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The U.S. Careens Over the Fiscal Cliff, Reaching Only Half of a Deal
New submitter Jetra wrote with word that the House of Representatives failed to vote on the "fiscal cliff" deal before midnight, technically sending the U.S. over the fiscal cliff. The White House and Senate, however, reached an agreement at the last minute to allow for some tax increases, and a House vote approving it is expected in the next day or two: "The agreement came together after negotiators cleared two final hurdles involving the estate tax and automatic spending cuts set to hit the Pentagon and other federal agencies later this week. Republicans gave ground on the spending cuts, known as the sequester, by agreeing to a two-month delay paid for in part with fresh tax revenue, a condition they had resisted. White House officials yielded to GOP wishes on how to handle estate taxes, aides said."
The battle over required spending cuts has predictably been delayed for another day, making the deal far from complete.
It's stuff like this that make me wonder what the hell is wrong with my country.
No need to wonder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_States
They're in leadership positions in both parties and are deeply-entrenched in the government bureaucracy. That's why no matter which party wins elections, nothing much (that really matters) changes. The only real battles are between Progressives who want to start filling up the FEMA camps now, and the ones that think the frogs should be heated a bit longer first.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
At least he gets shit done, unlike Olame-a.
... is the day the world ends.
When the rest of the human race choose to face reality every single day ...
When the rest of the human race try their best to balance their own budget ...
The liberals will tell you something else ... that debt is good, that more debt is more good ...
That a country with a 16 trillion debt, should pile on more debt, in order to make it better.
The thing that comes with the most powerful oomph is this ...
They, the liberals, actually think that they are more clever than everybody else !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Liberal? I'm liberal, all of a sudden? CLUE: In the United States of America, to qualify as "liberal" you have to approve of homosexuality and gay marriage, you have to support women's rights (almost militantly), you must beat down a white guy while giving a "brother" a helping hand, you must approve of welfare and free abortions for all women, whether they realize that they need them or not.
I could go on.
But, just because you disagree with my assessment of economics, I'm a fucking liberal.
Did your mama have any children that lived?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So, however, is capital investment.
- yes, but only private enterprise actually does what is known as 'investment'. Governments only spend, they don't invest. If something is worth an investment it's only because the investor believes he'll be able to generate a profit that will cover the costs and have a decent return on that investment (decent, as in beating the real inflation and then also covering risk costs and taxes obviously and generating some profit that steal beats passive investments and inflation hedges).
Government doesn't do any of that, the entire government structure is set up not to incentivise profitable investments but instead to grow power of government regardless of costs. You see costs do not matter to the government officials, they are not holding the bag, it's not their money, but whatever they can spend increases their power. This is the exact opposite of what an investor has to deal with. An investor has to evaluate risk reward ratio, he has to be as efficient as possible to ensure his input costs are as low as possible so that he can actually access more market to sell more of his productive output.
A government official doesn't need to fight for the market share, he has it by decree. He doesn't need to lower his costs, he is not risking any money of his own or his credit and assets. He doesn't need to generate profit, in fact generating profit is absolutely irrelevant, that's not the point. The point is to spend spend spend, spend as much as possible, to get as much blanket to yourself as possible and then ensure that you can grow grow grow your budget for the next year, not cut it!
I mean government has a function, but that function is not an investment one, it's a protection one. In USA at least the government is there (supposed to be anyway) to protect individuals from tyranny. Be it tyranny of foreign invasion and foreign governments or be it in fact tyranny of domestic attempts to steal the power and use it to curtail individual freedoms. Unfortunately about 124 years into the experiment it failed and tyranny eventually was introduced.
For example democracy is tyranny, it's tyranny of the majority. It doesn't matter WHO is the tyrant, the people who are oppressed are always some form of a minority. Power minority or a voting minority. Setting up income taxes for example, especially progressive income taxes can only be done because of tyranny and mobocracy, but it's a democratic process. It's not like it's impossible to vote your rights away, it happened so many times in history, including history of USA that it shouldn't be a surprise. That's why democracies always actually descent into tyrannies, it's because the majority vote for the politicians who are willing to sell out a minority to give the majority some satisfaction, whatever that is.
As to the entire 'crop' metaphor, well sure, if you see the purpose of government to steal as much from the economy as possible rather than just do its authorised job, ensure that the authorised functions are running and nothing else happens. But that's the problem, you are certain that governments should be doing more all the time, otherwise where would this notion come from, that governments need to 'harvest' economic output?
Capital investment is never a government job, I wrote some other comments on that, I don't like to repeat the same thing, but hey, the same wrong things get thrown around quite often.
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By the way, the OP in this thread is so confused, it should be obvious to everybody but somehow it is not. Look at his statements:
No, a balanced budget is the last freaking thing we or any country needs. National budgets aren't like your personal checkbook, hell they're not even like a companies balance sheet
- look at this. Read it.
Now look at this o
You can't handle the truth.