except that it is the creation of Fed and the fiat money printing that caused the 'Great' depression rather than gold standard, and Nixon got rid of the gold standard to pay for more of his programs, you can't print gold. Saying that gold is responsible for massive crashes is basically insane.
He states that the Fed failing to print money, after 1/3 of banks failed, caused the Great Depression by artificially restricting the money supply.
Investment in production stopped because of tax cuts? Do you understand what income tax is? Income tax is a disincentive to reinvest, like a consumption tax would be the disincentive to consume.
No, when your income is high - when you don't reinvest - you pay more taxes. If I make a million dollars this year, and I don't reinvest any of it before the end of the year, I have to pay tax on the full million dollars of income. If I know the tax rate above $250,000 is much higher than the rate below that amount, I'm going to reinvest everything I can to avoid the high income tax rate.
Consumption taxes work differently - you pay when you consume. With income taxes, you pay when you don't consume/reinvest.
The great FAILURE of the Keynesian ideas was that it predicted that once the war ends, the US would be in worse shape because of all of the men returning from the war would cause a huge unemployment in the minds of Keynesians.
That's an incorrect prediction of economists. The Keynesian model worked, or else World War II would have carried no economic benefit, since free market fundamentalists believe that all government intervention is bad.
The Austrian school
The Austrian School doesn't have any economists. They don't believe in economics. They think economics modeling is too hard, so they gave up.
(I skimmed most of your conspiracy theories.)
Governments DESTROY the middle class by not allowing the money to be saved by the middle class and reinvested into businesses. This is reflected in everything, from the income tax policies, to the printing/borrowing/spending policy, to the insane amount of regulations that exist in a bubble themselves and NEVER prevent anything bad from happening to the real people, they only prevent the Free Market from functioning properly by creating Monopolies.
The markets of most of Europe are highly regulated by the government, and they have much better income equality than the United States. When a government functions properly - when it busts up monopolies, institutes sane tariffs and taxes - the market also performs better.
>The Nixon administration has done quite a few things to allow the next credit bubbles to be set up and to allow huge monopolies to move the production out of the US. The wage controls, the price controls, getting off of the gold standard and printing and setting insanely low interest rates and thus discouraging savings and reinvestment.
You can't have it both ways. If Nixon "allowed" the companies to move the production outside of the US, then before it was only government intervention that kept production inside the United States. Nixon did do some damage deregulating international capital markets, which has led to a point where a majority of capital has nothing to do with actual investment - it's all gambling by crooks, as predicted by Adam Smith, who believed artificially controlled interest rates were a good thing:
The legal rate... ought not be much above the lowest market rate. If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent, the greater part of the money which was to be lent would be lent to prodigals and projectors [promoters of fraudulent schemes], who alone would be
Everyone in America is part of American society. That is literally how it works. If our society rewards one person more than another, through any set of rules, the society is signaling it's value system through monetary exchange.
The counter to your assertion is that the majority (not all, by any means) of the folks who are doing this stuff are helping bring capital to the markets. Through investment banking, deal-making, and mathematical analysis of market patterns it helps allocate capital to projects which build economies.
They are not making real investments. Government funding through the military gave us computers, and then the internet, and then provided incentives to build the "information superhighway" as it was coined by the Clinton Administration. Taxes pay for roads, water, sewer, police, social services -- infrastructure, or the blank slate that allows for innovation. Individuals investing in themselves can then provide the innovation, and that's what usually happens in America. An idea is developed in a university, then invested and brought to fruition by venture capitalists, and then offered on the public exchange to complete the funding. But that last part really isn't necessary. What have Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs innovated? Legal loopholes? Exotic, entirely false financial instruments? Algorithms to game FOREX markets? Why can't a government agency list the companies, their stock prices, and P/E ratios, and force reasonable terms of investment to avoid all of this needless volatility?
On days like today, I feel like Wall Street should be beaten to death and floated down the river. If investors want to invest, they should tip toe out of their mansions, examine and analyse successful local businesses, and then invest directly. The stock market has removed accountability and reason from investing. It should be seriously reformed or entirely done away with.
What do you think finances manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology?
If you think that the markets reward long term investments that don't turn up in quarterly reports, you're not paying attention. Moving jobs to third world countries is rewarded in the stock market, not building American factories to employ American workers.
It's the stock market, it's forms of agency, and blind faith in the quarterly profit report that are ruinously damaging our ability to have an economy at all.
Will ANY politician in US say to the 'voters': You have to bite the bullet. There is no money for Medicare. There is no money for Social Security checks. There is no money for any Government run program.
Social Security has never cost the US Government a dime. It's a trust fund that is in danger of paying 75% of what was promised if nothing is done by 2020. The easy solution is to raise the retirement age to match the increase in life expectancy - which seems fair enough.
As far as Medicare and other social services, they account for about 40% of our discretionary budget -- approximately the same amount we spend on the military. So, I think we can stop building Ospreys and drawing down our 750 military bases around the world before we start ending social services.
However the BIG Sell Off is coming whether the Governments do anything or not.
The difference between US and Greece is this: Greece is in Euro and cannot print, so it either quits Euro and goes back to Drachma and prints the money into oblivion causing a crash of its bonds/treasuries/currency OR Greece bites the bullet. Greek's Government for some reason decided to go the High Road and to be Honest for some reason, I need to figure it out.
US will NEVER do this, it's impossible. It will print and print USD into hyper-inflation.
The issue is that Greece cannot devalue it's own currency, as the US can through the Fed. It is forced to keep the Euro, and France and Germany do not want their currency devalued. Fiat money systems are purposefully designed that way - the restrictions of gold based currencies were the cause of massive crashes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
, just understand that for a Government work has ceased being a rewarded function long time ago, when the government decided it can print money and set interest rates. That's the primary problem.
They've been able to print money and control interest rates since the mid 1930s. America has had a good debt level for most of those years - only when taxes were cut for the wealthy in the 80s did real investment in production stop.
Furthermore, during WWII, we had a debt level far higher than we do now. WWII was basically the largest Keynesian economic success story in world history, and our debt levels came down quickly as the government reaped the benefits of the creation of the middle class.
When you destroy the middle class, you destroy the economy. Lower class families do not have the resources to make real investments, and the ultra rich have no incentive to make real investments. So we're left with underperforming, underemployed economies across the United States, and a bunch of people on Wall St waving their dicks in the air, making big bets and doing little else. It's the wrong solution for what we need - real investment in real production to provide real jobs for real people.
You're missing the point. All of these highly educated fund managers missed the boat on the real estate crash. Simply put, they don't serve a good purpose to our society. So why pay them such high salaries?
The DOW and stock prices in general have no relation to the economy, or to the health of the company. It's just a number. A number that can make people with a lot of money in paper feel very good, or very bad.
Other nations like England have small taxes that slow down trading, because you have to pay a "token tax" every time you make a trade. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but I think it's a good idea. A better idea would be forcing traders to hold their investments for even one month - all of this market volatility nonsense would disappear. Or even just to force holding a short sale for a week. It's a different moment when you're about to dump five hundred thousand in a particular company, when you know you can't decide to sell it in the next moment. It may make it harder for large companies to raise capital, but they don't appear to do anything useful with it anyways.
When you can make money hand over fist doing nothing, a very bad thing has happened: work has ceased to become a rewarded function. Instead, it's who you can screw over with dodgy investment strategies and exotic financial instruments that are not only worthless, but a liability. It's time that we end the casino markets and return to investing in things that are actually part of the economy that creates jobs - manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology.
Fund managers who literally do nothing but piss away money are making $1,000 an hour, and the people who educate our children are making less than $20 an hour. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
First-world countries don't go to war because of an economic factor, never have, and the burden of proof is on you to back your ignorant comment up.
9/11 involved 17 Saudi Arabian hijackers. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled by an Islamic leader. Saudi Arabia has a terrible human rights record, doesn't allow non-muslims to testify in court, and allows young girls to be raped by old men through arranged marriages. Hardly a democratic paradise. So, why did we decide to invade Iraq? First, they said it was revenge for working with Al Qaeda, which is pure bullshit. Then it was WMD, which is also pure bullshit. Now it's to spread freedom and democracy, which yet again pure bullshit, otherwise we would have invaded Saudia Arabia for reasons one and three.
Short answer: Saudi Arabia plays ball, does what we tell them, and Saddam Hussein did not. Iraq also happens to sit on unexploited oil resources. Consider the headline, "West Sees Glittering Prizes Ahead in Giant Oilfields," printed in the London Times in 2002. That pretty much says it all.
If you like, I can go back through the history of just the United States for our wars, fought either for power or economic reasons. We invaded many Latin American countries because they kicked out US corporations and tried to reaffirm ownership of their own resources. We overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953 in Operation AJAX to restore British and American access to their resources, mostly oil. We invaded the Philippines after they refused our attempt to annex them in 1898 after the war with Spain, which also involved Cuba.
We have denied the right of nations to self rule for hundreds of years, beginning with the Native Americans, and even as I type, we are denying the rights of Iraqis and Afghanis the right to determine their own future. Economically, we strive to destroy local economies in order to enrich our own, from opening up agriculture markets in Mexico to put millions of poor farmers out of work, or opening up "free trade zones" to allow manufacturers to create something akin to a slave labor camp to push up their profit margins, and ship local jobs overseas.
First world countries are usually first world countries because they have raped and pillaged the third world for labor and resources. This was true for the British Empire, where the sun never set, and the Irish said because God would never trust the English in the dark. We are the new empire. We have over 750 military bases around the world trying to maintain our empire. You, just like many other Americans, are simply in denial about it.
Unless you suggest we euthanize anyone who arrives at a hospital without insurance, then you aren't actually going to address the issue. When it's your mother or father in a life or death situation, I'll bet that the concept of "my" resources and "your" resources become less of a problem.
"Yeah, I'm sorry my mom had to die. But I didn't want her to consume any of her neighbor's resources."
or
"Yeah, well, the kid's mom didn't have any money and died during child birth. It needed a $20,000 operation to save it's life, but we just pumped it full of morphine until it stopped breathing. We billed it's next of kin for the morphine."
First of all, Ann Coulter is worthless human being. She has capitalized on the tragedy of 9/11 by preaching hate. She's nothing more than a reeking blonde vulture, desperately clawing at the carcass of terrorism for the last bits of money she can dig out, all the while claiming she's the only one who cares. Anyway.
You do not need the government to help the poor, downtrodden, unfortunate, or anyone else down on their luck.
You don't need the government to fight wars, do you? Just get together with your friends, build an aircraft carrier, manufacture all the weapons, and drive that shit over there. Government would only get in the way of such a complicated operation, right?
Obviously not. Certain institutions, when socialized, provide better services to a greater amount of people. That's why our military is the best in the world - we spend all of our money on it.
It's the same reason why the Constitution gave the power to the government to build roads and post offices. Infrastructure is what makes a nation strong and resilient, and this includes the infrastructure that takes care of the needy.
And how do you propose people get together to improve the human condition? Maybe they could organize into some sort of group that would decide to use shared resources to accomplish that task, and give their approval or disapproval in some sort of democratic fashion.
Now you might be able to realize that the entire purpose of a democratic government is to allow people to decide how to best use their nation's resources. Some people get their warm fuzzies from denying that this is the case.
Do you know how much good research is done by the CDC? NASA? Publicly funded universities? We wouldn't be communicating right now with computers, or over the internet, if it weren't for government spending to improve the human condition.
The goals stated are quite cheap compared to the profiteering war empire the founders warned against becoming. You just have to pull your head out of your ass and look around.
In many ways I'm still a Hubert Humphrey Democrat -- someone who believes in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. A society is judged by how it treats the elderly, the sick, the impoverished. To me it's a matter of ethics and compassion. -Al Franken
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. -Ann Coulter
In Afghanistan, we are not battling an army that has the same technology we do. We're battling an indigenous people who have been at war for fifty years, either between themselves or against an invader. Unfortunately for us, the only people they hate more than another tribe is foreign invaders, i.e. Americans.
They are holed up in caves, stocking up on ammunition and resting until they have enough weapons, ammo, and food to launch another assault. Or they are building IEDs and monitoring regular troop movements to plant and detonate them. Their singular goal is to kick us out, and eventually they will. You can't occupy a nation, especially one as battle hardened as Afghanistan, when they don't want you there in the first place.
Tweet all the fuck you want. They are reloading no matter what lame psyops scheme you have cooked up.
Imagine if you were defending your homeland. What wouldn't you do?
One of the first cases is stating that the Virgin Mary's body went to heaven after she died. Which is plainly a crock of shit, if you aren't one of the faithful cultists.
But continue to enjoy your little rituals, I guess. Meanwhile, the church says that condoms are a sin, and worse than AIDS, and as a result the birth rate and STDs have not gotten any better in countries faithful to the cult. With all due to respect, the catholic church can go fuck itself.
Tom, I live in a world where a person who feigns moral superiority for monetary gain or even personal vanity is rightly called a hypocrite, and outed for it when possible.
I guess Sergey could say he remembers what it was like being under the thumb of a hopeless totalitarian dickhole from his time living in Soviet Era Russia. So, if you want the same experience of someone else deciding what you can and cannot have access to, shackle yourself to an iPhone.
(By the way, Steve Jobs is the same guy who denied paternity while his daughter and former girlfriend lived on welfare. I don't think he has any solid footing on the moral high ground.)
Most chinese factories work like this: You're hired at what seems like a good wage for eight hours. Only then you find out you are given quotas that you can't complete unless you work 80 or 90 hours a week, with unpaid overtime. In some slave labor camps, you are paid room and board and then given your wages at the end of a year contract, and they only need to find three infractions under the law to kick you out of your dormitory and not pay you a dime.
And if you're wondering why your wages are less than what your parents made, adjusted for purchasing power, then you are ignoring the answer. I do not want to compete with someone willing to work for $100 a month in such deplorable conditions, whose environment looks like this.
I'd rather have less stuff.
The scam of externalizing real costs to the next generation is worse than giving them a national deficit, because it could take hundreds of years to undo the damage, and much more money than we thought we saved.
The Federal Government, like all state governments, has gotten out of control. Trillions of dollars in useless spending(I am talking about actual useless spending, not important spending, i.e. Military, enforcement, etc) and it does not appear to be getting any better. This is not a new trend, as this as been an issue for a long time.
Military spending accounts for half of the Federal budget. You cannot lower taxes and wage two wars at the same time you have hundreds of military bases scattered throughout the globe and not have a deficit. That's pretty basic macroeconomics.
Just how long does the EU believe it can fund every lazy person's wet dream(s) before it goes bankrupt?
Germans have the right to vacation time. They're also the only competition China has in worldwide exports. France has a nationwide network of nuclear power plants and high speed electric rail. London is one of the financial capitals of the world. And guess what? All of those places have a strong middle class, a good education system, and generally have lower poverty rates and happier and healthier populations than the United States. Your inability to accept that they may do some things better than us is evidence of immaturity.
I know that a VAT would seem a better solution(though not perfect, as you said), but it is not. It would kill businesses that rely on people traveling to get "a better deal", due to lower sales tax in certain states. I see it all the time between Tennessee and Georgia.
This is like saying that regulating deceptive banking practices would hurt deceptive banks. Who cares? A business model based on tax loopholes is not a business model. It's a currently legal scam.
You're missing the point. The point is to make sure that the companies taking money are providing transparency to their investment strategy, not only to the investors but to the credit rating agencies as well. The firms in question purposefully obscured CDOs and other exotic financial instruments so they could play hot potato with the emperor's clothes and cash in on the commissions.
The information he provided was not to cover up injustice, therefore your argument fails.
In addition to describing the technical programs, the Sun articles disclosed a crisis in meeting N.S.A.’s demands for electrical power and described how the agency had rejected a program that had the promise of collecting communications while protecting Americans’ privacy.
Boosh.
In other words, Wikipedia is an untrusted source. Why should I do that when I can find a trusted and trustable source?
So, if I hand you a copy of the NYT that states that martians have landed in SoHo to buy some leather pants, that immediately becomes a fact to you?
I sincerely hope you're feigning stupidity in order to try and salvage your argument. It's quite pathetic, though.
We can change Safeway, so much easier than we can change the government. Safeway is constantly trying to sell new things, rearranging things, trying to better serve us(aka get our money).
If all corporations were limited in their power, there wouldn't be a problem. Unregulated markets like America are filled with oligopolies.
I don't have to do business with any corporation i don't' want to. I HAVE to do business with the government.
Do you really think you have a choice to not buy a car because there's a reasonable public transportation option? Can you make the choice not to use a bank? To buy a home? If you use money, you're dealing with a corporation. Unless all you do is work for yourself, walk home, and then work on your victory garden.
conservative health care bill?? forcing EVERYONE to buy insurance
Yeah, just like you're forced to buy car insurance, just like in Mitt Romney's plan. And don't say they aren't the same thing. I've made an assertion you can falsify. Prove I'm wrong with evidence.
OK now you're off partisan politics and on to insulting me. Sure buddy, i have no values. Enjoy your obama presidency, as he takes us further down the same fucking path we've been going down. Bush Hit the accelerator and obama is hitting it harder, cheer him on! w00t.
No, this is based on experience. Most people who don't understand why Chomsky would be upset about funding terrorism in Central America - they say to themselves, "Well, that's different. That's us. We're freedom fighters defending ourselves against communism!" It's a common human fallacy, where your morality only applies to your neighbors and not to yourself, and any evil you perform is rationalized just as your enemies rationalize their evil deeds. And as Chomsky is fond of saying, talking about the injustices performed by your enemies has no moral value. There's nothing you can do about injustices and genocide in East Timor. Unless, of course, it's your government that provided the weapons, the diplomatic cover, and the censorship of the press that allowed such genocide to take place.
I'll continue to be critical of any government that belongs to me as a citizen, but not so shortsighted as to feign ignorance and refuse to recognize real progress. I support none of the continuation of the foreign policy that has been around long before Bush, but I do recognize that Obama is less likely to start another injust war, because he is more connected with the realities of international politics and diplomacy. He's not a dumbassed cowboy that thinks you can "smoke them out of their holes," or even more stupidly, believes that you can have a successful war against a military strategy.
Please explain how a law stating one may not release classified information is unjust.
If the information is classified to cover up injustice. Which is the purpose of classifying most information.
This is a false statement, as the intelligence budget is no longer considered classified.
Provide a link to the latest detailed account of CIA and NSA spending.
As anyone can change Wikipedia at any time, the information contained in Wikipedia is not fact checked, nor is the veracity of the sources verified.
You know you can click on the links, right? Then look at the domain, and see if it's legit, or look up the ISBN number and do a Google Books search. I'm almost certain you do not understand what the verb "verify" means.
By Wikipedia's own admission, anyone can edit an article at any time, therefore the information in the article can not be trusted at any point in time.
Unless you check the sources. Are you aware of how research works? How would you treat Wikipedia differently from Encyclopedia Brittanica? I mean, besides prancing around red herrings.
Maybe you should try researching the federal budget and the budget process.
At no point is there a clear accounting of money spent on intelligence agencies. This violates the constitution. You're free to pretend otherwise; I imagine it's necessary to fill in the holes that your alternate reality requires.
Is there any other power center you'd like to shill for? No, I'm serious. I'd love to see how badly you would do for the Pentagon. Maybe you could take a crack at defending extraordinary renditions?
In other words, your quote actually argues against your point because Drake was breaking the law. The information Drake released did not show any illegal acts, merely failed projects the nature and existence of which were classified. Drake violated the law and was indicted by a grand jury. Your quote does not help your cause in the least.
Aww boo. Oh wait! Here's one:
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. -Thomas Jefferson
Score one for reading the founding fathers, and a second point for understanding the empire they were fighting against.
Slashdot Mirror
except that it is the creation of Fed and the fiat money printing that caused the 'Great' depression rather than gold standard, and Nixon got rid of the gold standard to pay for more of his programs, you can't print gold. Saying that gold is responsible for massive crashes is basically insane.
Milton Friedman thinks differently. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7pnjzCuSv8
He states that the Fed failing to print money, after 1/3 of banks failed, caused the Great Depression by artificially restricting the money supply.
Investment in production stopped because of tax cuts? Do you understand what income tax is? Income tax is a disincentive to reinvest, like a consumption tax would be the disincentive to consume.
No, when your income is high - when you don't reinvest - you pay more taxes. If I make a million dollars this year, and I don't reinvest any of it before the end of the year, I have to pay tax on the full million dollars of income. If I know the tax rate above $250,000 is much higher than the rate below that amount, I'm going to reinvest everything I can to avoid the high income tax rate.
Consumption taxes work differently - you pay when you consume. With income taxes, you pay when you don't consume/reinvest.
The great FAILURE of the Keynesian ideas was that it predicted that once the war ends, the US would be in worse shape because of all of the men returning from the war would cause a huge unemployment in the minds of Keynesians.
That's an incorrect prediction of economists. The Keynesian model worked, or else World War II would have carried no economic benefit, since free market fundamentalists believe that all government intervention is bad.
The Austrian school
The Austrian School doesn't have any economists. They don't believe in economics. They think economics modeling is too hard, so they gave up.
(I skimmed most of your conspiracy theories.)
Governments DESTROY the middle class by not allowing the money to be saved by the middle class and reinvested into businesses. This is reflected in everything, from the income tax policies, to the printing/borrowing/spending policy, to the insane amount of regulations that exist in a bubble themselves and NEVER prevent anything bad from happening to the real people, they only prevent the Free Market from functioning properly by creating Monopolies.
The markets of most of Europe are highly regulated by the government, and they have much better income equality than the United States. When a government functions properly - when it busts up monopolies, institutes sane tariffs and taxes - the market also performs better.
>The Nixon administration has done quite a few things to allow the next credit bubbles to be set up and to allow huge monopolies to move the production out of the US. The wage controls, the price controls, getting off of the gold standard and printing and setting insanely low interest rates and thus discouraging savings and reinvestment.
You can't have it both ways. If Nixon "allowed" the companies to move the production outside of the US, then before it was only government intervention that kept production inside the United States. Nixon did do some damage deregulating international capital markets, which has led to a point where a majority of capital has nothing to do with actual investment - it's all gambling by crooks, as predicted by Adam Smith, who believed artificially controlled interest rates were a good thing:
The legal rate... ought not be much above the lowest market rate. If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent, the greater part of the money which was to be lent would be lent to prodigals and projectors [promoters of fraudulent schemes], who alone would be
Everyone in America is part of American society. That is literally how it works. If our society rewards one person more than another, through any set of rules, the society is signaling it's value system through monetary exchange.
The counter to your assertion is that the majority (not all, by any means) of the folks who are doing this stuff are helping bring capital to the markets. Through investment banking, deal-making, and mathematical analysis of market patterns it helps allocate capital to projects which build economies.
They are not making real investments. Government funding through the military gave us computers, and then the internet, and then provided incentives to build the "information superhighway" as it was coined by the Clinton Administration. Taxes pay for roads, water, sewer, police, social services -- infrastructure, or the blank slate that allows for innovation. Individuals investing in themselves can then provide the innovation, and that's what usually happens in America. An idea is developed in a university, then invested and brought to fruition by venture capitalists, and then offered on the public exchange to complete the funding. But that last part really isn't necessary. What have Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs innovated? Legal loopholes? Exotic, entirely false financial instruments? Algorithms to game FOREX markets? Why can't a government agency list the companies, their stock prices, and P/E ratios, and force reasonable terms of investment to avoid all of this needless volatility?
On days like today, I feel like Wall Street should be beaten to death and floated down the river. If investors want to invest, they should tip toe out of their mansions, examine and analyse successful local businesses, and then invest directly. The stock market has removed accountability and reason from investing. It should be seriously reformed or entirely done away with.
What do you think finances manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology?
If you think that the markets reward long term investments that don't turn up in quarterly reports, you're not paying attention. Moving jobs to third world countries is rewarded in the stock market, not building American factories to employ American workers.
It's the stock market, it's forms of agency, and blind faith in the quarterly profit report that are ruinously damaging our ability to have an economy at all.
Will ANY politician in US say to the 'voters': You have to bite the bullet. There is no money for Medicare. There is no money for Social Security checks. There is no money for any Government run program.
Social Security has never cost the US Government a dime. It's a trust fund that is in danger of paying 75% of what was promised if nothing is done by 2020. The easy solution is to raise the retirement age to match the increase in life expectancy - which seems fair enough.
As far as Medicare and other social services, they account for about 40% of our discretionary budget -- approximately the same amount we spend on the military. So, I think we can stop building Ospreys and drawing down our 750 military bases around the world before we start ending social services.
However the BIG Sell Off is coming whether the Governments do anything or not.
The difference between US and Greece is this: Greece is in Euro and cannot print, so it either quits Euro and goes back to Drachma and prints the money into oblivion causing a crash of its bonds/treasuries/currency OR Greece bites the bullet. Greek's Government for some reason decided to go the High Road and to be Honest for some reason, I need to figure it out.
US will NEVER do this, it's impossible. It will print and print USD into hyper-inflation.
The issue is that Greece cannot devalue it's own currency, as the US can through the Fed. It is forced to keep the Euro, and France and Germany do not want their currency devalued. Fiat money systems are purposefully designed that way - the restrictions of gold based currencies were the cause of massive crashes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
, just understand that for a Government work has ceased being a rewarded function long time ago, when the government decided it can print money and set interest rates. That's the primary problem.
They've been able to print money and control interest rates since the mid 1930s. America has had a good debt level for most of those years - only when taxes were cut for the wealthy in the 80s did real investment in production stop.
Furthermore, during WWII, we had a debt level far higher than we do now. WWII was basically the largest Keynesian economic success story in world history, and our debt levels came down quickly as the government reaped the benefits of the creation of the middle class.
When you destroy the middle class, you destroy the economy. Lower class families do not have the resources to make real investments, and the ultra rich have no incentive to make real investments. So we're left with underperforming, underemployed economies across the United States, and a bunch of people on Wall St waving their dicks in the air, making big bets and doing little else. It's the wrong solution for what we need - real investment in real production to provide real jobs for real people.
You're missing the point. All of these highly educated fund managers missed the boat on the real estate crash. Simply put, they don't serve a good purpose to our society. So why pay them such high salaries?
The DOW and stock prices in general have no relation to the economy, or to the health of the company. It's just a number. A number that can make people with a lot of money in paper feel very good, or very bad.
Other nations like England have small taxes that slow down trading, because you have to pay a "token tax" every time you make a trade. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but I think it's a good idea. A better idea would be forcing traders to hold their investments for even one month - all of this market volatility nonsense would disappear. Or even just to force holding a short sale for a week. It's a different moment when you're about to dump five hundred thousand in a particular company, when you know you can't decide to sell it in the next moment. It may make it harder for large companies to raise capital, but they don't appear to do anything useful with it anyways.
When you can make money hand over fist doing nothing, a very bad thing has happened: work has ceased to become a rewarded function. Instead, it's who you can screw over with dodgy investment strategies and exotic financial instruments that are not only worthless, but a liability. It's time that we end the casino markets and return to investing in things that are actually part of the economy that creates jobs - manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology.
Fund managers who literally do nothing but piss away money are making $1,000 an hour, and the people who educate our children are making less than $20 an hour. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
First-world countries don't go to war because of an economic factor, never have, and the burden of proof is on you to back your ignorant comment up.
9/11 involved 17 Saudi Arabian hijackers. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled by an Islamic leader. Saudi Arabia has a terrible human rights record, doesn't allow non-muslims to testify in court, and allows young girls to be raped by old men through arranged marriages. Hardly a democratic paradise. So, why did we decide to invade Iraq? First, they said it was revenge for working with Al Qaeda, which is pure bullshit. Then it was WMD, which is also pure bullshit. Now it's to spread freedom and democracy, which yet again pure bullshit, otherwise we would have invaded Saudia Arabia for reasons one and three.
Short answer: Saudi Arabia plays ball, does what we tell them, and Saddam Hussein did not. Iraq also happens to sit on unexploited oil resources. Consider the headline, "West Sees Glittering Prizes Ahead in Giant Oilfields," printed in the London Times in 2002. That pretty much says it all.
If you like, I can go back through the history of just the United States for our wars, fought either for power or economic reasons. We invaded many Latin American countries because they kicked out US corporations and tried to reaffirm ownership of their own resources. We overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953 in Operation AJAX to restore British and American access to their resources, mostly oil. We invaded the Philippines after they refused our attempt to annex them in 1898 after the war with Spain, which also involved Cuba.
We have denied the right of nations to self rule for hundreds of years, beginning with the Native Americans, and even as I type, we are denying the rights of Iraqis and Afghanis the right to determine their own future. Economically, we strive to destroy local economies in order to enrich our own, from opening up agriculture markets in Mexico to put millions of poor farmers out of work, or opening up "free trade zones" to allow manufacturers to create something akin to a slave labor camp to push up their profit margins, and ship local jobs overseas.
First world countries are usually first world countries because they have raped and pillaged the third world for labor and resources. This was true for the British Empire, where the sun never set, and the Irish said because God would never trust the English in the dark. We are the new empire. We have over 750 military bases around the world trying to maintain our empire. You, just like many other Americans, are simply in denial about it.
Well, that was an impressive assertion. Do you have any facts at all to back it up?
Unless you suggest we euthanize anyone who arrives at a hospital without insurance, then you aren't actually going to address the issue. When it's your mother or father in a life or death situation, I'll bet that the concept of "my" resources and "your" resources become less of a problem.
"Yeah, I'm sorry my mom had to die. But I didn't want her to consume any of her neighbor's resources."
or
"Yeah, well, the kid's mom didn't have any money and died during child birth. It needed a $20,000 operation to save it's life, but we just pumped it full of morphine until it stopped breathing. We billed it's next of kin for the morphine."
It's a sick world that you want to live in.
First of all, Ann Coulter is worthless human being. She has capitalized on the tragedy of 9/11 by preaching hate. She's nothing more than a reeking blonde vulture, desperately clawing at the carcass of terrorism for the last bits of money she can dig out, all the while claiming she's the only one who cares. Anyway.
You do not need the government to help the poor, downtrodden, unfortunate, or anyone else down on their luck.
You don't need the government to fight wars, do you? Just get together with your friends, build an aircraft carrier, manufacture all the weapons, and drive that shit over there. Government would only get in the way of such a complicated operation, right?
Obviously not. Certain institutions, when socialized, provide better services to a greater amount of people. That's why our military is the best in the world - we spend all of our money on it.
It's the same reason why the Constitution gave the power to the government to build roads and post offices. Infrastructure is what makes a nation strong and resilient, and this includes the infrastructure that takes care of the needy.
And how do you propose people get together to improve the human condition? Maybe they could organize into some sort of group that would decide to use shared resources to accomplish that task, and give their approval or disapproval in some sort of democratic fashion.
Now you might be able to realize that the entire purpose of a democratic government is to allow people to decide how to best use their nation's resources. Some people get their warm fuzzies from denying that this is the case.
Do you know how much good research is done by the CDC? NASA? Publicly funded universities? We wouldn't be communicating right now with computers, or over the internet, if it weren't for government spending to improve the human condition.
The goals stated are quite cheap compared to the profiteering war empire the founders warned against becoming. You just have to pull your head out of your ass and look around.
In many ways I'm still a Hubert Humphrey Democrat -- someone who believes in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. A society is judged by how it treats the elderly, the sick, the impoverished. To me it's a matter of ethics and compassion. -Al Franken
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. -Ann Coulter
Yeah, about that political discourse...
In Afghanistan, we are not battling an army that has the same technology we do. We're battling an indigenous people who have been at war for fifty years, either between themselves or against an invader. Unfortunately for us, the only people they hate more than another tribe is foreign invaders, i.e. Americans.
They are holed up in caves, stocking up on ammunition and resting until they have enough weapons, ammo, and food to launch another assault. Or they are building IEDs and monitoring regular troop movements to plant and detonate them. Their singular goal is to kick us out, and eventually they will. You can't occupy a nation, especially one as battle hardened as Afghanistan, when they don't want you there in the first place.
Tweet all the fuck you want. They are reloading no matter what lame psyops scheme you have cooked up.
Imagine if you were defending your homeland. What wouldn't you do?
One of the first cases is stating that the Virgin Mary's body went to heaven after she died. Which is plainly a crock of shit, if you aren't one of the faithful cultists.
But continue to enjoy your little rituals, I guess. Meanwhile, the church says that condoms are a sin, and worse than AIDS, and as a result the birth rate and STDs have not gotten any better in countries faithful to the cult. With all due to respect, the catholic church can go fuck itself.
Tom, I live in a world where a person who feigns moral superiority for monetary gain or even personal vanity is rightly called a hypocrite, and outed for it when possible.
I guess Sergey could say he remembers what it was like being under the thumb of a hopeless totalitarian dickhole from his time living in Soviet Era Russia. So, if you want the same experience of someone else deciding what you can and cannot have access to, shackle yourself to an iPhone.
(By the way, Steve Jobs is the same guy who denied paternity while his daughter and former girlfriend lived on welfare. I don't think he has any solid footing on the moral high ground.)
Most chinese factories work like this: You're hired at what seems like a good wage for eight hours. Only then you find out you are given quotas that you can't complete unless you work 80 or 90 hours a week, with unpaid overtime. In some slave labor camps, you are paid room and board and then given your wages at the end of a year contract, and they only need to find three infractions under the law to kick you out of your dormitory and not pay you a dime.
And if you're wondering why your wages are less than what your parents made, adjusted for purchasing power, then you are ignoring the answer. I do not want to compete with someone willing to work for $100 a month in such deplorable conditions, whose environment looks like this.
I'd rather have less stuff.
The scam of externalizing real costs to the next generation is worse than giving them a national deficit, because it could take hundreds of years to undo the damage, and much more money than we thought we saved.
The Federal Government, like all state governments, has gotten out of control. Trillions of dollars in useless spending(I am talking about actual useless spending, not important spending, i.e. Military, enforcement, etc) and it does not appear to be getting any better. This is not a new trend, as this as been an issue for a long time.
Military spending accounts for half of the Federal budget. You cannot lower taxes and wage two wars at the same time you have hundreds of military bases scattered throughout the globe and not have a deficit. That's pretty basic macroeconomics.
Just how long does the EU believe it can fund every lazy person's wet dream(s) before it goes bankrupt?
Germans have the right to vacation time. They're also the only competition China has in worldwide exports. France has a nationwide network of nuclear power plants and high speed electric rail. London is one of the financial capitals of the world. And guess what? All of those places have a strong middle class, a good education system, and generally have lower poverty rates and happier and healthier populations than the United States. Your inability to accept that they may do some things better than us is evidence of immaturity.
I know that a VAT would seem a better solution(though not perfect, as you said), but it is not. It would kill businesses that rely on people traveling to get "a better deal", due to lower sales tax in certain states. I see it all the time between Tennessee and Georgia.
This is like saying that regulating deceptive banking practices would hurt deceptive banks. Who cares? A business model based on tax loopholes is not a business model. It's a currently legal scam.
You're missing the point. The point is to make sure that the companies taking money are providing transparency to their investment strategy, not only to the investors but to the credit rating agencies as well. The firms in question purposefully obscured CDOs and other exotic financial instruments so they could play hot potato with the emperor's clothes and cash in on the commissions.
The information he provided was not to cover up injustice, therefore your argument fails.
In addition to describing the technical programs, the Sun articles disclosed a crisis in meeting N.S.A.’s demands for electrical power and described how the agency had rejected a program that had the promise of collecting communications while protecting Americans’ privacy.
Boosh.
In other words, Wikipedia is an untrusted source. Why should I do that when I can find a trusted and trustable source?
So, if I hand you a copy of the NYT that states that martians have landed in SoHo to buy some leather pants, that immediately becomes a fact to you?
I sincerely hope you're feigning stupidity in order to try and salvage your argument. It's quite pathetic, though.
We can change Safeway, so much easier than we can change the government. Safeway is constantly trying to sell new things, rearranging things, trying to better serve us(aka get our money).
If all corporations were limited in their power, there wouldn't be a problem. Unregulated markets like America are filled with oligopolies.
I don't have to do business with any corporation i don't' want to. I HAVE to do business with the government.
Do you really think you have a choice to not buy a car because there's a reasonable public transportation option? Can you make the choice not to use a bank? To buy a home? If you use money, you're dealing with a corporation. Unless all you do is work for yourself, walk home, and then work on your victory garden.
conservative health care bill?? forcing EVERYONE to buy insurance
Yeah, just like you're forced to buy car insurance, just like in Mitt Romney's plan. And don't say they aren't the same thing. I've made an assertion you can falsify. Prove I'm wrong with evidence.
OK now you're off partisan politics and on to insulting me. Sure buddy, i have no values. Enjoy your obama presidency, as he takes us further down the same fucking path we've been going down. Bush Hit the accelerator and obama is hitting it harder, cheer him on! w00t.
No, this is based on experience. Most people who don't understand why Chomsky would be upset about funding terrorism in Central America - they say to themselves, "Well, that's different. That's us. We're freedom fighters defending ourselves against communism!" It's a common human fallacy, where your morality only applies to your neighbors and not to yourself, and any evil you perform is rationalized just as your enemies rationalize their evil deeds. And as Chomsky is fond of saying, talking about the injustices performed by your enemies has no moral value. There's nothing you can do about injustices and genocide in East Timor. Unless, of course, it's your government that provided the weapons, the diplomatic cover, and the censorship of the press that allowed such genocide to take place.
I'll continue to be critical of any government that belongs to me as a citizen, but not so shortsighted as to feign ignorance and refuse to recognize real progress. I support none of the continuation of the foreign policy that has been around long before Bush, but I do recognize that Obama is less likely to start another injust war, because he is more connected with the realities of international politics and diplomacy. He's not a dumbassed cowboy that thinks you can "smoke them out of their holes," or even more stupidly, believes that you can have a successful war against a military strategy.
Please explain how a law stating one may not release classified information is unjust.
If the information is classified to cover up injustice. Which is the purpose of classifying most information.
This is a false statement, as the intelligence budget is no longer considered classified.
Provide a link to the latest detailed account of CIA and NSA spending.
As anyone can change Wikipedia at any time, the information contained in Wikipedia is not fact checked, nor is the veracity of the sources verified.
You know you can click on the links, right? Then look at the domain, and see if it's legit, or look up the ISBN number and do a Google Books search. I'm almost certain you do not understand what the verb "verify" means.
By Wikipedia's own admission, anyone can edit an article at any time, therefore the information in the article can not be trusted at any point in time.
Unless you check the sources. Are you aware of how research works? How would you treat Wikipedia differently from Encyclopedia Brittanica? I mean, besides prancing around red herrings.
Maybe you should try researching the federal budget and the budget process.
At no point is there a clear accounting of money spent on intelligence agencies. This violates the constitution. You're free to pretend otherwise; I imagine it's necessary to fill in the holes that your alternate reality requires.
Is there any other power center you'd like to shill for? No, I'm serious. I'd love to see how badly you would do for the Pentagon. Maybe you could take a crack at defending extraordinary renditions?
In other words, your quote actually argues against your point because Drake was breaking the law. The information Drake released did not show any illegal acts, merely failed projects the nature and existence of which were classified. Drake violated the law and was indicted by a grand jury. Your quote does not help your cause in the least.
Aww boo. Oh wait! Here's one:
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. -Thomas Jefferson
Score one for reading the founding fathers, and a second point for understanding the empire they were fighting against.