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Presidential Youth Debate Answers and Details Now Online
Last month, Slashdot readers contributed their own inquiries to the pool of questions for the Walden University Presidential Youth Debate. Two of those questions made the cut, and you can watch either the individual video responses to each of the questions presented to John McCain and Barack Obama (by scrolling down the just-linked debate home page), or the whole debate straight through. For something meatier, if you are weary of predictably slippery campaign-style answers, Ethan Rowe of End Point has a very interesting blog post about the technology background of the debate.
Out of curiosity, which two questions came from /.?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Well, there is at least a partial answer here.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
So, let me get this straight. Taxpayers are paying $7bn to rescue Goldman, just so Goldman can pay "only" $1.5bn in bonuses as a reward for the incompetence and greed that caused the failure. Whether the bonuses total 1.5bn or whatever, the whole thing stinks of rewarding the incompetents with a taxpayer handout - socialism at its finest.
On the term "Gold Standard"... I REALLY hate it when people keep saying "Gold Standard", which is never what it was intended to be... it was supposed to be Gold AND Silver, measured against each other... this adds an immense amount of flexibility and stability to the market, but I guess that doesn't fit with the Keynesian interpretation of Hard Money. Keynesian economists like to paint Hard Money as this antiquated, ridiculously quaint system that would never work in our modern "advanced" economic system. Utterly stupid.
Here's a serious question. Why did the US dollar suddenly shoot up against all the other currencies when this global financial crisis started? The USA is where the gigantic financial crisis happened. So why is the US dollar suddenly so much higher than it was before? Any economists out there?
Here are some graphs: http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/EUR/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/GBP/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/BRL/graph120.html
WHY???
I think you are referring to bimetalism, which is a different beast than the gold standard. Bimetalism didn't show up as a significant force in U.S. monetary policy until the late 19th century. Bimetalism is seriously unstable because it is susceptible to changes in the supply of or demand for either metal. Both silver and gold have significant industrial use that would be greatly impacted by fixing the ratio
For example, if the standard ratio of gold to silver is 20:1 (as bimetalism is usually formulated) and the silver supply expands, that extra silver won't go to other use because it is overpriced relative to supply.
For example the current ratio of gold to silver price is about 75:1. Lets say we went back to a 20:1 bimetalic standard tomorrow. That means gold is overpriced and silver is underpriced. In other words, gold is worth more outside of the monetary realm than it is within it. So gold will get withdrawn from circulation and used for other things. Silver, on the other hand, is worth more as money than it is being put to other uses. Industries will stop using so much silver and turn it into coinage. In the end, the bimetalic standard will disappear because all of the gold will be out of circulation and we will end up on a silver standard. Which is in essence what happened in the 19th century until McKinley was elected in 1896, whereupon we returned to the gold standard.
The problem with a gold standard is that the value of gold does fluctuate according to supply and demand which results in a currency that fluctuates in a manner that is difficult to control. The end result is that governments end up having to hoard gold in an attempt to stabilize their currency which would drive up worldwide gold demand, deflate the currency, and cause economic stagnation.
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I love how McCain says "We will show compassion, and we will show courage" in regards to an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. Who is "we"? The people who are blocking the poor woman from making a choice in order to deal with something she views as a problem? It must be so easy for them to be courageous in a situation that doesn't affect them. If women are forced to have children they don't want, we'll end up with more and more orphans, and who will pay for them? Surely there aren't enough people to adopt all those unwanted children.
Actually, the answers were of a higher quality than most I've seen them give.
McCain's response regarding the No Child Left Behind program was actually well in touch with the reasons why that program faltered. It was surprising, and more than I expected from him. However the solutions he endorsed, in his response and elsewhere in his policy, do not actually address the problems as he described them here. Obama's response to the same question was, by contrast, boilerplate about reform, including rhetoric about increasing the funding for schools and the pay grade for teachers. Neither point makes sense - we already toss quite a lot of money into schools, relative to other countries, and district performance varies WILDLY even among similar funding levels. The issue is just more complicated than a matter of funding.
On the other hand, I was greatly irritated at McCain's response to the question about women's health care. He was practically schizophrenic, talking about helping "challenged" women on the one hand, and then declaring that life begins at conception and all life is sacred on the other. He even trotted out that tired old pony of "partial-birth abortion". He also stood in OBVIOUS contrast to Obama, who described a holistic approach point-by-point and then made it quite clear that he would defend Roe vs. Wade and abortion rights in general. The candidates are markedly different here and your choice between them will have a serious impact.
They both also clearly differed on how seriously they took the idea of workplace discrimination and harassment,
Also, Obama offered more detail on how he would create oversight for the bank bailout program, and McCain offered more detail on how he might implement VA reform. You can tell where their strengths lie - if not as character traits, then at least in terms of what they believe their voting bloc is. That information is actually of use.
Neither of them touched the prison population question with a ten-foot pole, which I found irritating. Neither of them wanted to get into the briar patch of drug law I assume. On the other hand, it was quite refreshing to hear an entire sequence of debate responses where neither candidate mentioned Iraq or terrorism.
Also, I find the complaints about the exclusivity of the debate a little disingenuous - they're mostly directed at the Democratic and Republican parties. What's up with that? The roster of participants was chosen by Walden University. Go harangue them.