- well, I am not your president, so what do you care?
raping of resources
- I don't see raping, I see people developing their economy. Everything else is secondary to that until the point is reached, where there is enough wealth to start caring about the environment. Just ask the people in the poorest nations what is the most important thing - environment or food? Only wealthy economies with large amounts of wealth and production can start caring about anything beyond food and minimum comforts.
impressive social inequities
- that's what free market capitalism was fixing, as the people were poor before free market capitalism of USA, but they became wealthy in a wealthy economy as US freedoms allowed them to become wealthy, not due to anything that any government could do, as government does not create wealth.
USA should never have become a 'superpower', building empires is against its original ideals, that was distrustful of empire needs for standing armies, heavy taxes, large bureaucracies, and centralized decision making.
USA however did manage to pay out all of its debts in 19 century and to become the world's largest creditor nation. It took on all sorts of loans during the century but US used the loans to build up production capacity, to increase its infrastructure and to start manufacturing that allowed it to repay the debts and become the largest ever creditor nation. Today, on the other hand, USA is the largest debtor nation not only in the modern world, but in history of the human civilization.
with pretty much slave labor camps otherwise known as textile mills just to get started
- people were coming to USA for more freedoms, many even entered serfdom to come to USA and were serfs for a few years before becoming free people, but this practice ended in 19 century because it became unfeasible, serfs became more expensive than hiring help.
In the 20th century we became a super power due to massive infrastructure investments giving us our highway system
- if you think so, you'll be totally astonished at what I wrote on this topic. The highway system built as a public works project became a catastrophe for USA, in many senses, starting from the economics of it, and destruction of viable alternatives in rail and air transport and subsidies to the auto-industry and becoming completely dependent on oil and building impossible to maintain without subsidies infrastructure, to the major cause of States losing their freedoms and sovereignty to the federal government, which usurped power and is destroying every freedom of every US citizen with this Trojan Horse of subsidized highway infrastructure.
DARPA helped us build the Internet as we know it today
- DARPA took an off the shelf idea of packet switching from telcos and POTS and applied it to already existing computer networks (yes, computers and computer LANs existed prior to TCP/IP, imagine that?!) Sure, DARPA did some good, but if US government was limited to research in sciences there wouldn't have been any economic disasters that the government has caused and is causing now, we wouldn't be talking about loss of freedoms in US, so that's a red herring.
from establishing minimal wage
- which should not exist. With millions out of work, with all sorts of regulations that punish employers for employing people in USA and taxing and regulating and inflating and subsidizing monopolies, why is there a surprise US is in such shit in terms of economy? Minimum wage is a terrible idea, that caused loss of many jobs and cause rise in tuition fees, as people were no longer hired right after school, because they weren't worth paying over minimum wage, but paying them that didn't make economic sense, all while this minimum wage law destroyed apprenticeships.
setting fire codes
- none of federal government's business.
I don't see anyone leaving this country because they feel the government is too oppressive
- Jim Rogers? I left because of lack of economic freedoms and observing the fall of USA to become the next USSR, and as I was born in USSR I can't imagine living in a new one.
usually twice as much and don't forget the artificially low cost of gas here.
- my corporation in Canada only paid 18% taxes.
In Cyprus it's now paying less than 10%.
As to gas prices - well obviously, USA highway subsidies are closely tied to USA energy policy and the wars on 'terror', which ensure lower gas prices. Empires need their cheap gas, don't they?
Well, there are no places that are as idealistic as what USA used to be in 19 century, but there are places that do have more economic freedoms. Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland from the more developed nations, that's my choice.
Of-course while everybody is completely bearish on Somalia and other African nations, I actually think in the long run it pays to go counter-trend, so I am looking to invest there but it's not easy for an outsider.
Great Depression is your answer to what? Because Great Depression was created by the Fed, who monetized UK debt (yeah, English debt). Fed was printing obscene amounts of greenbacks and buying UK debt to prevent UK from defaulting (sort of like Germany is doing with Greece).
The 1921 saw a depression that had higher unemployment than what is observed today, but by 1923 that depression was over. The difference? Government spending was cut by 70%.
1925 US Fed started monetizing UK debt, this inflated the agriculture bubble, which burst by 1929, similar to what Fed was doing starting with Greenspan and Clinton, when they set discount rate at 1%, and later Bernanke and Bush, who set the discount rate at 0% and since gov't was mandating that Freddie/Fannie and FHA subsidize 30% of substandard mortgages by 1992 and 50% of them by 1999 and 65% of them by 2006, it's not a surprise that the bubble that burst 3 years ago was in housing and not in agriculture.
The Great Depression started because the burst of the agriculture bubble inflated by the Fed was actively fought against by government bail outs and stimulus. I provided a time-line earlier on this topic, just like the bail outs and stimulus printed and given out by Congress and the Fed in 2008 and ever since. In 1929 this started the Great Depression. I am expecting the Greatest Depression this time around, because this time around USA doesn't have the savings and manufacturing (production capacity), that US of the twenties had and today USA is the biggest debtor nation with no savings and no understanding of economics on all levels and a enormous, all encompassing government, who completely abolished the idea of freedom by its mere existence.
So you are going to make smart ass comments, maybe you should try and understand the subject first.
Isn't that ironic, that people like you leave comments like yours and get moderated up like in this case while talking about the government in USA, a country, where people came to for freedoms?
Freedoms, as in freedoms from government.
The reason USA became the wealthiest country in the world in 19 century was capitalist free market and industrialization, which only became possible because the US was so free to do business in because the government was so limited, so small and so insignificant.
Today, with government being what it is, USA became what it became, and people have to leave the country to search for those very ideals that their forebears left other countries to come to USA for? I suppose it does makes sense to do that for the folks who were unfortunate enough to be born in US in this time, the time of the great government involvement and destruction of freedoms.
I invite everybody to think about moving to freer nations, there are nations like that. On the other hand I am sure some people would rather try to save theirs, but it doesn't seem that there is a peaceful way of doing it.
T-bills are rated as safe, but they are not safe and haven't been since 1971.
Also there was never any trust fund, US gov't had to go to court and prove to SCOTUS that SS taxes were not earmarked in any way:
Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937), decided on the same day as Steward, upheld the program because "The proceeds of both [employee and employer] taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like internal-revenue taxes generally, and are not earmarked in any way". That is, the Social Security Tax was constitutional as a mere exercise of Congress's general taxation powers.
It was only legal under general power of Congress to tax, so it could not have a trust fund and it never did have a trust fund.
Charles Blahous (One of two public trustees for Social Security & Medicare)
and
Andrew Biggs (Former principal deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration )
T-Bills are not an investment, that's a huge misconception on your part. They have to be sold to somebody and interest has to be paid on them and principal also has to be paid back, so who is supposed to do that? And why would anybody continue buying and rolling over US T-bills? The Fed is busy doing that, but Fed prints money - inflation tax you never voted for, to do this.
Since the moment of inception SS payouts have exceeded SS contributions by 17 TRILLION dollars, which means that the people who are now dead and those who have been on that program for a couple of decades by now got an EXCELLENT return on that non-investment.
Indeed, people who came into SS early only had to pay for a couple of years into it, but were getting decades worth of checks out of it. The so called surplus is no such thing, because SS taxes were never earmarked, so it's a general tax, just a tax, not a fund. The money was spent by government, recklessly, which is the opposite of how it was sold to the public.
It was sold to the public with a notion that gov't is for some weird reason better at handling money than an average Joe is. In the forties/fifties the self-employed and the high earners (earning over 3 times the national average salary) didn't have to pay into it, because it was sold under the notion that it was some sort of a fund, though it never was. So forcing those, who clearly can take care of themselves into this insane program was going to show the true colors of this program early on.
First they had to get the camel's nose under the tent, with low tax rates and limited participation, then they used the ever increasing political power and bread/circuses voting block to push for more and more participation and because it's a pyramid scam the taxes eventually grew to be OVER SEVEN TIMES as high as they were originally.
SEVEN TIMES AS HIGH.
To sustain the continuation of this program within the next 10 years, the taxes must be doubled! The people who are paying into this today will see nothing out of it in USA. What's the reason that they should continue paying? They will not see anything out of it. Either there will be no jobs due to these very programs and large government in USA, and nobody will have a job to pay these taxes (and why should they work in economy visible to IRS?) or there will be SS checks coming but the USD will be worth nothing - Zimbabwe style inflation and no nation will want to continue subsidizing the US consumer the way China is doing today, so no goods will be bought with those dollars and US has no manufacturing capacity to supply its population and none is going to come on line with the thieves in the government regulating and taxing and subsidizing.
No no, SS and Medicare and Wars must be abolished now, US government spending needs to be cut by 99% and 99% of US government sector needs to be fired for economy to start healing.
No way you'll have population growth that would do anything to improve the SS pyramid just by reforming immigration because without reform of government spending the economy of US will continue to deteriorate and you will quickly find that few people want to come as immigrants to a country that has bad economy, people will go to Asia and South America or Australia first.
What is the justification to force ones who don't need this into the program?
And it's not the rich, who are suffering due to the SS contributions, it's the current working people, who because of SS will have no savings of their own and by the time they are old, there will be no SS and if it will exist, that would mean that US dollar buys nothing at all, because nobody will be paying into it, without jobs it's impossible, it will be the Fed printing checks in worthless Zimbabwe style USD.
But again, what can possibly be the justification to force those, who do not need this clearly, and weren't paying into this from the time of inception, to have to contribute into it? It's clear that they don't need it and won't have a use for the destroyed currency by the time they are old? What is the justification? You are not-convinced of something, I didn't hear a word of justification beyond "poor starve", and this is not a justification to force anybody to pay into SS, because SS was SOLD to the US public as if it was a fund, though it never was.
The correct thing to do is to abolish SS now (and Medicare and all other government programs and departments and wars) and let the economy to fix itself privately, because the poor get much richer in wealthy economy but in the economy destroyed by government intervention they only get poorer every day, never mind the SS checks.
So you don't actually have anything to say to justify your position, which even Roosevelt was not going to justify when he introduced SS?
Here, let me help you:
Year Rate Self-Employed Rate 1940 2% Not applicable 1950 3% Not applicable 1960 6% 4.5% 1970 8.4% 6.3% 1980 10.16% 7.05% 1990 12.4% 12.4% 2000 12.4% 12.4% 2010 12.4% 12.4%
Notice how in 40s and 50s the rate for self-employed individuals was "Not Applicable"? Notice how the rate grew over time and then forced the self-employed individuals into the program as well?
Roosevelt didn't want to make the argument then, but he didn't want to make the argument because he didn't believe it would work, or maybe he genuinely didn't believe in this type of a system, which taxed people for "pension fund", which they clearly didn't need.
You on the other hand want to tax people who clearly do not need this pension fund to pay pensions to others, who already got more in benefits than they ever paid into them.
This is a pyramid scam, where people who got in early paid basically nothing and got their retirements paid for by the later comers, but the people today are the real suckers, paying the highest tax rate, which will go higher if SS is not abolished and will get nothing out of it but inflation.
The kids won't have this problem, they won't pay. They either will have no jobs to pay taxes or they'll just skip US entirely. The question is what the generations who are paying today will do? Will they continue paying the ever increasing tax and continue transfer of their income to those, who already got a great deal out of the program or will they also stop paying?
-
Still, you cannot come up with an answer to justify your position. What is your justification for taxing the rich for a pension fund that they don't need, can't use and will only be losing money on, as they clearly can use the money better themselves than any government worker ever could?
My question is how do you justify this, and nothing comes to mind except for Marxist ideology. Is there a way to justify it?
Roosevelt couldn't justify it certainly, he didn't want SS to be seen as income transfer, though it was never funded by anything except for income transfer from the working to the current beneficiaries, so when SS started people who ran their own businesses and self employed weren't paying this tax.
How do you justify saying that people who can take care of themselves clearly must be forced to participate in this program, which was established from the start as a supposed 'pension plan', though it never had a fund and gov't argued that SS taxes were never earmarked for anything, and that SS taxes were legal only due to general power of Congress to tax.
So my question does not call you a Marxist (never mind what I think, but I didn't call you that,) my question is about justification. Why should Bill Gates ever be asked to pay a single penny into that program? What, he is not smart enough to keep his money and insure his retirement better than any government official would? Are government officials that much smarter and better with money than Gates?
Buffet?
Jim Rogers?
Are they smarter than any average businessman or a woman who run their own businesses? Why shouldn't a person be allowed to opt out of this fraudulent program, for the like of which Madoff is now in jail?
What makes SS a pension plan exactly? There is no fund that people are putting the money into, there are no assets that are being accumulated and there is no interest that is accrued.
So what makes a pension plan? A pension plan would mean that money is used to create an asset and grow a fund, but US government had to argue specifically that SS payments are not earmarked for any purpose:
Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937), decided on the same day as Steward, upheld the program because "The proceeds of both [employee and employer] taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like internal-revenue taxes generally, and are not earmarked in any way". That is, the Social Security Tax was constitutional as a mere exercise of Congress's general taxation powers.
IFF SS was an actual insurance plan (why would people want government to run it for them, is beyond me, people should know better that governments are not responsible with money and they answer to no one), but then it would have assets, there would have been savings, there would have been something behind the fund, something with value.
As it is, it is a pyramid scam, because it is an income transfer program, which absolutely depends on current working population to pay for the benefits of the retirees. If the unemployment goes up by a factor of 2 right now, the SS taxes would have to go up significantly for the payments to continue, but even then it's not enough, because in year 2010 SS paid out more in benefits than it collected in taxes.
You may want to listen to this:
Charles Blahous (One of two public trustees for Social Security & Medicare)
Andrew Biggs (Former principal deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration )
---
The only flaw with medicare/medicaid system is that it has not been paired with a rise in taxes. If you're going to provide medical coverage for a large group of people, they need to be taxed accordingly for the service provided (like every other sane country does). The solution isn't to get rid of the programs, since both are very useful programs, the solution is to actually pay for them with appropriate taxation.
- 17 TRILLION. That's the amount that the retirees have gotten OUT of the SS that they did NOT put in.
They didn't put that 17 Trillion into SS, but they got it out. There was no fund, so that money wasn't accrued as interest upon any contributions. It was totally transferred from the working individuals to the non-working ones. WHO is supposed to pay higher taxes to pay that back to those who paid it? I don't understand, can you raise the dead and make them WORK for the money they received and can you force the recipients today to start paying it back?
WHY should FUTURE generations have to come up with that 17 Trillion they never saw? Why should anybody ever pay into a government program to transfer their income to people, who voted that program for themselves and transferred the costs to the future generations?
What kind of a crooked ass system are you running here?
The problem with the US right now isn't "big government", it's the idiot electorate that wants tons of services and doesn't want to pay for it, so they keep electing people who promise to be able to pull that off somehow (which of course they can't).
- DUH. Obviously it's the bread and circuses voters who are the problem, and they are successfully used by the politicians to make government ever more powerful, to make sure no spending is ever cut.
Do you for a second believe that ANY of the proposals - Democrat or Republican would actually CUT spending in US federal government?
Ha! They call this 'cuts', when in reality what they do is they decrease the amount by which the spending is scheduled to increase. They don't take a number from last year and say: we are going to spend LESS next year. No no, th
Can you justify this in any way beyond a Marxist ideology, that people who are already making good money and likely are making better financial decisions than any government on this planet ever could for those people must pay into SS at all? Into a program they do not need?
They came to US for the promise of freer land, didn't they? They got their freedom one way or another.
The children worked across the globe forever until free market capitalism of 19 century USA provided a huge push in the amount of wealth (productive capacity, cheap goods and services, automation, movement away from agriculture and towards manufacturing) so that children actually stopped being used as labor, but there was no problem with so called 'child labor' before capitalism allowed children to stop having to work until a much later age. That's because the new wealth - products and services and 5% of farmers feeding 100% of population allowed people to pursue different careers, have more products at their disposal, have more leisure, and be pushed into higher education than any time before that. That's because the manufacturing jobs required a more educated work force.
The fact that USA today has such huge issues with education come from th fact that US policies have pushed capital savings out of the country, pushed productive capacity - jobs in factories out of the country, which means the US doesn't need that many educated people and the people don't need to have very high education. It's basic economics - it creates incentives or it removes them.
Gov't removed incentives to manufacture in US by destroying capital savings through social programs, regulations and taxes, so it pushed capital out of the country. The remaining citizens are not needed in the productive jobs anymore. Service sector and gov't jobs are not productive jobs, they don't create anything that can be exchanged for productive capacity of other people, who actually do produce/manufacture.
So in reality this socialist agenda and huge government that pushed for it (just because it wanted the power) created monopolies in everything in US and other Western countries, destroyed private investment opportunities, caused capital flight, destroyed savings, removed the need for more education and is causing massive poverty, causing US to turn back in time and will cause actual child labor I suspect.
I think that capitalism is the best tool that people invented to get out of poverty for everybody, and socialism is the regressive tool that people unfortunately vote for, because they want things for free provided by others, which causes poverty and destruction of economy and society by promoting huge governments and thus monopolies and empire building.
So my view is - you want less child labor? Get rid of government that destroys free market.
Oh, as if child labor was created by the eeveeeel capitalists.
Yeah, because obviously children had happy childhood before the capital was saved and factories started their production. Obviously children were pulled out of their families by the evil rich person, who forced the people to stop being farmers/hunters and forced them into the factories.
As to robber barons - at least somebody was thinking.
A guy with a nick like yours is going to talk about this issue with a straight face?:) Seriously?
Anyway, we do know what happened when there was no SS and no Fed and no IRS and no FDIC and no FHA and no EPA and no FDA and no FAA and no Freddie/Fannie and no departments of education/agriculture/business/energy, etc.etc.
USA economy was the fastest growing economy in the world. USA became the major creditor nation, came up with the most productive system and all sorts of people wanted to come to USA from everywhere to do business there, to work there, because USA had the least government.
Why do you think people were coming to US in droves, for more government? Why do you think the 19 century made USA the powerhouse of productivity on this planet, the government? The government didn't even exist basically before 1913, when it found a way to start growing by creating the Fed and IRS.
Canada is an energy exporter nation with a very small population (sort of like Norway), and as these go, they are welfare states specifically because they are resource exporters.
There is an economic paradox, I think it's called 'resource curse', it's when a nation becomes uncompetitive in manufacturing and production due to exporting resources, such as oil and gas. In such nations the economy structures itself very heavy at the top of government pyramid, where the money is collected from the exports, and then it's "doled out", also various labor regulations in these countries preclude it from having any real free market, investing into productive capacity except for the export business stops making sense, and the country becomes uncompetitive from POV of manufacturing and production capacity.
Germany deals with its problems by allowing large numbers of foreigners to work in the country cheaply, so instead of outsourcing manufacturing to China, they found that outsourcing it to foreigners who come into the country makes more sense, and by the way, they have a trade surplus with China, which shows that US claims that China is unfair in its trading practices is a bunch of nonsense. Of-course US has a trade deficit with Canada, so....
UK by the way, is on its way to its own economic disaster, with manufacturing gone and a large welfare state that developed over the last century destroying the economy.
So what spending would you get rid o
- Wars, 99% of military. All of SS. All of Medicare. All government departments. All regulations of business. FHA, Freddie/Fannie, FDIC, Fed, IRS, FDA, EPA, FAA, CIA, Food stamps, EI, public schools, minimum wage, OSHA, MSHA, all of it, including department of transport. All assets must be sold off to private entities. Of-course all income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes must be abolished.
Hold on, hold on. So it's a rational decision to raise taxes on people who are NOT getting SS and Medicare to subsidize those who want it but are no longer paying into it?
That's a rational decision? You and I have a completely different understanding of the word 'rational', because I see this rational: those who are PAYING taxes NOW are the ones who should be deciding what taxes they will pay, not somebody else, who voted himself a sweet deal, to get a great pension for themselves but transfer the payments to the future generations, (those who are paying now.)
No no, the rational thing to do is to allow people to opt out of SS and Medicare but allow them then to stop paying those taxes today, if they want to opt out of them today and forever.
How many people, do you think, would take that offer? I think majority of people would. And think of this: the programs were sold to the public by making it sound like the government will make BETTER economic decisions for the public, because the government says that an average Joe cannot think for himself and would end up poor by the end of his life, but the government, in its infinite wisdom will make sound economic decisions and will keep the economy going and will make sure that the Joe is not left out in the cold.
Instead, the people who are paying today, are paying the MOST of anybody who EVER paid into SS and Medicare, but they will be the ones who will get the least, because their kids are sure as hell not going to pay into those systems, because they won't have jobs in USA due to the incredibly awful economic decisions made by the government, which pushed productive capital out of the country and destroyed manufacturing sector and jobs.
The people are overtaxed, anybody paying Medicare and SS is paying over 15% only into those programs, never mind income taxes by the federal gov't, by the state, municipalities, the sales taxes, the corporate taxes, the transaction taxes (buying/selling a house costs you in taxes too), property taxes, fuel taxes, excise taxes, the ever growing and unvoted for inflation tax.
No, the rational thing to do is not to increase government spending, it's to abolish it.
Come on, there is no use for this station in space now, so all the money is going to be burned maintaining it until 2020, there is no economic incentive to keep it going and it's just a waste of resources and energy. But it's in orbit already, so instead of doing 5 next launches to replace crews in there, they could shoot up a few boosters with fuel in them, attach them to the station, then at some point launch it into a much higher orbit, or even send it to the Moon or Mars. Who needs that station up there now? What use is it? It's a waste of money and resources and energy, it's a jobs program and nothing else.
Dump it now, but dump it with style, calculate a way to push it to an orbit around some other body in space. Mothball it and send it to Mars.
Second simple solution: call Dropbox and tell them you'll pay to use their service if they sign your contract. Write your contract and mail it to them.
Complex solution: build your own software to do what they do. I don't see how that's going to be cheaper or easier than the first 2 simple solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
My, you are persistent
- well, I am not your president, so what do you care?
raping of resources
- I don't see raping, I see people developing their economy. Everything else is secondary to that until the point is reached, where there is enough wealth to start caring about the environment. Just ask the people in the poorest nations what is the most important thing - environment or food? Only wealthy economies with large amounts of wealth and production can start caring about anything beyond food and minimum comforts.
impressive social inequities
- that's what free market capitalism was fixing, as the people were poor before free market capitalism of USA, but they became wealthy in a wealthy economy as US freedoms allowed them to become wealthy, not due to anything that any government could do, as government does not create wealth.
What are you basing this on?
USA should never have become a 'superpower', building empires is against its original ideals, that was distrustful of empire needs for standing armies, heavy taxes, large bureaucracies, and centralized decision making.
USA however did manage to pay out all of its debts in 19 century and to become the world's largest creditor nation. It took on all sorts of loans during the century but US used the loans to build up production capacity, to increase its infrastructure and to start manufacturing that allowed it to repay the debts and become the largest ever creditor nation. Today, on the other hand, USA is the largest debtor nation not only in the modern world, but in history of the human civilization.
with pretty much slave labor camps otherwise known as textile mills just to get started
- people were coming to USA for more freedoms, many even entered serfdom to come to USA and were serfs for a few years before becoming free people, but this practice ended in 19 century because it became unfeasible, serfs became more expensive than hiring help.
In the 20th century we became a super power due to massive infrastructure investments giving us our highway system
- if you think so, you'll be totally astonished at what I wrote on this topic. The highway system built as a public works project became a catastrophe for USA, in many senses, starting from the economics of it, and destruction of viable alternatives in rail and air transport and subsidies to the auto-industry and becoming completely dependent on oil and building impossible to maintain without subsidies infrastructure, to the major cause of States losing their freedoms and sovereignty to the federal government, which usurped power and is destroying every freedom of every US citizen with this Trojan Horse of subsidized highway infrastructure.
DARPA helped us build the Internet as we know it today
- DARPA took an off the shelf idea of packet switching from telcos and POTS and applied it to already existing computer networks (yes, computers and computer LANs existed prior to TCP/IP, imagine that?!) Sure, DARPA did some good, but if US government was limited to research in sciences there wouldn't have been any economic disasters that the government has caused and is causing now, we wouldn't be talking about loss of freedoms in US, so that's a red herring.
from establishing minimal wage
- which should not exist. With millions out of work, with all sorts of regulations that punish employers for employing people in USA and taxing and regulating and inflating and subsidizing monopolies, why is there a surprise US is in such shit in terms of economy? Minimum wage is a terrible idea, that caused loss of many jobs and cause rise in tuition fees, as people were no longer hired right after school, because they weren't worth paying over minimum wage, but paying them that didn't make economic sense, all while this minimum wage law destroyed apprenticeships.
setting fire codes
- none of federal government's business.
I don't see anyone leaving this country because they feel the government is too oppressive
- Jim Rogers? I left because of lack of economic freedoms and observing the fall of USA to become the next USSR, and as I was born in USSR I can't imagine living in a new one.
usually twice as much and don't forget the artificially low cost of gas here.
- my corporation in Canada only paid 18% taxes.
In Cyprus it's now paying less than 10%.
As to gas prices - well obviously, USA highway subsidies are closely tied to USA energy policy and the wars on 'terror', which ensure lower gas prices. Empires need their cheap gas, don't they?
Well, there are no places that are as idealistic as what USA used to be in 19 century, but there are places that do have more economic freedoms. Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland from the more developed nations, that's my choice.
Of-course while everybody is completely bearish on Somalia and other African nations, I actually think in the long run it pays to go counter-trend, so I am looking to invest there but it's not easy for an outsider.
Great Depression is your answer to what? Because Great Depression was created by the Fed, who monetized UK debt (yeah, English debt). Fed was printing obscene amounts of greenbacks and buying UK debt to prevent UK from defaulting (sort of like Germany is doing with Greece).
The 1921 saw a depression that had higher unemployment than what is observed today, but by 1923 that depression was over. The difference? Government spending was cut by 70%.
1925 US Fed started monetizing UK debt, this inflated the agriculture bubble, which burst by 1929, similar to what Fed was doing starting with Greenspan and Clinton, when they set discount rate at 1%, and later Bernanke and Bush, who set the discount rate at 0% and since gov't was mandating that Freddie/Fannie and FHA subsidize 30% of substandard mortgages by 1992 and 50% of them by 1999 and 65% of them by 2006, it's not a surprise that the bubble that burst 3 years ago was in housing and not in agriculture.
The Great Depression started because the burst of the agriculture bubble inflated by the Fed was actively fought against by government bail outs and stimulus. I provided a time-line earlier on this topic, just like the bail outs and stimulus printed and given out by Congress and the Fed in 2008 and ever since. In 1929 this started the Great Depression. I am expecting the Greatest Depression this time around, because this time around USA doesn't have the savings and manufacturing (production capacity), that US of the twenties had and today USA is the biggest debtor nation with no savings and no understanding of economics on all levels and a enormous, all encompassing government, who completely abolished the idea of freedom by its mere existence.
So you are going to make smart ass comments, maybe you should try and understand the subject first.
Isn't that ironic, that people like you leave comments like yours and get moderated up like in this case while talking about the government in USA, a country, where people came to for freedoms?
Freedoms, as in freedoms from government.
The reason USA became the wealthiest country in the world in 19 century was capitalist free market and industrialization, which only became possible because the US was so free to do business in because the government was so limited, so small and so insignificant.
Today, with government being what it is, USA became what it became, and people have to leave the country to search for those very ideals that their forebears left other countries to come to USA for? I suppose it does makes sense to do that for the folks who were unfortunate enough to be born in US in this time, the time of the great government involvement and destruction of freedoms.
I invite everybody to think about moving to freer nations, there are nations like that. On the other hand I am sure some people would rather try to save theirs, but it doesn't seem that there is a peaceful way of doing it.
Tea Party Republicans are threatening to put the nation into default
- false. Obama is threatening default (while privately Obama and Geithner are talking to bankers and politicians around the world on the phone, promising not to default even if the debt ceiling is NOT raised.)
And btw I expect "them" to rate my post down into oblivion. Expect to see it rated as flamebait, overrated or something else.
- who is 'them'? This place if filled with socialists and Marxists.
T-bills are rated as safe, but they are not safe and haven't been since 1971.
Also there was never any trust fund, US gov't had to go to court and prove to SCOTUS that SS taxes were not earmarked in any way:
Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937), decided on the same day as Steward, upheld the program because "The proceeds of both [employee and employer] taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like internal-revenue taxes generally, and are not earmarked in any way". That is, the Social Security Tax was constitutional as a mere exercise of Congress's general taxation powers.
It was only legal under general power of Congress to tax, so it could not have a trust fund and it never did have a trust fund.
Interview with
Charles Blahous (One of two public trustees for Social Security & Medicare)
and
Andrew Biggs (Former principal deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration )
T-Bills are not an investment, that's a huge misconception on your part. They have to be sold to somebody and interest has to be paid on them and principal also has to be paid back, so who is supposed to do that? And why would anybody continue buying and rolling over US T-bills? The Fed is busy doing that, but Fed prints money - inflation tax you never voted for, to do this.
Since the moment of inception SS payouts have exceeded SS contributions by 17 TRILLION dollars, which means that the people who are now dead and those who have been on that program for a couple of decades by now got an EXCELLENT return on that non-investment.
Indeed, people who came into SS early only had to pay for a couple of years into it, but were getting decades worth of checks out of it. The so called surplus is no such thing, because SS taxes were never earmarked, so it's a general tax, just a tax, not a fund. The money was spent by government, recklessly, which is the opposite of how it was sold to the public.
It was sold to the public with a notion that gov't is for some weird reason better at handling money than an average Joe is. In the forties/fifties the self-employed and the high earners (earning over 3 times the national average salary) didn't have to pay into it, because it was sold under the notion that it was some sort of a fund, though it never was. So forcing those, who clearly can take care of themselves into this insane program was going to show the true colors of this program early on.
First they had to get the camel's nose under the tent, with low tax rates and limited participation, then they used the ever increasing political power and bread/circuses voting block to push for more and more participation and because it's a pyramid scam the taxes eventually grew to be OVER SEVEN TIMES as high as they were originally.
SEVEN TIMES AS HIGH.
To sustain the continuation of this program within the next 10 years, the taxes must be doubled! The people who are paying into this today will see nothing out of it in USA. What's the reason that they should continue paying? They will not see anything out of it. Either there will be no jobs due to these very programs and large government in USA, and nobody will have a job to pay these taxes (and why should they work in economy visible to IRS?) or there will be SS checks coming but the USD will be worth nothing - Zimbabwe style inflation and no nation will want to continue subsidizing the US consumer the way China is doing today, so no goods will be bought with those dollars and US has no manufacturing capacity to supply its population and none is going to come on line with the thieves in the government regulating and taxing and subsidizing.
No no, SS and Medicare and Wars must be abolished now, US government spending needs to be cut by 99% and 99% of US government sector needs to be fired for economy to start healing.
No way you'll have population growth that would do anything to improve the SS pyramid just by reforming immigration because without reform of government spending the economy of US will continue to deteriorate and you will quickly find that few people want to come as immigrants to a country that has bad economy, people will go to Asia and South America or Australia first.
Convinced of what?
What is the justification to force ones who don't need this into the program?
And it's not the rich, who are suffering due to the SS contributions, it's the current working people, who because of SS will have no savings of their own and by the time they are old, there will be no SS and if it will exist, that would mean that US dollar buys nothing at all, because nobody will be paying into it, without jobs it's impossible, it will be the Fed printing checks in worthless Zimbabwe style USD.
But again, what can possibly be the justification to force those, who do not need this clearly, and weren't paying into this from the time of inception, to have to contribute into it? It's clear that they don't need it and won't have a use for the destroyed currency by the time they are old? What is the justification? You are not-convinced of something, I didn't hear a word of justification beyond "poor starve", and this is not a justification to force anybody to pay into SS, because SS was SOLD to the US public as if it was a fund, though it never was.
The correct thing to do is to abolish SS now (and Medicare and all other government programs and departments and wars) and let the economy to fix itself privately, because the poor get much richer in wealthy economy but in the economy destroyed by government intervention they only get poorer every day, never mind the SS checks.
So you don't actually have anything to say to justify your position, which even Roosevelt was not going to justify when he introduced SS?
Here, let me help you:
Notice how in 40s and 50s the rate for self-employed individuals was "Not Applicable"? Notice how the rate grew over time and then forced the self-employed individuals into the program as well?
Roosevelt didn't want to make the argument then, but he didn't want to make the argument because he didn't believe it would work, or maybe he genuinely didn't believe in this type of a system, which taxed people for "pension fund", which they clearly didn't need.
You on the other hand want to tax people who clearly do not need this pension fund to pay pensions to others, who already got more in benefits than they ever paid into them.
This is a pyramid scam, where people who got in early paid basically nothing and got their retirements paid for by the later comers, but the people today are the real suckers, paying the highest tax rate, which will go higher if SS is not abolished and will get nothing out of it but inflation.
The kids won't have this problem, they won't pay. They either will have no jobs to pay taxes or they'll just skip US entirely. The question is what the generations who are paying today will do? Will they continue paying the ever increasing tax and continue transfer of their income to those, who already got a great deal out of the program or will they also stop paying?
-
Still, you cannot come up with an answer to justify your position. What is your justification for taxing the rich for a pension fund that they don't need, can't use and will only be losing money on, as they clearly can use the money better themselves than any government worker ever could?
Also: the status quo is wrong.
My question is how do you justify this, and nothing comes to mind except for Marxist ideology. Is there a way to justify it?
Roosevelt couldn't justify it certainly, he didn't want SS to be seen as income transfer, though it was never funded by anything except for income transfer from the working to the current beneficiaries, so when SS started people who ran their own businesses and self employed weren't paying this tax.
How do you justify saying that people who can take care of themselves clearly must be forced to participate in this program, which was established from the start as a supposed 'pension plan', though it never had a fund and gov't argued that SS taxes were never earmarked for anything, and that SS taxes were legal only due to general power of Congress to tax.
So my question does not call you a Marxist (never mind what I think, but I didn't call you that,) my question is about justification. Why should Bill Gates ever be asked to pay a single penny into that program? What, he is not smart enough to keep his money and insure his retirement better than any government official would? Are government officials that much smarter and better with money than Gates?
Buffet?
Jim Rogers?
Are they smarter than any average businessman or a woman who run their own businesses? Why shouldn't a person be allowed to opt out of this fraudulent program, for the like of which Madoff is now in jail?
Social security is a pension plan
- is it?
What makes SS a pension plan exactly? There is no fund that people are putting the money into, there are no assets that are being accumulated and there is no interest that is accrued.
So what makes a pension plan? A pension plan would mean that money is used to create an asset and grow a fund, but US government had to argue specifically that SS payments are not earmarked for any purpose:
Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937), decided on the same day as Steward, upheld the program because "The proceeds of both [employee and employer] taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like internal-revenue taxes generally, and are not earmarked in any way". That is, the Social Security Tax was constitutional as a mere exercise of Congress's general taxation powers.
IFF SS was an actual insurance plan (why would people want government to run it for them, is beyond me, people should know better that governments are not responsible with money and they answer to no one), but then it would have assets, there would have been savings, there would have been something behind the fund, something with value.
As it is, it is a pyramid scam, because it is an income transfer program, which absolutely depends on current working population to pay for the benefits of the retirees. If the unemployment goes up by a factor of 2 right now, the SS taxes would have to go up significantly for the payments to continue, but even then it's not enough, because in year 2010 SS paid out more in benefits than it collected in taxes.
You may want to listen to this:
Charles Blahous (One of two public trustees for Social Security & Medicare)
Andrew Biggs (Former principal deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration )
---
The only flaw with medicare/medicaid system is that it has not been paired with a rise in taxes. If you're going to provide medical coverage for a large group of people, they need to be taxed accordingly for the service provided (like every other sane country does). The solution isn't to get rid of the programs, since both are very useful programs, the solution is to actually pay for them with appropriate taxation.
- 17 TRILLION. That's the amount that the retirees have gotten OUT of the SS that they did NOT put in.
They didn't put that 17 Trillion into SS, but they got it out. There was no fund, so that money wasn't accrued as interest upon any contributions. It was totally transferred from the working individuals to the non-working ones. WHO is supposed to pay higher taxes to pay that back to those who paid it? I don't understand, can you raise the dead and make them WORK for the money they received and can you force the recipients today to start paying it back?
WHY should FUTURE generations have to come up with that 17 Trillion they never saw? Why should anybody ever pay into a government program to transfer their income to people, who voted that program for themselves and transferred the costs to the future generations?
What kind of a crooked ass system are you running here?
The problem with the US right now isn't "big government", it's the idiot electorate that wants tons of services and doesn't want to pay for it, so they keep electing people who promise to be able to pull that off somehow (which of course they can't).
- DUH. Obviously it's the bread and circuses voters who are the problem, and they are successfully used by the politicians to make government ever more powerful, to make sure no spending is ever cut.
Do you for a second believe that ANY of the proposals - Democrat or Republican would actually CUT spending in US federal government?
Ha! They call this 'cuts', when in reality what they do is they decrease the amount by which the spending is scheduled to increase. They don't take a number from last year and say: we are going to spend LESS next year. No no, th
Can you justify this in any way beyond a Marxist ideology, that people who are already making good money and likely are making better financial decisions than any government on this planet ever could for those people must pay into SS at all? Into a program they do not need?
They came to US for the promise of freer land, didn't they? They got their freedom one way or another.
The children worked across the globe forever until free market capitalism of 19 century USA provided a huge push in the amount of wealth (productive capacity, cheap goods and services, automation, movement away from agriculture and towards manufacturing) so that children actually stopped being used as labor, but there was no problem with so called 'child labor' before capitalism allowed children to stop having to work until a much later age. That's because the new wealth - products and services and 5% of farmers feeding 100% of population allowed people to pursue different careers, have more products at their disposal, have more leisure, and be pushed into higher education than any time before that. That's because the manufacturing jobs required a more educated work force.
The fact that USA today has such huge issues with education come from th fact that US policies have pushed capital savings out of the country, pushed productive capacity - jobs in factories out of the country, which means the US doesn't need that many educated people and the people don't need to have very high education. It's basic economics - it creates incentives or it removes them.
Gov't removed incentives to manufacture in US by destroying capital savings through social programs, regulations and taxes, so it pushed capital out of the country. The remaining citizens are not needed in the productive jobs anymore. Service sector and gov't jobs are not productive jobs, they don't create anything that can be exchanged for productive capacity of other people, who actually do produce/manufacture.
So in reality this socialist agenda and huge government that pushed for it (just because it wanted the power) created monopolies in everything in US and other Western countries, destroyed private investment opportunities, caused capital flight, destroyed savings, removed the need for more education and is causing massive poverty, causing US to turn back in time and will cause actual child labor I suspect.
I think that capitalism is the best tool that people invented to get out of poverty for everybody, and socialism is the regressive tool that people unfortunately vote for, because they want things for free provided by others, which causes poverty and destruction of economy and society by promoting huge governments and thus monopolies and empire building.
So my view is - you want less child labor? Get rid of government that destroys free market.
Oh, as if child labor was created by the eeveeeel capitalists.
Yeah, because obviously children had happy childhood before the capital was saved and factories started their production. Obviously children were pulled out of their families by the evil rich person, who forced the people to stop being farmers/hunters and forced them into the factories.
As to robber barons - at least somebody was thinking.
A guy with a nick like yours is going to talk about this issue with a straight face? :) Seriously?
Anyway, we do know what happened when there was no SS and no Fed and no IRS and no FDIC and no FHA and no EPA and no FDA and no FAA and no Freddie/Fannie and no departments of education/agriculture/business/energy, etc.etc.
USA economy was the fastest growing economy in the world. USA became the major creditor nation, came up with the most productive system and all sorts of people wanted to come to USA from everywhere to do business there, to work there, because USA had the least government.
Why do you think people were coming to US in droves, for more government? Why do you think the 19 century made USA the powerhouse of productivity on this planet, the government? The government didn't even exist basically before 1913, when it found a way to start growing by creating the Fed and IRS.
Canada is an energy exporter nation with a very small population (sort of like Norway), and as these go, they are welfare states specifically because they are resource exporters.
There is an economic paradox, I think it's called 'resource curse', it's when a nation becomes uncompetitive in manufacturing and production due to exporting resources, such as oil and gas. In such nations the economy structures itself very heavy at the top of government pyramid, where the money is collected from the exports, and then it's "doled out", also various labor regulations in these countries preclude it from having any real free market, investing into productive capacity except for the export business stops making sense, and the country becomes uncompetitive from POV of manufacturing and production capacity.
Germany deals with its problems by allowing large numbers of foreigners to work in the country cheaply, so instead of outsourcing manufacturing to China, they found that outsourcing it to foreigners who come into the country makes more sense, and by the way, they have a trade surplus with China, which shows that US claims that China is unfair in its trading practices is a bunch of nonsense. Of-course US has a trade deficit with Canada, so ....
UK by the way, is on its way to its own economic disaster, with manufacturing gone and a large welfare state that developed over the last century destroying the economy.
So what spending would you get rid o
- Wars, 99% of military. All of SS. All of Medicare. All government departments. All regulations of business. FHA, Freddie/Fannie, FDIC, Fed, IRS, FDA, EPA, FAA, CIA, Food stamps, EI, public schools, minimum wage, OSHA, MSHA, all of it, including department of transport. All assets must be sold off to private entities. Of-course all income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes must be abolished.
Actually there was a study that showed that young people are not having kids because of the overwhelming social obligations that they are forced to pay into by huge taxes.
FYI
That's by
Charles Blahous (One of two public trustees for Social Security & Medicare)
and
Andrew Biggs (Former principal deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration )
.
Hold on, hold on. So it's a rational decision to raise taxes on people who are NOT getting SS and Medicare to subsidize those who want it but are no longer paying into it?
That's a rational decision? You and I have a completely different understanding of the word 'rational', because I see this rational: those who are PAYING taxes NOW are the ones who should be deciding what taxes they will pay, not somebody else, who voted himself a sweet deal, to get a great pension for themselves but transfer the payments to the future generations, (those who are paying now.)
No no, the rational thing to do is to allow people to opt out of SS and Medicare but allow them then to stop paying those taxes today, if they want to opt out of them today and forever.
How many people, do you think, would take that offer? I think majority of people would. And think of this: the programs were sold to the public by making it sound like the government will make BETTER economic decisions for the public, because the government says that an average Joe cannot think for himself and would end up poor by the end of his life, but the government, in its infinite wisdom will make sound economic decisions and will keep the economy going and will make sure that the Joe is not left out in the cold.
Instead, the people who are paying today, are paying the MOST of anybody who EVER paid into SS and Medicare, but they will be the ones who will get the least, because their kids are sure as hell not going to pay into those systems, because they won't have jobs in USA due to the incredibly awful economic decisions made by the government, which pushed productive capital out of the country and destroyed manufacturing sector and jobs.
The people are overtaxed, anybody paying Medicare and SS is paying over 15% only into those programs, never mind income taxes by the federal gov't, by the state, municipalities, the sales taxes, the corporate taxes, the transaction taxes (buying/selling a house costs you in taxes too), property taxes, fuel taxes, excise taxes, the ever growing and unvoted for inflation tax.
No, the rational thing to do is not to increase government spending, it's to abolish it.
Come on, there is no use for this station in space now, so all the money is going to be burned maintaining it until 2020, there is no economic incentive to keep it going and it's just a waste of resources and energy. But it's in orbit already, so instead of doing 5 next launches to replace crews in there, they could shoot up a few boosters with fuel in them, attach them to the station, then at some point launch it into a much higher orbit, or even send it to the Moon or Mars. Who needs that station up there now? What use is it? It's a waste of money and resources and energy, it's a jobs program and nothing else.
Dump it now, but dump it with style, calculate a way to push it to an orbit around some other body in space. Mothball it and send it to Mars.
Windows? Don't they have something like 'at' command? You probably can just use that and put a perl script to check the files.
That's your choice, I prefer rsync personally and cvs for development that I do for myself.
Well, you can run your own version control as well.
First simple solution: host your own secure ftp.
Second simple solution: call Dropbox and tell them you'll pay to use their service if they sign your contract. Write your contract and mail it to them.
Complex solution: build your own software to do what they do. I don't see how that's going to be cheaper or easier than the first 2 simple solutions.