I'd really like to know what's considered antitrust...
- the same exact thing that it always was, since the very first one and every one after that: inability of some businesses to compete on quality and price ratio against a very successful company.
The reality is that what Google, Standard Oil, Alcoa Aluminium, IBM, Blockbuster, Microsoft provided customers with (or tried) was what customers really liked and so these companies became much more successful than the rest, and that's the problem: they are providing such good products at such low prices, that others have to BRIBE politicians to (re)enter the field without competition.
The reality is that anti-trust has NOTHING to do with what is best for the customer, it has to do with some business interests that cannot compete in the real world and use government as a MAFIA organisation that it is to destroy the more efficient, better companies. Of-course the companies fight back but to the politicians it doesn't matter who wins: the best in the field or the worst, either way the politicians get paid and create a public image that looks like they are on the side of the people, while the reality is the exact opposite.
Sure, maybe they should. As long as they can add this device to the plane:
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world.... The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.
and if the planes only need to be in the air for 40 femtoseconds.
Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
and it's cheap enough so that the military would not hesitate at the cost, as it has done before as TFS suggests.
If all of those things coincide, then sure, transparent aluminium.
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OTOH I would suggest going with a thin steel mesh screen maybe, or just doubling the width of the glass that is already in use.
Bill Gates has the right idea. I just wish other very rich people had as much sense and willingness to spend their money to help people.
- I wish that people with money simply tried to make more money by growing their marketshare as much as they possibly can in any business they attempt, thus lowering costs and prices for everybody and I wish people would stop believing in nonsense, such as: giving away savings for simple consumer spending is a good thing for any economy.
/. has 2 stories almost in a sequence, one is complaining that Amazon is reinvesting its profits to improve customer service, the other one (this one) shows that the only way that some others found to 'compete' with Amazon is to use government power to raise prices artificially and reduce quality of customer service. What's more, many here are actually cheering against currently the best in the field (Amazon) and want to see them stopped!
I guess as time goes nothing really changes. People still don't learn from history, people are still jealous little creatures and they are still acting against their own best interest just to try and push somebody down that does things better than they do. Of-course governments are still oppressing the freedoms of people, be it the individuals that try and build the best thing they can or be it others, who benefit from that work. Just like the case of Standard Oil, which was lowering prices and increasing product quality, speed of delivery over 4 decades, before it was broken down by a government, that acted that way to protect many smaller uncompetitive interests, that combined forces with the government to destroy the most successful and to hurt the consumers. Same with Alcoa Aluminium, same attempted with the IBM, same attempted with Microsoft, by the way, same with Amazon.
That's right, all of these cases have nothing to do with damage to customers, all of these cases have to do with damage to the uncompetitive businesses and corrupt politicians and the stupid mob that cheers for this destruction of excellence against their own real interests.
In a free market, free from gov't doing this on behest of somebody standing on a background with a bribe in his hand, there are no monopolies, but there may be economies of scale that serve customers the best while at least temporarily winning in the market. The moment they stop competing and stop innovating, stop pushing prices down and quality up, that's the moment somebody else can start doing that. But this hurts egos and bottom lines of the uncompetitive and this does not put money in the pockets of the politicians and this does not give the mob a reason to vandalise something.
Real history and real economics - something they don't teach in public schools for a reason.
If that's the case, then again, it's not a real business, never was! You don't have a business that subsidises other businesses for no reason, you have to be able to make a profit, which means you are definitely covering your costs and you are now running in the black, saving for more investment and maybe expansion.
Any fool, if given a billion dollars can turn it into a million dollars by running a "business" that hands out money, and that's what it is, if your business is losing money by "serving" while subsidising others.
My point is, if a company has 50,000 LEGITIMATE clients, who are businesses (or not businesses), then they should be able to restructure, if their business is not going well. Sure, failures can happen, especially in the over-regulated, over-taxed, over-inflated world of large collectivist governments, which sue companies for attempting to stay alive by modifying their business model (like gov't lawsuits against company mergers for example, that may in fact prevent a business restructuring, vital to the company's survival in a changing economy), but if you have legitimate customers, you don't even need 50,000 to stay afloat if you have 2 brain cells to rub together.
This was not a legitimate business then, buying a pencil for $1 and selling it for 50cents won't work, no matter how much volume, you are still losing money on each sale.
50,000 companies?
on
Do Is Done
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Seriously, these ridiculous numbers, like: 50,000 companies were clients of whatevermoomoo.com should not be trusted. No company that can serve 50,000 companies loses business, if necessary it can transform business, it can lower prices, it can do whatever it takes to hold on to that gigantic customer base. More than that, if you have 50,000 companies on your resume, you think it's hard to land business in another 1000? Seriously, SAP or Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or Google or Apple or whatever has that kind of customer base, do you see them just shutting down at some point, disappearing because they can no longer figure out HOW to serve 50,000+ companies as customers?
I live in a country where states are allowed to pass so-called "right to work" legislation and then fire people on the basis of those things, and as long as they do not admit this as the reason for the dismissal, it is perfectly legal.
- I sell my software to companies, I build software for companies, everything is in a contract. Any side can let the other side go for no reason with a 2 week notice. I must be able to terminate any one of my employees' contract by giving them a notice and that's that.
Nothing I did helped make the world a better place. The work I did made a CEO richer and that was about it. The companies were built on "How can we cheapen this so we make more money on it."
- this comes from fundamental misunderstanding of what businesses that people use in their every day lives do. You are saying banking, insurance, credit card companies are not helping making a world a better place? So people shouldn't be able to pool risk, pool resources, be able to transact online or IRL with credit cards, being able to pay for things, invest in things that eventually can translate to other businesses existing (for example a niche business of attempting to fix a spinal cord injury that really will only benefit a tiny proportion of the population as opposed to something like a credit card company, a bank or an insurance provider, that allow orders of magnitude more people to do things they couldn't really do otherwise without those businesses)?
Tell you what, most people are not going to need a spinal cord surgery, but most people do need to be able to pay for their electrical and gas bill online so that their house doesn't go dark and cold in a winter night, guess what is more important and less selfish.
Private sector did exactly as it is supposed to: somebody lost money by not being efficient or vigilant, somebody else made money by being more efficient and or more vigilant.
As long as the government does not step in with some form of a bail out there is no problem there at all. This bank or whatever financial firm it is will be HELD ACCOUNTABLE by the shareholders, clients, but at least there are mechanisms for doing that in the private sector.
Obamacare is about stealing money from people and apparently there is no mechanism to stop this theft at all.
- USA revolution was fought over something smaller than this. 3% tax. It's laughable given current levels of taxation, imagine: fighting a revolutionary war to prevent taxation without representation, tyranny and generally taxes by a king just to re-invent a much more intrusive system, with the tax burden being orders of magnitude greater, oppression being orders of magnitude more evident, but the people have to accept it because it is a law based on some silly notion of 'democracy'?
Democracy is tyranny by majority and it's much WORSE than tyranny by a single dictator. At least with a dictator you can aim your anger at a particular person and you can even attempt and maybe succeed in cutting his head off. Cutting a head off this democratic hydra is quite a different challenge, it's not going to happen.
A thing strong enough to take down a government like this one this time around just may be the collectivism itself, as it eats itself with all these taxes, inflation, regulations that destroy individual freedoms and destroy the economy, so eventually the beast eats everything and has nothing left and then it dies.
Sounds like ZB figured out the truth about America and is acting upon it. The only way to hire people is to ensure that they have little ability to appeal to the American court system.
Tea Party didn't do its job. It lost the battle here, when it gave up and allowed the debt ceiling to be raised.
The only way Tea Party could have been thanked (not sarcastically, but as a matter of fact) would have been as if it managed to prevent the rise of the debt ceiling, thus forcing an actual true reduction in government spending by forcing complete stop to the deficit spending.
Tea Party lost, I don't see any reason to thank it. It lost completely in this case and hurt its brand immensely by losing.
Disclaimer: If I were American, I would support the Tea Party (though I would also identify as a libertarian and an anarchist, those are not exclusive, they intersect but they are not equivalent).
The taxes in USA today are higher than they have ever been in history. I am not talking about tax rates, the tax rates were much higher during the WWII and a period of time after that ( 94% marginal rate, which applied progressively to incomes over 200,000 a year). However nobody actually paid any of these taxes, people avoided paying taxes, avoided declaring incomes, they both avoided and evaded taxes and I applaud them for that. In fact I applaud anybody avoiding ANY level of any type of income taxation.
Today, however, the effective rates are highest in USA history and they are not only paid by the top 1% (in fact many in the top 1% still manage to avoid and / or evade taxes, I again, applaud them for it and cheer for them, wish all were like them and avoided and evaded all income taxes).
No, the income taxes today apply to the majority of people and the rates are horrendous. I discuss some of this in my journal on this site, for example here is an entry, looking at IRS data.
Of-course it's been 100 years since introduction of the IRS and the Fed now, and in that time, the purpose that IRS and the Fed were introduced for were substituted for their inevitable outcome - growing government at all costs to the economy by using the threat of violence, gov't power to extract wealth from the working individuals and transfer it to the voting mob (*and to grow that mob for that purpose by impoverishing it via destruction of the free market economy, all while throwing the stolen crumbs at it to get its votes*) and to transfer the majority of the stolen funds to the new political elite, which enjoys the proceeds of this major theft.
The USA gov't now is nothing more than a Mafia organisation, but of-course so is for example the Russian government and 99% of all the other governments out there. Eventually this world wide system of destruction of individual freedom and property will collapse under its own weight, hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later, it will collapse because the political elite is not satisfied just with what it can extract in the plain sight. They just had to destroy the money itself to extract wealth via inflation, this time it's a global event and this time the collapse will have ramifications globally.
Of-course it's not a fact that the consequences will help to heal the problem, but it should give the system enough of a jolt at the least to produce some deeper and wider pockets of supporters for the individual freedom and free market capitalism, hopefully it will be enough to increase the overall economic and societal health of the entire system.
first line of the post says that US Treasury bonds have junk status. When you lead with an easily verifiable, factually incorrect statement like that, nobody will take you seriously.
- you should read it again, you are one of the people with your head far up your own ass, that's where your problem lies.
Here, let me demonstrate some more, the following statements are presented as 'verifiable facts' by the establishment political system and the media:
Inflation in USA is low.
USA gov't pays its debts.
SS has a trust fund.
Government spending is investment.
Income taxes are legal and are collected legally.
USA gov't behaves legally with its data collecting programs.
USA gov't behaves legally with its drone strike programs.
The job of Congressmen is to allow USA government to keep borrowing to spend.
The Congress is not doing its job when it selects, which programs (laws) to fund or not to fund.
POTUS can legally start a war without declaration by Congress.
All of the above statements are false, however they are 'easily verifiable' to be true if your sources for this 'easy verification' come from the establishment.
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Yes, it is true that the US, like most other countries, will never pay off its debt. The way fiat currency works is that inflation continously transfers wealth from those who save to those who borrow.
- USA defaulted on its obligations back in 1971, everything past that is just a consequence of that action. USA doesn't pay bills, it runs a gigantic ponzi scam and eventually all ponzi scams come to an end. USA will never pay off its debts to the debtors, but it will pay for what it is doing with a severely reduced living standard.
Fiat currencies do not work, they all fail given enough time.
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The federal government has this credibility,
- no, the USA federal gov't does not have the credibility, it has the printing press, that's the only true statement - US gov't has the credibility that it will attempt to print away its debts. As to credibility that USA can actually pay for the borrowing it does, there is no such credibility. USA licenses the rating agencies to give fake credit ratings to its debt in order to force people to accept this theft (inflation) by forcing the pension funds and various other institutions to buy this type of debt that cannot be repaid. As to the foreign debt holders, they are other central banks, who also have no credibility and are distributing this theft (inflation) among their own citizens the way USA does within its borders.
and therefore it is more profitable for it to invest in things like infrastructure and education than to pay off debt.
- none of these things are investments, investments imply that there is a return. Gov't doesn't look for return, it looks for increase in power and to enrich those, who have the closest ties to the politicians. So certain construction companies, "educational" institutions get the money and the people are used as the collateral.
Eventually, when many Americans would want to get up and leave USA because of the diminished standard of living, the gov't will attempt to make it illegal one way or another to just leave. They are already doing it with the IRS preventing people from getting travel passports if they have more than certain amount of IRS debt. To prevent young people from leaving, all they have to do is declare that anybody with a student loan cannot get a passport before they pay out their loan, and these loans are not dismissed in bankruptcy, so the entire young portion of the USA population will be stuck in USA for decades at least (practically forever).
(Even feeding the poor can be seen as an investment, because they will likely generate tax revenue in the future.)
No, you are the liar. The agencies that downgraded the US debt (and it is JUNK today, anybody who doesn't understand it has his or her head up their own asshole) were sued by the US gov't.
Of-course they were supposed to downgrade it to junk, the only agency that really downgraded the US bonds (Egan Jones) was stripped of their license to rate US debt. The sequester (cut to the spending) was the condition, the promise, under which the US gov't wouldn't be downgraded further (and eventually the worthless 'rating' agencies brought the US debt rating up again after getting scared of the feds and the SEC, etc.).
The Chinese don't want the US debt to grow, they just don't want the threat of not being paid what they are owed, so that's nonsense and that's why Chinese rating agencies downgraded US debt now, after the so called 'ceiling' was raised again.
The real crisis in USA is the debt, not the fake ceiling. The ceiling would have actually put a lid on ability of USA to continue running this enormous, biggest in history of the world ponzi scam, made up of the US bonds, dollars (the SS and Medicare are second in size ponzi scams after the bonds and the dollars).
USA is bankrupt, it can't pay its debts.
USA did NOT have to default on its creditors, 2300BILLION USD are collected per year by the feds, less than 300BILLION USD need to be paid out as the interest.
Obama, other politicians, the MSM all came out and told the bond holders: you are the low men on the totem pole, we won't pay you if we can't borrow more from you even though we collect almost 10 times the money in taxes that we need to pay you.
Anybody in their sane mind would see this as a direct threat against their assets (US bonds or dollars) if they have any and would immediately start unloading, but then again, this was obvious for a couple of decades now what is going on, specifically after the real default in 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar.
The real story of-course is that USA is bankrupt, US bonds are junk, USA will never pay any of its debts and would rather cause massive inflation (maybe even hyper inflation) and the credit agencies are bought and paid for not to report that truth.
GS came out with a recommendation to dump the gold to its muppets^C^C^C^C^C 'investors'. Somebody was dumping large quantities of gold on the market of a few days straight, in an attempt to move the price down, most likely trying to weed out the weak hands so that they could buy much more back at lower prices.
Anyway, enjoy your Marxist/Keynesian ideology, certainly the only thing it will bring you will be a total economic and societal collapse, maybe that's your cup of tea of-course but you desire it so much, you should get to experience it.
No, anybody who did not vote for the shutdown should be shot and the government should be shut down permanently.
This is inevitable, the government spending in USA depends on the biggest ponzi scam of all times and civilisations. US bonds and the dollar the biggest scams that exist, next after that would be the SS, Medicare, etc.
Bullshit, people don't have to drive. Is your proposal that people also don't have to live if they don't get the vaccine?
This is nonsense, taking away the right of the individuals by using the power of the collective to subjugate the will of the people to the desires of the State for so called 'common good'. The herd immunity argument does not change anything, people must have their individual freedoms and if they don't, then the entire herd can go fuck itself and die.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans in the USA practice free market capitalism, that's the exact opposite of what they are all doing, so your confusion comes from the fact that in reality the 2 supposed sides of the USA political parties are pretty much one and the same, except for minor issues (or not so minor, depending on whether you care about gays being oppressed or not as a general rule).
Basically to get free market capitalism the government itself needs to be reduced to a pre-1913 level, that would require at the minimum 100 times decrease of government and of its spending, it's not going to happen by itself or by a political will, it's going to happen when the system collapses (and it will) due to the impossibility of borrowing more from the rest of the world and realisation that without borrowing the USA cannot actually consume anything.
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I'd really like to know what's considered antitrust...
- the same exact thing that it always was, since the very first one and every one after that: inability of some businesses to compete on quality and price ratio against a very successful company.
The reality is that what Google, Standard Oil, Alcoa Aluminium, IBM, Blockbuster, Microsoft provided customers with (or tried) was what customers really liked and so these companies became much more successful than the rest, and that's the problem: they are providing such good products at such low prices, that others have to BRIBE politicians to (re)enter the field without competition.
The reality is that anti-trust has NOTHING to do with what is best for the customer, it has to do with some business interests that cannot compete in the real world and use government as a MAFIA organisation that it is to destroy the more efficient, better companies. Of-course the companies fight back but to the politicians it doesn't matter who wins: the best in the field or the worst, either way the politicians get paid and create a public image that looks like they are on the side of the people, while the reality is the exact opposite.
it's a trap!
Sure, maybe they should. As long as they can add this device to the plane:
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world.... The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.
and if the planes only need to be in the air for 40 femtoseconds.
Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
and it's cheap enough so that the military would not hesitate at the cost, as it has done before as TFS suggests.
If all of those things coincide, then sure, transparent aluminium.
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OTOH I would suggest going with a thin steel mesh screen maybe, or just doubling the width of the glass that is already in use.
You can't really strip the emperor if he is already naked, but you can be the first one to tell the truth about it.
Police: Are you classified as human?
Korben Dallas: Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
Police: Are you classified as human?
Korben Dallas: Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
Bill Gates has the right idea. I just wish other very rich people had as much sense and willingness to spend their money to help people.
- I wish that people with money simply tried to make more money by growing their marketshare as much as they possibly can in any business they attempt, thus lowering costs and prices for everybody and I wish people would stop believing in nonsense, such as: giving away savings for simple consumer spending is a good thing for any economy.
/. has 2 stories almost in a sequence, one is complaining that Amazon is reinvesting its profits to improve customer service, the other one (this one) shows that the only way that some others found to 'compete' with Amazon is to use government power to raise prices artificially and reduce quality of customer service. What's more, many here are actually cheering against currently the best in the field (Amazon) and want to see them stopped!
I guess as time goes nothing really changes. People still don't learn from history, people are still jealous little creatures and they are still acting against their own best interest just to try and push somebody down that does things better than they do. Of-course governments are still oppressing the freedoms of people, be it the individuals that try and build the best thing they can or be it others, who benefit from that work. Just like the case of Standard Oil, which was lowering prices and increasing product quality, speed of delivery over 4 decades, before it was broken down by a government, that acted that way to protect many smaller uncompetitive interests, that combined forces with the government to destroy the most successful and to hurt the consumers. Same with Alcoa Aluminium, same attempted with the IBM, same attempted with Microsoft, by the way, same with Amazon.
That's right, all of these cases have nothing to do with damage to customers, all of these cases have to do with damage to the uncompetitive businesses and corrupt politicians and the stupid mob that cheers for this destruction of excellence against their own real interests.
In a free market, free from gov't doing this on behest of somebody standing on a background with a bribe in his hand, there are no monopolies, but there may be economies of scale that serve customers the best while at least temporarily winning in the market. The moment they stop competing and stop innovating, stop pushing prices down and quality up, that's the moment somebody else can start doing that. But this hurts egos and bottom lines of the uncompetitive and this does not put money in the pockets of the politicians and this does not give the mob a reason to vandalise something.
Real history and real economics - something they don't teach in public schools for a reason.
If that's the case, then again, it's not a real business, never was! You don't have a business that subsidises other businesses for no reason, you have to be able to make a profit, which means you are definitely covering your costs and you are now running in the black, saving for more investment and maybe expansion.
Any fool, if given a billion dollars can turn it into a million dollars by running a "business" that hands out money, and that's what it is, if your business is losing money by "serving" while subsidising others.
My point is, if a company has 50,000 LEGITIMATE clients, who are businesses (or not businesses), then they should be able to restructure, if their business is not going well. Sure, failures can happen, especially in the over-regulated, over-taxed, over-inflated world of large collectivist governments, which sue companies for attempting to stay alive by modifying their business model (like gov't lawsuits against company mergers for example, that may in fact prevent a business restructuring, vital to the company's survival in a changing economy), but if you have legitimate customers, you don't even need 50,000 to stay afloat if you have 2 brain cells to rub together.
This was not a legitimate business then, buying a pencil for $1 and selling it for 50cents won't work, no matter how much volume, you are still losing money on each sale.
Seriously, these ridiculous numbers, like: 50,000 companies were clients of whatevermoomoo.com should not be trusted. No company that can serve 50,000 companies loses business, if necessary it can transform business, it can lower prices, it can do whatever it takes to hold on to that gigantic customer base. More than that, if you have 50,000 companies on your resume, you think it's hard to land business in another 1000? Seriously, SAP or Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or Google or Apple or whatever has that kind of customer base, do you see them just shutting down at some point, disappearing because they can no longer figure out HOW to serve 50,000+ companies as customers?
These are made up numbers.
I live in a country where states are allowed to pass so-called "right to work" legislation and then fire people on the basis of those things, and as long as they do not admit this as the reason for the dismissal, it is perfectly legal.
- I sell my software to companies, I build software for companies, everything is in a contract. Any side can let the other side go for no reason with a 2 week notice. I must be able to terminate any one of my employees' contract by giving them a notice and that's that.
Nothing I did helped make the world a better place. The work I did made a CEO richer and that was about it. The companies were built on "How can we cheapen this so we make more money on it."
- this comes from fundamental misunderstanding of what businesses that people use in their every day lives do. You are saying banking, insurance, credit card companies are not helping making a world a better place? So people shouldn't be able to pool risk, pool resources, be able to transact online or IRL with credit cards, being able to pay for things, invest in things that eventually can translate to other businesses existing (for example a niche business of attempting to fix a spinal cord injury that really will only benefit a tiny proportion of the population as opposed to something like a credit card company, a bank or an insurance provider, that allow orders of magnitude more people to do things they couldn't really do otherwise without those businesses)?
Tell you what, most people are not going to need a spinal cord surgery, but most people do need to be able to pay for their electrical and gas bill online so that their house doesn't go dark and cold in a winter night, guess what is more important and less selfish.
Private sector did exactly as it is supposed to: somebody lost money by not being efficient or vigilant, somebody else made money by being more efficient and or more vigilant.
As long as the government does not step in with some form of a bail out there is no problem there at all. This bank or whatever financial firm it is will be HELD ACCOUNTABLE by the shareholders, clients, but at least there are mechanisms for doing that in the private sector.
Obamacare is about stealing money from people and apparently there is no mechanism to stop this theft at all.
you just have to suck it up and accept it.
- USA revolution was fought over something smaller than this. 3% tax. It's laughable given current levels of taxation, imagine: fighting a revolutionary war to prevent taxation without representation, tyranny and generally taxes by a king just to re-invent a much more intrusive system, with the tax burden being orders of magnitude greater, oppression being orders of magnitude more evident, but the people have to accept it because it is a law based on some silly notion of 'democracy'?
Democracy is tyranny by majority and it's much WORSE than tyranny by a single dictator. At least with a dictator you can aim your anger at a particular person and you can even attempt and maybe succeed in cutting his head off. Cutting a head off this democratic hydra is quite a different challenge, it's not going to happen.
A thing strong enough to take down a government like this one this time around just may be the collectivism itself, as it eats itself with all these taxes, inflation, regulations that destroy individual freedoms and destroy the economy, so eventually the beast eats everything and has nothing left and then it dies.
Where is this rampant sexism coming from? 'She'? 'He'?!
We must not stand for such obvious discrimination of terms based on such outdated ideas as biology!
Sounds like ZB figured out the truth about America and is acting upon it. The only way to hire people is to ensure that they have little ability to appeal to the American court system.
Tea Party didn't do its job. It lost the battle here, when it gave up and allowed the debt ceiling to be raised.
The only way Tea Party could have been thanked (not sarcastically, but as a matter of fact) would have been as if it managed to prevent the rise of the debt ceiling, thus forcing an actual true reduction in government spending by forcing complete stop to the deficit spending.
Tea Party lost, I don't see any reason to thank it. It lost completely in this case and hurt its brand immensely by losing.
Disclaimer: If I were American, I would support the Tea Party (though I would also identify as a libertarian and an anarchist, those are not exclusive, they intersect but they are not equivalent).
The taxes in USA today are higher than they have ever been in history. I am not talking about tax rates, the tax rates were much higher during the WWII and a period of time after that ( 94% marginal rate, which applied progressively to incomes over 200,000 a year). However nobody actually paid any of these taxes, people avoided paying taxes, avoided declaring incomes, they both avoided and evaded taxes and I applaud them for that. In fact I applaud anybody avoiding ANY level of any type of income taxation.
Today, however, the effective rates are highest in USA history and they are not only paid by the top 1% (in fact many in the top 1% still manage to avoid and / or evade taxes, I again, applaud them for it and cheer for them, wish all were like them and avoided and evaded all income taxes).
No, the income taxes today apply to the majority of people and the rates are horrendous. I discuss some of this in my journal on this site, for example here is an entry, looking at IRS data.
Of-course it's been 100 years since introduction of the IRS and the Fed now, and in that time, the purpose that IRS and the Fed were introduced for were substituted for their inevitable outcome - growing government at all costs to the economy by using the threat of violence, gov't power to extract wealth from the working individuals and transfer it to the voting mob (*and to grow that mob for that purpose by impoverishing it via destruction of the free market economy, all while throwing the stolen crumbs at it to get its votes*) and to transfer the majority of the stolen funds to the new political elite, which enjoys the proceeds of this major theft.
The USA gov't now is nothing more than a Mafia organisation, but of-course so is for example the Russian government and 99% of all the other governments out there. Eventually this world wide system of destruction of individual freedom and property will collapse under its own weight, hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later, it will collapse because the political elite is not satisfied just with what it can extract in the plain sight. They just had to destroy the money itself to extract wealth via inflation, this time it's a global event and this time the collapse will have ramifications globally.
Of-course it's not a fact that the consequences will help to heal the problem, but it should give the system enough of a jolt at the least to produce some deeper and wider pockets of supporters for the individual freedom and free market capitalism, hopefully it will be enough to increase the overall economic and societal health of the entire system.
first line of the post says that US Treasury bonds have junk status. When you lead with an easily verifiable, factually incorrect statement like that, nobody will take you seriously.
- you should read it again, you are one of the people with your head far up your own ass, that's where your problem lies.
Here, let me demonstrate some more, the following statements are presented as 'verifiable facts' by the establishment political system and the media:
All of the above statements are false, however they are 'easily verifiable' to be true if your sources for this 'easy verification' come from the establishment.
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Yes, it is true that the US, like most other countries, will never pay off its debt. The way fiat currency works is that inflation continously transfers wealth from those who save to those who borrow.
- USA defaulted on its obligations back in 1971, everything past that is just a consequence of that action. USA doesn't pay bills, it runs a gigantic ponzi scam and eventually all ponzi scams come to an end. USA will never pay off its debts to the debtors, but it will pay for what it is doing with a severely reduced living standard.
Fiat currencies do not work, they all fail given enough time.
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The federal government has this credibility,
- no, the USA federal gov't does not have the credibility, it has the printing press, that's the only true statement - US gov't has the credibility that it will attempt to print away its debts. As to credibility that USA can actually pay for the borrowing it does, there is no such credibility. USA licenses the rating agencies to give fake credit ratings to its debt in order to force people to accept this theft (inflation) by forcing the pension funds and various other institutions to buy this type of debt that cannot be repaid. As to the foreign debt holders, they are other central banks, who also have no credibility and are distributing this theft (inflation) among their own citizens the way USA does within its borders.
and therefore it is more profitable for it to invest in things like infrastructure and education than to pay off debt.
- none of these things are investments, investments imply that there is a return. Gov't doesn't look for return, it looks for increase in power and to enrich those, who have the closest ties to the politicians. So certain construction companies, "educational" institutions get the money and the people are used as the collateral.
Eventually, when many Americans would want to get up and leave USA because of the diminished standard of living, the gov't will attempt to make it illegal one way or another to just leave. They are already doing it with the IRS preventing people from getting travel passports if they have more than certain amount of IRS debt. To prevent young people from leaving, all they have to do is declare that anybody with a student loan cannot get a passport before they pay out their loan, and these loans are not dismissed in bankruptcy, so the entire young portion of the USA population will be stuck in USA for decades at least (practically forever).
(Even feeding the poor can be seen as an investment, because they will likely generate tax revenue in the future.)
- feeding the poor is just a w
No, you are the liar. The agencies that downgraded the US debt (and it is JUNK today, anybody who doesn't understand it has his or her head up their own asshole) were sued by the US gov't.
Of-course they were supposed to downgrade it to junk, the only agency that really downgraded the US bonds (Egan Jones) was stripped of their license to rate US debt. The sequester (cut to the spending) was the condition, the promise, under which the US gov't wouldn't be downgraded further (and eventually the worthless 'rating' agencies brought the US debt rating up again after getting scared of the feds and the SEC, etc.).
The Chinese don't want the US debt to grow, they just don't want the threat of not being paid what they are owed, so that's nonsense and that's why Chinese rating agencies downgraded US debt now, after the so called 'ceiling' was raised again.
The real crisis in USA is the debt, not the fake ceiling. The ceiling would have actually put a lid on ability of USA to continue running this enormous, biggest in history of the world ponzi scam, made up of the US bonds, dollars (the SS and Medicare are second in size ponzi scams after the bonds and the dollars).
USA is bankrupt, it can't pay its debts.
USA did NOT have to default on its creditors, 2300BILLION USD are collected per year by the feds, less than 300BILLION USD need to be paid out as the interest.
Obama, other politicians, the MSM all came out and told the bond holders: you are the low men on the totem pole, we won't pay you if we can't borrow more from you even though we collect almost 10 times the money in taxes that we need to pay you.
Anybody in their sane mind would see this as a direct threat against their assets (US bonds or dollars) if they have any and would immediately start unloading, but then again, this was obvious for a couple of decades now what is going on, specifically after the real default in 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar.
The real story of-course is that USA is bankrupt, US bonds are junk, USA will never pay any of its debts and would rather cause massive inflation (maybe even hyper inflation) and the credit agencies are bought and paid for not to report that truth.
GS came out with a recommendation to dump the gold to its muppets^C^C^C^C^C 'investors'. Somebody was dumping large quantities of gold on the market of a few days straight, in an attempt to move the price down, most likely trying to weed out the weak hands so that they could buy much more back at lower prices.
Anyway, enjoy your Marxist/Keynesian ideology, certainly the only thing it will bring you will be a total economic and societal collapse, maybe that's your cup of tea of-course but you desire it so much, you should get to experience it.
No, anybody who did not vote for the shutdown should be shot and the government should be shut down permanently.
This is inevitable, the government spending in USA depends on the biggest ponzi scam of all times and civilisations. US bonds and the dollar the biggest scams that exist, next after that would be the SS, Medicare, etc.
Bullshit, people don't have to drive. Is your proposal that people also don't have to live if they don't get the vaccine?
This is nonsense, taking away the right of the individuals by using the power of the collective to subjugate the will of the people to the desires of the State for so called 'common good'. The herd immunity argument does not change anything, people must have their individual freedoms and if they don't, then the entire herd can go fuck itself and die.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans in the USA practice free market capitalism, that's the exact opposite of what they are all doing, so your confusion comes from the fact that in reality the 2 supposed sides of the USA political parties are pretty much one and the same, except for minor issues (or not so minor, depending on whether you care about gays being oppressed or not as a general rule).
Basically to get free market capitalism the government itself needs to be reduced to a pre-1913 level, that would require at the minimum 100 times decrease of government and of its spending, it's not going to happen by itself or by a political will, it's going to happen when the system collapses (and it will) due to the impossibility of borrowing more from the rest of the world and realisation that without borrowing the USA cannot actually consume anything.
It could if you started as a billionaire and levered up 1 to 100 against :)
You are a blind person in this world, which you completely don't understand.