Clinton was in office from January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001
Debt table:
Date Dollar Amount
09/30/2002 6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
09/30/1998 5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997 5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996 5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995 4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994 4,692,749,910,013.32
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139.38
09/30/1992 4,064,620,655,521.66
Do you see any years where the debt was lower the next year than the year before? I don't see any years like that.
2. Let's look at your claim carefully:
a.
He didn't put it on a credit card.
b.
The federal government spent less than it took in.
c.
That SS is a separate budget item doesn't change this.
d.
The government borrowed from itself
a contradicts d, b contradicts d. c does not interact with any other claim, so we can throw it out.
What you are saying is that the federal gov't didn't put anything on credit card but that it borrowed. You are saying the federal gov't didn't spend more than it took in, but it borrowed.
SS is part of the federal budget, by the way, who do you think makes the payments, Martians? Whatever accounting tricks (that a private person would be in jail for if he ran his business this way) they want to play by saying they are borrowing from themselves, they are just printing money if that's what they are doing.
Yes, they were printing massive amounts of money. Saying that printing massive amounts of money is the same as spending as much as you are getting in revenue is really a huge fucking lie.
You don't make more money due to a raise if prices are not going up.
If prices are not going up, your salary isn't going up either, you have a stable price situation, your wage is just a price to your employer. Actually 19th century USA showed this, the prices were falling, people weren't making significantly more money, somewhat more, but not with raises all the time. They were making more money by being able to buy more goods with the same money next year as they could a year before.
Again, you don't drive inflation by raising prices, inflation is not a function of rising prices. Inflation is a function of expansion of the money supply. Rising prices are a consequence of inflation, not the cause of it.
A growing economy causes prices to fall, not to rise until the government steps in with fake money.
- inflation is expansion of monetary supply and thus reduction of value of a single unit of currency. Real money, like gold, inflate at a natural level of production, mining, which is about 1.5%. However real money inflation is not theft! That's because there was actual work done to produce it, even at 1.5% mining and production capacity, silver, gold was in deflation over the 19th century, while the economy was growing (and gold and silver was money).
Doesn't inflation happen because people generally get raises as they work longer, thus they have more money, thus stores can charge more?
- no, you have it backwards.
1. Inflation is expansion of money.
2. People are forced to work longer because of inflation, so the government steals your purchasing power and thus you end up working more hours to get less real purchasing power (even if you end up with somewhat a higher nominal amount of dollars in your pocket, inflation is faster than your rate of salary growth if you have any growth).
3. Stores do not charge more because they 'can' because of inflation. Stores are actually in a constant competition to keep prices down, but they have their costs, which are rising due to inflation. The products supplied to them increase in price because of inflation. Stores are in a competition, they would rather sell at a lower price to a wider audience. Stores charge more not because 'they can', but because they have no choice.
Every time a store ends up charging more it risks losing its customers (and it does, people go without, people buy less, people find cheaper alternatives, etc., that's why for example restaurant visits are declining)
Otherwise, people would just get richer and richer without bound, and the prices would be the same, thus making things *seem* cheaper.
- people should get richer as a result of higher productivity, but your definition richer is probably not totally correct.
Richer does not mean more nominal dollars, richer means more purchasing power, that's all. Purchasing power grows as the production grows, not the dollar supply.
Understand this: you can print as many dollars as you like and you can put as many zeroes on them as you like, this does not make people richer! People become richer when productive output grows, when factories make more and more stuff and prices go down, not up. Inflation is a phenomena created by the government, which expands the money supply and as a result, there is a higher demand for the same amount of goods.
More dollars does not = more goods, it means higher prices for the same amount of goods. But it's worse than that, more dollars = fake signals to the economy about the amount of savings in the economy, as the nominal numbers are going up and the interest rates are pushed down because of the increased supply of dollars, the economy will eventually shrink and people will become poorer for it. The reason is that in the long term, there will be too much misallocation of resources and too much debt (as is now), and with a non-stop inflation engine, what happens is that real productivity moves goes away, moves somewhere else or just disappears.
Misallocation of resources means that the consuming sectors of the economy grow and the producing sectors of the economy shrink. Shrinking production = less wealthy, not more wealthy. The more fake money is in the system, the less purchasing power you get, the less purchasing power you get with your money, the less ability you have to invest. The less real investments are taking place, the lower is the productive output. The lower is the productive output, the less wealthy you are, as prices will keep going up for the ever shrinking pool of real goods and ever expanding pool of printed money.
Inflation is theft, it steals return on real savings and investment and so it steals everybody's purchasing power by destroying production.
"lacks credibility" - pretty rich from a Keynesian. The people who bet on the Austrian school of economics profited greatly in the long run over the last 20 years by bidding against the monetary expansion by the Central banks. Suffices it to say that hundreds of billions were made by betting against the housing market during its bubble, against the stock market during its bubble.
Probably trillions will be made in the next crash, with people betting against the bond market and the dollar itself. The crowd wants the bond, the dollar, the contrarian Austrians want to short the bond and the dollar, but they understand that shorting a dollar denominated asset is stupid, because nominally they will lose to the ability of the Fed to print. The Fed will print Trillions and thousands of Trillions when the time comes, so instead of shorting the bond market and the dollar, the correct way to play this is by being in assets that cannot be printed.
In this situation even the tech sector is better than the dollar, the problem for the tech sector is that its PE ratio has no correlation to real life.
You know what proves somebody being right or wrong in this case? If they can survive and even gain when the majority will be crashing. Keynesians are the majority, the majority want Keynesian solutions, the government wants Keynesian solutions.
You think Austrian model 'lacks credibility', that's fine by me. You bet your money the way you want, I do the way I want.
Everyone (again - more or less) agrees that the economy needed the stimulus
- please exclude me and millions more people from your 'everyone'. No, there shouldn't have been any stimulus, not a cent should have gone from savers into the pockets of failures via the redistribution system set up by the government.
For hard economic theory you should read Mises, Hayek, Rothbart not my blog. In case you are unaware of these people, Hayek is a person who for example analysed the data stock market data, spending, credit, etc., and predicted the 1929 crash before it happened, unlike Keynes, who lost money in that crash because he was consumed by 'animal spirits' and not data.
I didn't say that gold has to mirror DOW, you are misreading my comment, I said that gold is cheap in relative terms because the most expensive that we have ever seen gold was when it was 1 to 1 with DOW.
DOW is production, it pays dividends, it has a return on the investment (used to at least before the inflation, now it's just a response to inflation).
Gold is money, it's not an investment. It can't track DOW, I never said it should or can. I said it's cheap, because the most expensive that we know it ever came to be was when it was 1 to 1 with a dividend paying DOW.
- it's a misconception that comes from propaganda. Clinton never had any surpluses.
Every single year that Clinton was in the office, the year ended with more debt than was on the books at the beginning of the year. To run a balanced budget does not mean to put more debt on the books and pretend that your budget is balanced, it means not to spend more than you earn and if the only way for you to claim a 'balance' is by spending more than you earn but by growing your debt on your credit card, then how can you claim balance?
What Clinton did was insidious, with Rubin they refinanced US with a short term, adjustable rate mortgage and grew the debt because they didn't see it as a big deal at lower interest rates. Well, sure, it's not a big deal for Clinton, who left the office. It's a big deal for the country that stayed even when he was done, now the country owes that money (and everything that was added to the debt past Clinton). Clinton presided over the stock market bubble fuelled by Greenspan and started the housing bubble.
They are very well supported, the comment sections are not designed for this, but you can obviously read my blog, and there are plenty of people, who can explain all of this better than I could ever dream of.
why, I can accept that it can be considered but I disagree that it is correct. It is wrong to consider 'temporary inflation' to be a good thing. Inflation is theft, that's all it is, so you are redistributing by stealing. OK, fine, steal. But you can't even talk about this with a straight face, you have used the word temporary, which is ludicrous.
There is nothing more permanent than a 'temporary' solution, you should know that if you are a technical person. There is nothing temporary about it, the more of inflation that the Fed creates the worse the economy becomes and then as a response to that worsening, you want more of that inflation. What you call "address" I call an injection of morphine to prevent the sensors from feeling the pain.
The economy is in pain, that's what all of this misallocation of resources is - pain. The economy is in pain and it needs treatment, which means it needs to restructure the resources, let the failures fail, let the debts be written off, let the books clear, let the assets be sold at the real current value, let the government shrink and all sectors of economy shrink that are propped up and are not real.
What you call "address" in reality means numb the pain but do not look at the root cause, the real problem. WHY are people spending 30Million on this app? Is it really worth the 30Million? Well, it has no revenue, no profits. It is speculative based solely on a belief that there will be a greater fool down the road, who will, because of all this inflation accept to buy this at an even higher price (one way or another, be it to purchase the app or to purchase Yahoo stock at higher prices, whatever).
You are also saying: "social costs of individual poverty" implying that you think that you can reduce poverty by creating inflation. You believe that what you are doing by creating inflation is forcing people to spend their money, you are allowing the government to steal and spend money.
But the truth as to why sometimes inflation reduces unemployment is because it lowers the price of labour.
That's all it is, you are reducing everybody's labour price, you are reducing everybody's wages. Obviously you are doing it indiscriminately, you are not allowing the failing companies to fail and the successful companies to keep working at their own pace. You are saying: fuck you, we don't care if you are a successful company. Oh, and you, we are going to prop you up, we don't care that you are a fucking failure. So we are going to ensure that all of your employees and investors suffer, regardless of the preferences of the market.
We, the government, are going to steal whatever we can to grow government, to create subsidies and to reduce your wages while we are at it, but we will prevent failures from failing, and we will prevent the cleaning that is necessary from taking place.
Obviously you are unfamiliar with history, as all Keynesians are, they live in a weird bubble of sorts. You don't know that depressions, where government cut spending and taxes went away very quickly, in under 2 years, while those recessions that the governments propped up turned into depressions, and then more propping up caused the situation to get worse.
Keynesians believe that any type of spending is good, dig ditches, fill them up, build bombs, blow them up. That's why they don't understand the difference between a GOOD business model with no unsustainable debt and a BAD business model, that wastes resources and should be liquidated. That's why they believe they can 'solve' something with just a 'little' inflation. What they are actually doing is giving the patient (economy) sedatives and pain killers and telling it that the cancer is gone.
They call themselves Keynesians and they wouldn't even qualify for that obviously. Keyneys did say that there should be surpluses during 'good times', but he was totally wrong about the rest of it, but those are the parts that the modern Keynesians decided to follow.
Notice they are not following the 'surpluses' part, they are running huge deficits during 'times good' (which I argue are not good, they are inflationary themselves, not all inflation comes from the Fed, but all inflation comes from government. In case of the fractional reserve banking the reason there is so much of it that a significant amount of inflation is created is because of the fake FDIC insurance, which is a moral hazard. Today the US banks have about 10Trillion in deposits, which are credit to the banks. FDIC has 25Billion in 'assets', which are debt too, bonds.)
Comparing an output unit of productivity (gold, which has to be found, mined, refined, formed) to DOW, the productive part of the economy is arbitrary, but comparing to dollars, the paper that you can print as many zeroes as you wish is not arbitrary?
Interesting, interesting. What would you rather compare to, something that has to be productive to exist or something that exists because of.... desire of a politician to stay elected and thus satisfy the crowd's short term memory?
It denies the storage of value aspect of money by not realising that money printing is inflation itself and inflation of money supply causes destruction of value of a single monetary unit.
Keynesians deny this simple fact, which is why they are so confused by something that must seem to them to be a paradox: inflation and simultaneous rise of unemployment. It's not a paradox, it's only a paradox if you don't realise that inflation destroys value of money, thus kills investment opportunities and destroys productive jobs.
Oil and gold? Two non-bubbles. Gold isn't even at historic highs, for that it would have to be 1:1 with DOW, and it's nowhere near. Gold is very very cheap now.
As to oil, the US is using smallest amount in decades, it imports smallest amounts in at least quarter of a century, the production capacity is greater than ever and yet the prices are going up in dollars, but not in gold, not in silver. Again, oil is quite cheap if you are not buying it in dollars. It's the dollars that are cheap, and the demand for oil is growing in other parts of the world, which are the productive parts.
Imagine what happens once the Chinese stop subsidising US consumption... their currency shoots up against dollars and for them oil falls in price. So while the American's can't afford their oil, they'll be selling it to the Chinese, who will be able to buy it cheaper and cheaper in their money.
The bubbles that are being inflated are in bonds, dollars. As to asset bubbles, sure, there are asset bubbles. The tech sector is very much inflated.
How is it possible for a company with a price to earning ratio of 100 to go up in price even in dollars without inflation, while gold mining stocks, with PE ratios in single digits going down? This does not show anything at all similar to a bubble in gold and mining stocks, but it shows a very much overheated tech sector.
Yes, it is a bubble, but it's not simply a tech bubble, it's money bubble this time. It's all inflation, people are looking for place to park value.
For all the Keynesians that deny one of the 3 major functions of money (storage of value), that's what you do when you print and print without regard to the actual purchasing power - you force people to look into alternative ways of storing purchasing power, and obviously with the interest rates being pushed down by this same action by the Fed and other central banks around the world, there is no yield.
Savers, investors are in a search of yield and they can't find it. That's how bubbles form. While the Fed is trying hard to reflate the housing bubble it doesn't really control what the inflation goes into and when it comes rushing out, so it results in higher stock market prices, higher asset prices that go up in bidding wars, whatever people can think of, anything that is not the paper printed by the central banks.
It will burst, what will be the second worst of the bad is unclear right now but the worst of the bad will be USD denominated debt, bonds, dollars themselves.
The zero rate applies only to income and gains derived from investments made after residency has been established and will last until 2035. Income and gains before residency are subject to the island's 10 percent capital gains, but for investments sold after 10 years and before 2035, the rate drops to 5 percent. In America, the tax rate on long-term capital gains and dividends for the top 2 percent is just under 24 percent.
If somebody wants to start a new business in USA, they should definitely do it somewhere in Texas but even better, Puerto Rico. If you start a company in Puerto Rico, they promise 30 years of no capital gains taxes, that's beside the business income tax of 4% and there is no federal US income tax.
So if you start a company and it becomes successful, you definitely want to be there, you can sell your business and pay no capital gains. Clearly they won't be following MA example with this nonsense either.
If approved, the state estimates the tax may bring in a quarter billion dollars in 2014
- right, because taxing something creates more of it rather than reduces its amount.
FTFA
Most of the tax would be levied against integrators, developers and other companies producing custom software. It's not clear exactly what services would be covered by the tax, but if hosting, bandwidth, storage, security and other services are taxed, presumably the tax would affect any service based away from the premises.
Here is what will happen: Massachusetts will lose some of the integrator business, which will be provided from somewhere else. It's not clear what exactly they are proposing to tax of-course, they have no idea what they are talking about, but they sure as hell want to tax something there and that means raising costs and reducing business activity, whatever they do, they should expect less business, not more. I would be surprised if they managed to collect any taxes from this, they may end up with less tax dollars overall if/once they implement this idea.
When I switched to a GNU/Linux distro on the desktop, Windows OS was still sane (XP), since then I had to use a newer Windows machine a few of times, it confuses the shit out of me, I am not joking. The GUI paradigm has changed so much in any Windows past XP, it's not that I don't like it, I can't use it (and that means I don't like it). To me the new Windows is like Macintosh of the old but even worse in terms of figuring out what's where.
Mint Mate with is what I understand now, I guess I got stuck in one GUI paradigm and can't... no, I don't want to change it.
Well, Berezovsky is dead now. He brought Putin to power and taught him whatever he needed to know, including all about the money handling. Not that this is related, just a timely coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
You are mistaken, it's not an emotional aversion to a term. Keynesianism to economics what astrology is to astronomy.
Should Horoscopes be considered while having a discussion on, say, background cosmic radiation? No.
These 2 words: Keynesian and economics shouldn't even be in the same sentence.
Let's approach this methodically, shall we?
1. Let's look at debt figures.
debt figures 1950-1999
debt figures 2000-2012
Clinton was in office from January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001
Debt table:
Date Dollar Amount
Do you see any years where the debt was lower the next year than the year before? I don't see any years like that.
2. Let's look at your claim carefully:
a.
He didn't put it on a credit card.
b.
The federal government spent less than it took in.
c.
That SS is a separate budget item doesn't change this.
d.
The government borrowed from itself
a contradicts d, b contradicts d.
c does not interact with any other claim, so we can throw it out.
What you are saying is that the federal gov't didn't put anything on credit card but that it borrowed. You are saying the federal gov't didn't spend more than it took in, but it borrowed.
SS is part of the federal budget, by the way, who do you think makes the payments, Martians? Whatever accounting tricks (that a private person would be in jail for if he ran his business this way) they want to play by saying they are borrowing from themselves, they are just printing money if that's what they are doing.
Yes, they were printing massive amounts of money. Saying that printing massive amounts of money is the same as spending as much as you are getting in revenue is really a huge fucking lie.
You don't make more money due to a raise if prices are not going up.
If prices are not going up, your salary isn't going up either, you have a stable price situation, your wage is just a price to your employer. Actually 19th century USA showed this, the prices were falling, people weren't making significantly more money, somewhat more, but not with raises all the time. They were making more money by being able to buy more goods with the same money next year as they could a year before.
Again, you don't drive inflation by raising prices, inflation is not a function of rising prices. Inflation is a function of expansion of the money supply. Rising prices are a consequence of inflation, not the cause of it.
A growing economy causes prices to fall, not to rise until the government steps in with fake money.
How is inflation theft?
- inflation is expansion of monetary supply and thus reduction of value of a single unit of currency. Real money, like gold, inflate at a natural level of production, mining, which is about 1.5%. However real money inflation is not theft! That's because there was actual work done to produce it, even at 1.5% mining and production capacity, silver, gold was in deflation over the 19th century, while the economy was growing (and gold and silver was money).
Doesn't inflation happen because people generally get raises as they work longer, thus they have more money, thus stores can charge more?
- no, you have it backwards.
1. Inflation is expansion of money.
2. People are forced to work longer because of inflation, so the government steals your purchasing power and thus you end up working more hours to get less real purchasing power (even if you end up with somewhat a higher nominal amount of dollars in your pocket, inflation is faster than your rate of salary growth if you have any growth).
3. Stores do not charge more because they 'can' because of inflation. Stores are actually in a constant competition to keep prices down, but they have their costs, which are rising due to inflation. The products supplied to them increase in price because of inflation. Stores are in a competition, they would rather sell at a lower price to a wider audience. Stores charge more not because 'they can', but because they have no choice.
Every time a store ends up charging more it risks losing its customers (and it does, people go without, people buy less, people find cheaper alternatives, etc., that's why for example restaurant visits are declining)
Otherwise, people would just get richer and richer without bound, and the prices would be the same, thus making things *seem* cheaper.
- people should get richer as a result of higher productivity, but your definition richer is probably not totally correct.
Richer does not mean more nominal dollars, richer means more purchasing power, that's all. Purchasing power grows as the production grows, not the dollar supply.
Understand this: you can print as many dollars as you like and you can put as many zeroes on them as you like, this does not make people richer! People become richer when productive output grows, when factories make more and more stuff and prices go down, not up. Inflation is a phenomena created by the government, which expands the money supply and as a result, there is a higher demand for the same amount of goods.
More dollars does not = more goods, it means higher prices for the same amount of goods. But it's worse than that, more dollars = fake signals to the economy about the amount of savings in the economy, as the nominal numbers are going up and the interest rates are pushed down because of the increased supply of dollars, the economy will eventually shrink and people will become poorer for it. The reason is that in the long term, there will be too much misallocation of resources and too much debt (as is now), and with a non-stop inflation engine, what happens is that real productivity moves goes away, moves somewhere else or just disappears.
Misallocation of resources means that the consuming sectors of the economy grow and the producing sectors of the economy shrink. Shrinking production = less wealthy, not more wealthy. The more fake money is in the system, the less purchasing power you get, the less purchasing power you get with your money, the less ability you have to invest. The less real investments are taking place, the lower is the productive output. The lower is the productive output, the less wealthy you are, as prices will keep going up for the ever shrinking pool of real goods and ever expanding pool of printed money.
Inflation is theft, it steals return on real savings and investment and so it steals everybody's purchasing power by destroying production.
"lacks credibility" - pretty rich from a Keynesian. The people who bet on the Austrian school of economics profited greatly in the long run over the last 20 years by bidding against the monetary expansion by the Central banks. Suffices it to say that hundreds of billions were made by betting against the housing market during its bubble, against the stock market during its bubble.
Probably trillions will be made in the next crash, with people betting against the bond market and the dollar itself. The crowd wants the bond, the dollar, the contrarian Austrians want to short the bond and the dollar, but they understand that shorting a dollar denominated asset is stupid, because nominally they will lose to the ability of the Fed to print. The Fed will print Trillions and thousands of Trillions when the time comes, so instead of shorting the bond market and the dollar, the correct way to play this is by being in assets that cannot be printed.
In this situation even the tech sector is better than the dollar, the problem for the tech sector is that its PE ratio has no correlation to real life.
You know what proves somebody being right or wrong in this case? If they can survive and even gain when the majority will be crashing. Keynesians are the majority, the majority want Keynesian solutions, the government wants Keynesian solutions.
You think Austrian model 'lacks credibility', that's fine by me. You bet your money the way you want, I do the way I want.
Everyone (again - more or less) agrees that the economy needed the stimulus
- please exclude me and millions more people from your 'everyone'. No, there shouldn't have been any stimulus, not a cent should have gone from savers into the pockets of failures via the redistribution system set up by the government.
For hard economic theory you should read Mises, Hayek, Rothbart not my blog. In case you are unaware of these people, Hayek is a person who for example analysed the data stock market data, spending, credit, etc., and predicted the 1929 crash before it happened, unlike Keynes, who lost money in that crash because he was consumed by 'animal spirits' and not data.
I didn't say that gold has to mirror DOW, you are misreading my comment, I said that gold is cheap in relative terms because the most expensive that we have ever seen gold was when it was 1 to 1 with DOW.
DOW is production, it pays dividends, it has a return on the investment (used to at least before the inflation, now it's just a response to inflation).
Gold is money, it's not an investment. It can't track DOW, I never said it should or can. I said it's cheap, because the most expensive that we know it ever came to be was when it was 1 to 1 with a dividend paying DOW.
The last one was Clinton.
- it's a misconception that comes from propaganda. Clinton never had any surpluses.
Every single year that Clinton was in the office, the year ended with more debt than was on the books at the beginning of the year. To run a balanced budget does not mean to put more debt on the books and pretend that your budget is balanced, it means not to spend more than you earn and if the only way for you to claim a 'balance' is by spending more than you earn but by growing your debt on your credit card, then how can you claim balance?
What Clinton did was insidious, with Rubin they refinanced US with a short term, adjustable rate mortgage and grew the debt because they didn't see it as a big deal at lower interest rates. Well, sure, it's not a big deal for Clinton, who left the office. It's a big deal for the country that stayed even when he was done, now the country owes that money (and everything that was added to the debt past Clinton). Clinton presided over the stock market bubble fuelled by Greenspan and started the housing bubble.
They are very well supported, the comment sections are not designed for this, but you can obviously read my blog, and there are plenty of people, who can explain all of this better than I could ever dream of.
can be considered a good thing t
why, I can accept that it can be considered but I disagree that it is correct. It is wrong to consider 'temporary inflation' to be a good thing. Inflation is theft, that's all it is, so you are redistributing by stealing. OK, fine, steal. But you can't even talk about this with a straight face, you have used the word temporary, which is ludicrous.
There is nothing more permanent than a 'temporary' solution, you should know that if you are a technical person. There is nothing temporary about it, the more of inflation that the Fed creates the worse the economy becomes and then as a response to that worsening, you want more of that inflation. What you call "address" I call an injection of morphine to prevent the sensors from feeling the pain.
The economy is in pain, that's what all of this misallocation of resources is - pain. The economy is in pain and it needs treatment, which means it needs to restructure the resources, let the failures fail, let the debts be written off, let the books clear, let the assets be sold at the real current value, let the government shrink and all sectors of economy shrink that are propped up and are not real.
What you call "address" in reality means numb the pain but do not look at the root cause, the real problem. WHY are people spending 30Million on this app? Is it really worth the 30Million? Well, it has no revenue, no profits. It is speculative based solely on a belief that there will be a greater fool down the road, who will, because of all this inflation accept to buy this at an even higher price (one way or another, be it to purchase the app or to purchase Yahoo stock at higher prices, whatever).
You are also saying: "social costs of individual poverty" implying that you think that you can reduce poverty by creating inflation. You believe that what you are doing by creating inflation is forcing people to spend their money, you are allowing the government to steal and spend money.
But the truth as to why sometimes inflation reduces unemployment is because it lowers the price of labour.
That's all it is, you are reducing everybody's labour price, you are reducing everybody's wages. Obviously you are doing it indiscriminately, you are not allowing the failing companies to fail and the successful companies to keep working at their own pace. You are saying: fuck you, we don't care if you are a successful company. Oh, and you, we are going to prop you up, we don't care that you are a fucking failure. So we are going to ensure that all of your employees and investors suffer, regardless of the preferences of the market.
We, the government, are going to steal whatever we can to grow government, to create subsidies and to reduce your wages while we are at it, but we will prevent failures from failing, and we will prevent the cleaning that is necessary from taking place.
Obviously you are unfamiliar with history, as all Keynesians are, they live in a weird bubble of sorts. You don't know that depressions, where government cut spending and taxes went away very quickly, in under 2 years, while those recessions that the governments propped up turned into depressions, and then more propping up caused the situation to get worse.
Keynesians believe that any type of spending is good, dig ditches, fill them up, build bombs, blow them up. That's why they don't understand the difference between a GOOD business model with no unsustainable debt and a BAD business model, that wastes resources and should be liquidated. That's why they believe they can 'solve' something with just a 'little' inflation. What they are actually doing is giving the patient (economy) sedatives and pain killers and telling it that the cancer is gone.
They call themselves Keynesians and they wouldn't even qualify for that obviously. Keyneys did say that there should be surpluses during 'good times', but he was totally wrong about the rest of it, but those are the parts that the modern Keynesians decided to follow.
Notice they are not following the 'surpluses' part, they are running huge deficits during 'times good' (which I argue are not good, they are inflationary themselves, not all inflation comes from the Fed, but all inflation comes from government. In case of the fractional reserve banking the reason there is so much of it that a significant amount of inflation is created is because of the fake FDIC insurance, which is a moral hazard. Today the US banks have about 10Trillion in deposits, which are credit to the banks. FDIC has 25Billion in 'assets', which are debt too, bonds.)
Comparing an output unit of productivity (gold, which has to be found, mined, refined, formed) to DOW, the productive part of the economy is arbitrary, but comparing to dollars, the paper that you can print as many zeroes as you wish is not arbitrary?
Interesting, interesting. What would you rather compare to, something that has to be productive to exist or something that exists because of .... desire of a politician to stay elected and thus satisfy the crowd's short term memory?
It denies the storage of value aspect of money by not realising that money printing is inflation itself and inflation of money supply causes destruction of value of a single monetary unit.
Keynesians deny this simple fact, which is why they are so confused by something that must seem to them to be a paradox: inflation and simultaneous rise of unemployment. It's not a paradox, it's only a paradox if you don't realise that inflation destroys value of money, thus kills investment opportunities and destroys productive jobs.
Oil and gold? Two non-bubbles. Gold isn't even at historic highs, for that it would have to be 1:1 with DOW, and it's nowhere near. Gold is very very cheap now.
As to oil, the US is using smallest amount in decades, it imports smallest amounts in at least quarter of a century, the production capacity is greater than ever and yet the prices are going up in dollars, but not in gold, not in silver. Again, oil is quite cheap if you are not buying it in dollars. It's the dollars that are cheap, and the demand for oil is growing in other parts of the world, which are the productive parts.
Imagine what happens once the Chinese stop subsidising US consumption... their currency shoots up against dollars and for them oil falls in price. So while the American's can't afford their oil, they'll be selling it to the Chinese, who will be able to buy it cheaper and cheaper in their money.
The bubbles that are being inflated are in bonds, dollars. As to asset bubbles, sure, there are asset bubbles. The tech sector is very much inflated.
How is it possible for a company with a price to earning ratio of 100 to go up in price even in dollars without inflation, while gold mining stocks, with PE ratios in single digits going down? This does not show anything at all similar to a bubble in gold and mining stocks, but it shows a very much overheated tech sector.
Yes, it is a bubble, but it's not simply a tech bubble, it's money bubble this time. It's all inflation, people are looking for place to park value.
For all the Keynesians that deny one of the 3 major functions of money (storage of value), that's what you do when you print and print without regard to the actual purchasing power - you force people to look into alternative ways of storing purchasing power, and obviously with the interest rates being pushed down by this same action by the Fed and other central banks around the world, there is no yield.
Savers, investors are in a search of yield and they can't find it. That's how bubbles form. While the Fed is trying hard to reflate the housing bubble it doesn't really control what the inflation goes into and when it comes rushing out, so it results in higher stock market prices, higher asset prices that go up in bidding wars, whatever people can think of, anything that is not the paper printed by the central banks.
It will burst, what will be the second worst of the bad is unclear right now but the worst of the bad will be USD denominated debt, bonds, dollars themselves.
Dissenters
- that's the government's job, they do it already.
It's the law in Puerto Rico
The zero rate applies only to income and gains derived from investments made after residency has been established and will last until 2035. Income and gains before residency are subject to the island's 10 percent capital gains, but for investments sold after 10 years and before 2035, the rate drops to 5 percent. In America, the tax rate on long-term capital gains and dividends for the top 2 percent is just under 24 percent.
If somebody wants to start a new business in USA, they should definitely do it somewhere in Texas but even better, Puerto Rico. If you start a company in Puerto Rico, they promise 30 years of no capital gains taxes, that's beside the business income tax of 4% and there is no federal US income tax.
So if you start a company and it becomes successful, you definitely want to be there, you can sell your business and pay no capital gains. Clearly they won't be following MA example with this nonsense either.
If approved, the state estimates the tax may bring in a quarter billion dollars in 2014
- right, because taxing something creates more of it rather than reduces its amount.
FTFA
Most of the tax would be levied against integrators, developers and other companies producing custom software. It's not clear exactly what services would be covered by the tax, but if hosting, bandwidth, storage, security and other services are taxed, presumably the tax would affect any service based away from the premises.
Here is what will happen: Massachusetts will lose some of the integrator business, which will be provided from somewhere else. It's not clear what exactly they are proposing to tax of-course, they have no idea what they are talking about, but they sure as hell want to tax something there and that means raising costs and reducing business activity, whatever they do, they should expect less business, not more. I would be surprised if they managed to collect any taxes from this, they may end up with less tax dollars overall if/once they implement this idea.
When I switched to a GNU/Linux distro on the desktop, Windows OS was still sane (XP), since then I had to use a newer Windows machine a few of times, it confuses the shit out of me, I am not joking. The GUI paradigm has changed so much in any Windows past XP, it's not that I don't like it, I can't use it (and that means I don't like it). To me the new Windows is like Macintosh of the old but even worse in terms of figuring out what's where.
Mint Mate with is what I understand now, I guess I got stuck in one GUI paradigm and can't... no, I don't want to change it.
Well, Berezovsky is dead now. He brought Putin to power and taught him whatever he needed to know, including all about the money handling. Not that this is related, just a timely coincidence.
you can't require an out of state business be a collection agency.
- unfortunately that is not true, the government illegally forced businesses to be collection agencies around 1942-43 by introducing withholding tax as a special war time measure that never went away.
No huge explosion?
No shattered windows?
No collateral damage?
No pieces on eBay yet?
Lame.