to get a house... Suddenly you could borrow 105% of a house.
I am sure we could agree that we need a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. One that wouldn't allow the U.S.A. to ever go over its spending, even in war times. I personally would love to see tax day moved to two weeks before the election, not as far away as possible, and whenever congress wants to increase it, it would go before a vote of the American people.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Hurry up, get old, collect Social Security and die. That's your only escape.
If you think this mortgage meltdown is bad, you ain't seen nothin'. Want to know what the world will look like after the $35 trillion Social Security / Medicare shortfall kicks in? Probably more like the 1st half of the 20th Century than the 2nd half.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
It's important to have goals.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Hi, it looks like you are trying to eliminate a target. Would you like me to:
a) Arm the weapons systems
b) Initialize the targeting system
c) Deploy ECM in case hostiles are nearby"
I hate printers.
It can't be a joke because nobody makes jokes about number bases, ever[1]. So it must be a plot by the man to keep us all confused. Yes, that's it.
[1] OK, there's a first time for everything. What if you couldn't balance your checkbook and you realised you were trying to do ity in octal.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's odd. When I try spending more than what I have, my city improvements start disappearing.
Are these guys using cheats?
Every 2 terms of republican presidency, the national debt increases by a factor of 10. :D
Upcoming is 2 terms of democratic presidency (and supermajority in congress) so national debt should increase by a factor of 1000.
At least the Republicans got it half right, lowering taxes, which increased tax revenue. However, they forgot the more important part and still spent like drunken socialists.
The democrats will keep up the spending and increase taxes, which will decrease tax revenue, thus accelerating debt accumulation.
(FYI If you find yourself replying: "That doesn' make sense, decreasing tax rates MUST decrease tax revenue!" then you haven't had Econ 101 and probably shouldn't vote.)
...and you're wrong. As usually the case, take the opposite of the wingnut viewpoint and you have reality.
The wealthy are important to the economy. The wealthy and the upper-Middle class business owners are the engine of American prosperity. How many poor people ever offered you a job?
The rich don't create jobs, demand does. What creates the most demand? Having a large middle class with disposable income.
So let's cut this bullshit right now that wealthy = villain.
Let's cut the straw man. The problem isn't that people hate the rich, the problem is that our economy funnels all it's benefits to the rich.
Except that increased economic activity did "pay for" the tax cuts.
In the entire history of this planet, there has never been a single income tax cut for employers that has increased economic activity. Not one. If a business owner will make more money by expanding his business, he'll expand the business and write off the expense on his taxes. His personal tax rate is irrelevant. Where tax cuts do stimulate the economy and increase demand is by giving them to the middle class so they have more disposable income.
To this day, the biggest item in our budget is not defense (which is one of the few things the Constitution explicitly says should be paid for by taxation), but those damned entitlements.
Nonsense. All those entitlements go straight back into the economy at the base level, where it's most needed. What's blown our budgets are huge tax cuts for the wealthy and continuing to fund our military like we're on the verge of World War III. We're surrounded by two large, peaceful, friendly nations and the world's two largest oceans. Our actually defense needs are pretty damned small.
To this day, the biggest item in our budget is not defense (which is one of the few things the Constitution explicitly says should be paid for by taxation)
The problem with taking a strict interpretation of General Welfare is that you would have to take an equally strict interpretation of Common Defense. So if Social Security is unconstitutional, so are the CIA, the NSA, NORAD, the USAF, and spy satellites. But you never see wingnuts whine about the unconstitutionality of the U.S. Air Force, but they do whine about Social Security. It's almost like they're picking and choosing what government programs they're objecting to, sort of like how the NRA opposes Democrats on gun control yet Republicans who support gun control, like George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani, get a complete pass. Huh, interesting.
No, it can't. The result of the efforts to make home ownership more widespread was a set of anti-discrimination laws placed in the CRA. However, CRA regulated loans had virtually nothing to do with the current crisis. Despite CRA-regulated banks doing the bulk of regular loans, 50% of sub-prime loans - which make up the bulk the "toxic mortgages" - were issued by banks entirely free of CRA regulation, and a further 20-25% were issued by departments of CRA-regulated banks that were free of CRA regulations. The remaining 25-30%, while performed by regulated banks, were almost certainly illegal given the strict nature of the CRA and the requirements for collateral it imposes.
The problem here are not mortgages given to people on low incomes, but sub-prime mortgages given to everyone. People were using the sub-prime market to make excessive gambles that fell apart when the housing market collapsed. These varied from overly stretched ARM HELOCs to people buying multiple houses with the intent of either flipping them or renting them out. You can probably imagine that the largest gambles were not taken by the poor, but by those on median or higher than average incomes.
BTW, thanks for being one of the few people making this argument that didn't directly blame ethnic minorities for this mess, but remember that the key laws Democrats are being blamed for are not laws directed at low incomes, but at ending discrimination against ethnic minorities. Those that are promoting this meme are treading on very dangerous ground. The CRA didn't force banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them (quite the opposite in fact), and CRA regulated loans had little or nothing to do with this crisis, which affects sub-prime loans of the type the CRA prevents. It did require banks end discrimination, but a person from an ethnic minority who entered a branch of Wachovia and asked for a 110% mortgage to help them buy a $500,000 home which they expected to pay back using their Burger King salary would have been rejected just as a white person in the same circumstances would have been. The CRA wouldn't have forced them to give the loan anyway, the CRA would have done the opposite.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wow, some of the armchair economists in this thread should go get into government, they clearly have a complete and total handle on the intricacies of all national economies. Most impressive. No more than a few days in office will clearly have them properly handling debt and economy. Thank you for your enlightening opinions!
Just another ignorant American.
nonsense, and i got two examples:
1.- The American civil war was the deadliest, meanest and most violent military confrontation up until world war one. It saw the development of weaponry and military strategy up to an unprecedented point in world history, goodies like the submarine or the Gatling machine gun were invented during this time. By Americans. To shoot other Americans. Once they hated each other so much as to declare war on them, the little fact that they looked like your mother, or even were your uncles and aunts cared little, they happily proceeded to savagely try and kill each and every one of them.
2.- Ever read about a military dictatorship? typically, they are implemented by military personnel of the same nationality than the people against who it's implemented. And never, not even the most unprofessional and hippie army in the world, has drop their weapons and changed sides out of solidarity with the oppressed.
That's why a civil war is also called a fratricide war: 'tis brother against brother, father against son. And their family ties have never been strong enough to avoid conflict. Anywhere.
To think that "you just have to make them kill you to make them turn from the evil side" is, quite honestly, not the smartest thing I've read around here, to say it mildly.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
...when they could have just let it roll over to -$9,999,999,999? That's what I call surplus!
I'd think that the nerds here would know the difference between the deficit and the debt, but apparently not. They both involve the federal government of the US's indebtedness, and they both start with "d", but they're not the same thing.
The deficit is how much more we've spent in a year than we have. The deficit adds to the national debt.
The debt (the national debt) is how much we owe as a nation - the whole pile.
One of the first hits on Google said the CBO pegged the 2008 deficit at $219 billion US (probably not correct anyomre). The debt-clock is overflowing into the $10 trillions. That should give you an idea of the difference between the terms you're tossing around.
The deficit and the debt are not the same thing any more than the sales tax and the purchase price are the same thing.
How brave of you.
Seems more like the tenth guy got his bartender buddy to reduce his tab even though it put the bar's owner into debt.
No, you're not. Plagiarism is bad enough. Plagiarism combined with false attribution and impersonation ought to be prosecuted as slander.
OMG the dollar sign is static... it's the end of the world!!!!
You're right. After the upcoming total economic collapse, we'll need the clock to be able to display the debt in terms of Chinese yuan or Euros. The current design does not allow for that.
Given that the dollar sign was an LCD display, the obvious solution to the overflow problem would simply be to switch it from $ to £.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Just because Bush claims to be a conservative doesn't mean he actually is one!
And just because he's unpopular now doesn't mean he's not. He was plenty conservative for conservatives to back him to the hilt in 2000 and 2004.
a rouge government
So the commies are planning a come-back tour?
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
The citizens of Eastern Europe rose-up against their governments. These citizens didn't even own guns. By your reckoning they should have been squashed, but that didn't happen. Most of the soldiers refused to fire on their own neighbors, and the governments collapsed under the sheer weight of numbers.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Today's dollars? no. But the way that it's going, I'm betting 10 years from now that'll get you a Heath Bar....
"Do *you* think it's the right choice of word to describe someone who's defending their country against an invading army?"
Wait wait, - "defending"?! That's one hell of a loaded word. The insurgency in Iraq is best known for blowing up churches, running protection rackets, and assassinating Iraqi police officers. How can you characterize that as "defending"? That's a bizarre use of the word. Their efforts to hinder US forces amount to very little when compared to their efforts at murdering Iraqis.
Come on. The world is not binary. America and its opponents can simultaneously be wrong. You can make your point without using loaded words and mischaracterizations.
The debt is not growing exponentially...
Sure it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_Federal_Debt(gross).JPG
In fact, I'm about 90% sure it's exponential. It sure fits an exponential curve well. averaging about 7% growth. With percentage growth the doubling time is 100*ln(2)/percent. So at 7% it would be doubling every 10 years.
And just as a check...
1980 909,041
1990 should be double that:
1990 3,206,290
Yikes, even higher than 7%
2000 5,628,700
That's more like it. A fraction under 7%.
It's predictable. I predict with about 90% certainty that the national debt will grow at 7% per year and therefore doubles every 10 years. There you go. "Colin's Law". Though I would like to thank my high school science teachers for an introduction to exponential functions.
Even Excel can do the analysis for you. The function you need is "logest".
Deleted
I never stated the premise that the "US doesn't have a manufacturing base". I said, according to overwhelming trade deficits, it's as if we consume all we produce and then some.
"The first adds because someone has to go in and repair all that both in materials and labor."
You're allocating capital to something that doesn't necessarily built the economy up. This is the classic fallacy shoemaker's tale of a broken window, where it rests on the assumption that a boy breaking a window is good, because the shoemaker has to spend money repairing it employing the glasscutter -- when in fact he may have been saving for a new hammer - putting the black smith out of business.
Yea, yea, boo hoo, the wealthy have to fund the government. The wealthy make use of a disproportionately large portion of government benefits.
The wealthy benefit more than anyone from all the various business subsidies and giveaways.
The wealthy benefit more than anyone from corporate welfare and business bailouts.
The wealthy benefit more than anyone from government guaranteed business loans.
The wealthy benefit more than anyone from DOD spending - Our soldiers haven't defended our soil since Pearl harbor. Their primary purpose is defending "U.S. interests abroad" which is code word for "corporate interests" or, put bluntly, the wealthy's interests.
The wealthy benefit more than anyone from DOT, DOE, DHS, and other "infrastructure" department spending, where Congress essentially acts as a giant corporate money funnel.
Sure, the poor benefit from Social Security and Medicare, and a few other aid-related government programs that haven't yet been gutted, but don't pretend the rich don't receive a WINDFALL from our tax money.
Only one anonymous hater?
C'mon internet, I know you can do better than that!
what you consider to be "Econ 101" has been proven over and over to not be a universal truth
I didn't claim it was a universal truth, but it certainly applies to our current situation as the "Bush tax cuts" the dems are so eager to "rollback" raised revenues.
Here's some pesky Econ 101 for ya.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006842
From the article above:
Earlier this month the Congressional Budget Office released its latest report on tax revenue collections. The numbers are an eye-popping vindication of the Laffer Curve and the Bush tax cut's real economic value. Federal tax revenues surged in the first eight months of this fiscal year by $187 billion. This represents a 15.4% rise in federal tax receipts over 2004. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut. Once again, tax rate cuts have created a virtuous chain reaction of higher economic growth, more jobs, higher corporate profits, and finally more tax receipts.
This Laffer Curve effect has also created a revenue windfall for states and cities. As the economic expansion has plowed forward, and in some regions of the country accelerated, state tax receipts have climbed 7.5% this year already. Perhaps the most remarkable story from around the nation comes from the perpetually indebted New York City, which suddenly finds itself more than $3 billion in surplus thanks to an unexpected gush in revenues. Many of President Bush's critics foolishly predicted that states and localities would be victims of the Bush tax cut gamble.
Which is, of course, why units from California would be sent to attack Texas, and vice versa. You're keeping those other idiots in line, not like your family back home, who support you.
Take a look at some legislation during the Clinton years. Look what he did! He created... some stuff, that ... ruined our economy. Yes! Clinton, and all those other Democrats played their (foundational) part in causing this crisis of debt!
Besides making it easier for minorities to get approved for mortgages (which definately contributed to this crisis, but wasn't the sole cause), what specific bills did the democrats pass during the Clinton years that put us in this mess?
Both sides have caused problems here. Just look at legislation passed by the current Democratic controlled Congress.
What specific bills passed in the last 2 years caused the housing bubble to burst? Where these bills also supported by republicans?
I'm seriously asking these questions because people have been saying this over and over yet they don't provide any specifics. It seemed to me that the greedy nature of people, regardless of politics, is what caused this mess. Maybe I'm wrong.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Will the rouge government attack its citizens with mascara and lipstick?
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
1+15 digits ? That's short-sighted. They should just use a full-resolution display with scalable fonts :)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Which is why the Chinese economy is stronger.
Nonsense. China's "growth" is subsidized by government loans to government-owned companies, an enormous amount of which are under-performing or non-performing. It's a ponzi scheme, and sooner or later it collapses. It will make the subprime crisis look like a deck chair on the Titanic. One of the few things that keeps China afloat is the influx of cash and credit from the US. To suggest they don't need us is ludicrous.
And of course China doesn't have to dump them in the ocean, they can sell them to their own people - who will be much richer than Americans once their currency stops being artificially surpressed.
Are you crazy? 70% of China's population are pre-industrial agrarian people who live in poverty by any measure.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' ..."
Tell that to Iceland. Not so long ago, Iceland was a rich country. Recently, the country has become unable to pay its debts, and its currency has quickly lost its value. Now, banks have stopped trading in Iceland krona, which means the money has essentially become worthless. And that means that if all you have is Icelandic kronur, you will have a very hard time paying for things. I don't think Iceland is a rich country anymore. Now, tell me again why deficits don't matter?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
According to David Walker, US Comptroller General says that the debt clock does not count the $40 trillion that's off the balance sheet. So we are in the whole for about $56 trillion. $480K per household.
I don't know if you realize it or not, but you're a part of that very "upper class tax bracket" as described by, well, everyone.
When anyone talks about "the rich getting tax breaks," they're specifically referring to you.
You do realize that the majority of us only make 40-60K a year, right?
That's a bullshit analogy, because that pub is not an economy. In that pub, those men bring some money from the outside, and the pub is just a sink for it.
In a real economy, it doesn't work that way. That tenth guy, for example, isn't someone who shits his own gold coins and injects them in the economy, but someone who got a disproportionately large slice of the pie we're all producing. He isn't _producing_ $59 out of nowhere. The money is just an IOU for how much of the pie you're allowed to take. And somehow he's entitled to take more for per hour he put in.
If you want a more apt analogy, think not a pub and someone producing money out of nowhere to pay your beer. Think, say, a semi-closed medieval economy, and chipping in to maintain the roads they trade along:
- the first four men are the serfs. They do most of the actual work, and it's their grain that gets exported along those roads. In fact, they actually build the road too during the few months when they're not working the fields. They barely get a subsistence meal (and the 10th and 9th guy would have a fit if these could afford a beer), but don't get asked to pay any extra money. They paid their due in producing that crop that the others apropriated and sold.
- the fifth guy is the village guard, tax man and toll collector rolled in one, and doubles as the master's footman in case of a war too. He gets paid a pittance for his work, but gets taxed 1 florin (to use an apropriate medieval currency) for it, for road maintenance.
- the sixth guy is the miller. He actually gets to keep a share of the grain milled at his mill, but gets taxed 3 florins. He still makes a good living out of that arrangement.
- the seventh guy is the smith. He makes everything from horseshoes to ploughshares to the tenth guy's armour. He doesn't own his work either, 'cause the baron owns his smithy and gets the lion's share. But he gets a fair pay for it, even if he has to pay 7 florins right back as taxes. Still, his ore and coal come along that road, so he can understand paying to maintain that infrastructure.
- the eigth guy is the baron's scribe and clerk. He commands a high price because he's so smart. He gets paid a heck of a lot more than those serfs, and can even afford some minor luxuries. But, he also gets taxed 12 florins, or about a third of his nominal wage. He complains about it a lot, even though he's still left with more than the smith had before taxes. He thinks that a fair tax would be if everyone paid 10 florins, including the serfs who are already kept at at subsistence level and don't make that much in the first place.
- the ninth guy is the merchant who goes off to sell the grain and some of the smith's product once a year, to the nearest trade centre. He not only makes a fortune, but since he controls the baron's money supply, he can get almost any laws and concessions to swing his way. He gets to pay 18 florins for his income, and that annoys him no end. Why, he's the guy who makes money, while those serfs only get paid. They should pay him, not tax him, is what he keeps saying.
- the tenth guy is the baron. He gets the lion's share, regardless of whether that little village actually makes a profit or not. (A recent story on The Register comes to mind, about a CEO getting paid 74 million when the company _lost_ billions.) Due to imperial regulations, he has to pay 59 florins imperial tax for road maintenance and policing. He likes to act as if he produced that money by shitting gold, and someone is robbing him at gun point if he has to pay for the infrastructure that made him money. He pays astroturfers like David R. Kamerschen to spin him as if he were minting his own money and injecting money in the system, instead of as the guy who gets to plunder it the hardest.
And when the emperor decides to reduce that tax to 80 florins? Well, everyone is still working the same. Those serfs are still the ones actually feeding everyone else and doing most of the hard work, but they get nothing out of it. They're
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Huh? - are you intentionally replying to my post? - I'm having difficulty linking what-you-claim-I-reckon to anything I thought or typed.
Just to be clear; what I'm saying is that people in foreign countries deserve as much consideration as their counterparts in *your* country. People are people. It's our leaders that constantly seek to fuel this idea of incompatibility and conflict, as a means of justifying their existence/meddling in world affairs.
The best way to divert people's attention from how much they hate you and boost your ratings, is to hold a war.
Requiem for the American Dream
To be fair I don't think there's a state in the union that you can't own a pistol in. Even CA, MA, and NY, the biggest anti-gun states all still allow handgun ownership. They have concealed carry too, unlike poor Wisconsin and Illinois.
How many soldiers have you ever talked to that you think most/all of them would fire on U.S. citizens without a moment of hesitation? Speaking as one of the few adult males in my family who has never served in the armed forces I'm betting it's not many. The ones I've met, speaking truthfully, went in it for the college tuition and to get their lives together.
Most military atrocities are the result of problem that runs much deeper, putting on a uniform before the massacre is a side note. Sherman's March to the Sea not withstanding, do you think those soldier's you see every day are only one order away from burning the nation they've sworn to serve to the ground?
Because that's exactly how it happened last time? Of course it didn't come down to personal loyalties and protecting the homestead. The Confederate States was a small band of radicals who were crushed mercilessly in days...
Talk is cheap. Actions are what counts.
Democrats have consistently spent much less than republicans. The budget will always grow because inflation will force it to grow, but accounting for inflation, Democrats have consistently increased the size of the federal budget at HALF the rate of the Republicans since the end of WWII.
Today, we're not looking at simply "democrat vs. republican" pissing matches, we're looking at a fundamental difference between the parties in their way of looking at economics. Republicans don't believe the debt is a problem, because they'll be dead before it has to be paid back. Ford started it with a huge increase in the federal debt, but Reagan decided to turn running up the debt into an election platform! Today, it's "We'll cut your taxes even if the budget isn't balanced, and we won't increase spending either!".
It's been a long time.
You'll have to enlighten me.
How will severely reducing the monetary supply send the US into a hyper-inflationary period?
It's been a long time.
And I award you the "best of typo response".
Now I will mull over how my left index finger and the right index finger fired in the wrong order.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Yes, but with the Laffer Curve, there's an optimum tax rate that sits at the peak of the curve. Reducing tax rates below that optimum value will once again decrease tax revenue. (This is pretty much straight from the Wikipedia article you cited, incidentally.) So it is by no means universally true that tax revenue always decreases when you decrease the tax rate, something you strongly implied. The question then becomes, what is the optimum tax rate? There seems to be quite a bit of disagreement among economists about that, and many are still assuming we're on the left-hand side of the curve.
Why didn't I think of that! With a negative debt, we're effectively rolling in cash. Next we just need to switch our currency to the negabuck, 1 Nb = -$1.
please go die in a fire.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The average American doesn't have the balls to fix the problem. Half of America thinks that increasing taxes and increasing government responsibility for our personal issues is the solution... If we really cared about fiscal responsibility we would require American's to be fiscally responsible as individuals - rather than giving every fool who fails to provide for himself and family regular and on going handouts. Bob Barr for president!
Perhaps it'd be better to mull over how you didn't proofread your post.
See: http://davidk.myweb.uga.edu/
And I hardly doubt it came from an economist.
It used to be that the GNP meant something...this country could produce enough goods and services to cover our debt...
Well, no longer. We should only spend what we have to spend, not debt, but actual "income" or the tax money that the government collects (tariffs, etc).
Projected income = budgeted spending. The remainder or "actual" is either a surplus or deficit, and you fix that for the next budget...
Well...there is no way in hell we are paying off the national debt...you may as well borrow and spend, because it really doesn't matter.
Inflation will now go unchecked, our dollar will fall, and our economy will fail. This road has been chosen, and we must simply accept that fact.
--E--
that ~35% is federal only, we also pay state taxes (0-10% income tax). Some may pay additional city income taxes.
Add in property tax (gotta fund the schools, we do afterall spend more on schools than the military minus iraq) and it adds up a bit higher.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
To add to this, 24 of the top 25 sub-prime loan originators were not subject to regulation under the CRA. Therefore, the CRA did not cause problematic sub-prime loans.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Parent speaks the truth. I demand my government be run for free!
I'm not commenting about the deficit being super high or the fact that corruption does exist inside the government. I'm just saying that I think the parent is wack-job.
Parent starts at -1 karma on my end, but I see no problem with this comment and see no issue with modding it up rightly.
You will recall that an old Louie lost his head after the debt of France's monarch topped 80% of France's GDP. U.S. gross domestic output is about $13 trillion - and falling. This puts the national debt at 77% of GDP...and rising fast.
Swedish Meatball
Who seriously thinks we are going to pay back all the national debt?
I don't. I'm convinced at some point during the next war everybody (govs of countries) will say "Screw you" and default on all the loans they took out.
Which is why I say that in the U.S. we should be taking out ALL the loans we can from anybody overseas that will give em. Then build large physical items that can't be repo'd. Take out a HUGE loan to fix all the roads and bridges, buy that concrete wall across the border, get a couple dozen aircraft carriers. What are the Chinese going to do when we don't pay? Come and get it sucker!
Of course I'm joking....kinda...
i heard that pretty soon we'll need to add another digit to the CEO pay counter too.
I wish that I had done what I liked years ago (Internet, WWW, Linux) instead of what I was supposed to do.
They won't let me have a Kabar though. Which is kinda funny given I could manufacture a better weapon with an afternoon and a beltsander.
What you say may be true for FEDERAL spending, but as I am sure you are well aware, k-12 and public colleges are funded by mostly by property and state income taxes.
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html
We spent over $500 billion in 03/04 on education. In FY2008 the US government spent 515 billion dollars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
Check the facts, you have (like most people) confused federal and local spending on these issues (not counting iraq the overall education spending throughout the US is roughly simliar to military spending).
Stupid? I think when viewed in the context of overall spending my comments are accurate.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
First, the wealthy do consume much more government spending than the poor. In a direct way, through the various pork techniques, indirect ways via use of the infrastructure or with specific laws (from IP protection, tariff, regulations, and a miriad of other ways -- like getting huge bonuses in financial companies, crashing them and letting the taxpayers with the bill).
Also, it can be argued that the wealthy do not even have to consume government resources to put a large burden on society as a whole. They use more land, consume more non-renewable resources, etc, etc.
Anyway, the grand-parent said that "Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.". I point that this is definitely not the way to society is working, hence his whole analogy is flawed.
You call that "exactly on the money with verifiable data". Let me laugh.
In the second half of your post, you built such a nice strawman that I am not even going to argue with. Just read my post back, and tell me if the poor's beer is the same size as the rich's beer...
I didn't realise what you meant until I saw this post a couple times, and finally realised that we're so well off, it's pretty hard to hate on any of the parties, given how bad it is down south.
It's been a long time.
Excellent Red Vs Blue reference
Would be great if they added a large LED color display that would plot the national debt growth based on historical data.
Starting with 1989, show everyone a graph that displays how much the debt grew until now, month by month. Of course given the digital nature, it should be possible to show other data as well.
The benefit to this would be to show for example "How much did it grow under Bush #1, Clinton, Bush #2, Whoever's next"
If you're less than ten years away from retiring, then you should have your saving in a simple interest bank account. No stocks. That way a crash won't devalue your money.
What do you do when the government prints a trillion dollars? Or 1.5 trillion dollars? The reserve ratio in the USA is about 10:1.
The number of little bits of green paper you have may well increase, but they can half in value if the supply of money keeps increasing. That's as big a crash in value as the stock market.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7509715.stm
The truth is that there is no such thing as safe, or stable. Someone will always try to find a way to take it away from you. Particularly bankers. The nature of a fractional reserve means that all such banks take deposits, lend out 90% of it and only hold 10% in case of customers demanding money. Well, if there are any problems and people decide to remove their cash (Washington Mutual), only the first 10% get their money, everyone else loses out. Sure there are insurance schemes and guarantees, but a pension fund needs to be very large so only a fraction will be guaranteed.
I recommend you learn about money, understand how it is manipulated by banks and governments, how it affects stock markets etc. Then take active steps to protect yourself from them all.
Deleted
I hope you realize that China and the USA are in a willy-waving contest as to which has the larger surface. They're just about equal. And, oh, look, Canada is bigger than both.
So, do you propose to split the USA and Canada up? After al, you just told me that running a country that big as a Federation is slopply and not recommended. :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This misses the whole point of taxes in the first place. As you've noticed yourself, a large chunk of taxes goes into supporting the lower classes of the population - education, healthcare etc. The wealthiest typically don't use any of those. So, once you cut down taxes, the rich pay less, and as the result, the poor start getting less "supporting services" from the government, too.
By the way, that's what the beer bar analogy miss - it wasn't that bartender reduced the price, it was that he offered to sell less beer for less money (since, well, TANSTAAFL), and the ten agreed. And then it turned out that everyone has got less beer, but the richest guy still drinks less than he was given (because he buys his own, more expensive beer elsewhere, and comes to the bar simply for the company), so he doesn't really care, but he also paid much less than he had paid before.
When you can turns the tables and start dictating the terms?
China will no more "cut off all exports" than the U.S. did, and for the same reason - as China owns more and more of the U.S. business interests and government debt, they will call more and more of the shots. (See IMF for precedent).
It will be a great irony to watch America suffer the same fate they've inflicted on other countries - an economy that runs to the dictates of outsiders for outsider's benefit.
My name is Aaron James WE HAVE AN URGENT MESSAGE TO ALL ABOUT U.S.TYRANNY THREATENING OUR LIVES-AND some reflections on The National Debt as pertains to the false war on terror: The National debt, in part can be blamed on the false war on terror- THE U.S. IS TRYING TO MURDER MY MOTHER AND I CURRENTLY-Government is embarrassed over our online exposure we had at http://aaronjamesstory.com/ and GOVERNMENT JUST ATTACKED/ DOWNED OUR WEBSITE and removed it from archive.org as well! They had my name up on FBI.gov in falsified demeaning account -they removed the entry on the same day Oct6/08 just a few days prior-This is being done to erase ALL record of their intent towards our harm online. I just received a death threat on my youtube.com account at ajames1000 today reading "someone's got to die for our rights and freedoms-why not this guy" They have attempted our murders multiple times now.(some Important links at bottom) ***Most recent abduction attempt VIDEO WITNESSED http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sfObgs3GGg*** WE HAVE STUDIED THE FALSE WAR ON TERROR CLOSELY AFTER WE WERE ORIGINALLY PROFILED AND ATTACKED/LEFT IN POOL OF BLOOD ON AIRCRAFT-You don't know about or story- as Americans YOU MUST KNOW and propagate awareness because these same draconian mechanisms are now being used stealthily on ALL of us. Please read on. 1 trillion dollars into Iraq alone to this date, McCain singing about bombing Iran and Bush/Cheney capitalizing off of death and carnage in Afghanistan Iraq and Georgia-all rich with oil, popyseed (for opium/ illegal drug trade resource). The president of Afghanistan is now Khalid Kharzai- a U.S./ CIA asset and former senior financial adviser to Unocal, one of the largest oil companies in the East. U.S. economy is based on those three things in general. The National debt and financial ruin, the bailout- these are things that are MEANT to foster social decadence, because in a state of decadence and decay, the groundwork is laid for the steady removal and erosion of civil rights and liberties unto the progression towards martial law and globalization. MY MOTHER AND I ARE BEING TARGETED BY THE FALSE WAR ON TERROR AGENDA-The False War on Terror- an AIPEC/ U.S. *Government/ Israeli *Government initiative, (does not reflect on Israeli *people or *Jews in any way to be VERY clear.) Victims of the false war on terror are enumerate and it is an afflictive entity which is affecting many-and now targets my mother and I! Winnipeg police have committed 14 attempts upon our lives towards kidnapping us from Canada to torture in the U.S. My family and I -Canadian citizens-are suffering and her health deteriorates!! -we live daily in terror b/c of Bush regime related persecution and relentless attempts upon our lives! After a barbaric U.S. Northwest Airlines profiling attack upon my mother and I, we are victim of the North American Union "harmonizing of the peripheries 'Homeland Security'" effect/related tyranny and the ongoing violations of the 4th and 1st amendments (U.S.)against the human rights and liberties of all through the exploitation of the false opportunistic "War on Terror" mechanism that targets the American and Canadian citizen as terrorists in blatant paradox and hypocrisy against the original touted edifice of the 'War on Terror' in that currently through a covert and illegal juncture of U.S. and Canadian government, and as attest to the covert North American Union agenda, the U.S. is attempting to effect the murders and/or kidnapping of my mother and I to the U.S./ torture in retaliation for our exposure of Minneapolis's and Northwest Airlines' racial profiling attack upon us-Canadian citizens- on our 3 day trip to the United States in seek of medical consult at the Mayo Clinic. (21blacks:1 white imprisoned in MN Council on Crime and Justice declares Hennepin judiciary corrupt with "collusion between prosecution and judges to effect of targeting victims of police brutality blacks and the poor." Local
Japan owns 600 billion of US Treasury Securities, and China owns 500 billion.
Why? Japan wants to export it's deflation problem via the carry trade which is when Japanese Yen savings are used to buy Dollars which are then used to buy US Treasury Securities which yield higher interest than Japanese banks must pay to Japanese savers.
The US loves this because buying dollars with yen supports the US dollar keeping inflation down, while the Fed 'stimulates the economy' with loose monetary policy. Meanwhile Japanese exports are helped by devaluing the Yen. Japan must devalue the Yen for it's exports to be competitive with China.
China devalues the Renminbi ( Yuan ) by more complicated means, but like Japan, the result is accumulated Foreign Currency Reserves, including US Treasury Securities. Devaluing the Renminbi ( Yuan ) makes Chinese exports more competitive. Also, the restrictions on foreign investment necessary for China to control the value of the Renminbi ( Yuan ) allow some measure of central government control in how the Chinese economy develops.
Moreover, devaluing the Renminbi ( Yuan ) allows China to accumulate huge foreign currency reserves ( 2 trillion dollars worth so far ) that it can use for checkbook diplomacy, such as loaning to the third world or deals with Hugo Chavez or the Iranians.
It is worth noting that the Foreign Currency Reserves are aquired by the Chinese Government at the expense of the average Chinese citizen. The buying power of the Renminbi ( Yuan ) that the average Chinese worker is paid in has been appropriated by their government by their artificial devaluation of the Chinese Currency.
Not that there is any moral difference between that and a tax.
Anyway, if one of Japan or China started selling US Treasury securities they would shoot themselves in the foot. It would likely trigger a fire sale that would wreck the dollar and hurt the US, China, and Japan severely.
However, there has to be balanced trade sometime. Pressure will build and build until it inexorably happens somehow.
Here is a link you might find interesting
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[...]I say you don't understand becuase(sic) you openly demonstrate as much with your point about collecting on US debt. You seem to think that they can just call it in and get paid, while you totally ignore that doing so would massively devalue the dollar,[...]
and
You know very well what would happen if China tried to unload any real amount of US debt (which they can't simply collect on, as it's not that kind of debt).
You'll have to enlighten me.
How will severely reducing the monetary supply send the US into a hyper-inflationary period? How will selling bonds send the US into a hyper-inflationary period?
It's been a long time.