Basically, anyone I can find who has any direct experience with the issue and any sort of credentials which might lend them some credibility seems to agree that guns are not the problem and there's some greater force making us want to kill each other in the US. Unanimously, and regardless of their status as a gun owner, anyone who's actually dealt with or earnestly studied gun violence and is qualified to understand human interaction and behavior agrees that guns would just be replaced with some other weapon if we didn't have them.
I simply don't believe this statement. It defies not only logic, but reality. It's simple economics. Guns are an easy way to kill people, knives are more personal, more dangerous to use, require more effort, and are less effective. It's much easier to shoot 100 people, than it is to stab 100 people. That means reducing access to guns will both reduce the number of incidents, and reduce the severity of the incidents as it becomes harder to obtain guns. Basically, the desire to kill people is a demand curve, and the easier it is to carry out the objective the more people die. And beyond the simple logical understanding, there is plenty of research that disagrees. Which makes your comments fail the "no true Scotsman" sniff test because you seem to be excluding everyone who disagrees with you from your pool of experts.
And think about it: what makes guns so powerful? There's nothing magical about a gun that makes it more deadly as the best available weapon than a knife would be if that was the best we had. A bit easier to kill with? Sure, and harder to stop with anything other than another gun. But a knife will kill you just as dead as a gun and, if we didn't have anything more powerful than a knife, someone with a knife would be just as hard to stop with anything but a knife.
Do you even know what a gun is? It's point and shoot. It's not magic that makes it more deadly than a knife. It's the little pieces of metal travelling at around 1,700 mph that we call bullets that make them more deadly than running around trying to stab people with a knife.
So we get rid of guns. Then what? Knives take their place. We get rid of knives? Okay, then we've got people running each other down in vehicles. So we get rid of those, right? What next? You can sharpen a spoon into a weapon, we should get rid of those as well. Follow that to its logical conclusion and we find ourselves back in the stone age.
This is both a strawman argument and a slippery slope argument. Most people don't want to get rid of all guns, they'd just like to see more restrictions on who can own them, and more respect for their death dealing capabilities. Also, restricting access to knives is not likely to significantly impact murder and assault rates, because the difference between a knife and a blunt object isn't nearly as big as the difference between a knife and a gun.
My friend, again, you are absolutely correct. But you need to realize that you're arguing against people who fear guns more than they fear people wielding guns; as though it's the gun who wants to kill them, rather than the person holding it. They won't ever admit that there's a people problem, because it would force them to admit that they, themselves, are flawed.
Once again, you are completely wrong. Murder is a people problem, but there are many different ways to deal with the problem, and reduced access to guns is one method that will reduce the effects of the people problem. Increase the barrier to commit the crime, and there is less of that crime. There are other approaches that also need to be taken, because it's a demand curve, so increasing barriers only reduces the effect of the problem, it doesn't eliminate it. It's not a silver bullet. So reducing violent
Mankind has never found a cure for the disease of insatiable greed, and that chasm between the worlds multi-billionaires and the other 99.9999% of the human population isn't shrinking.
Hmm. I suppose we haven't found a permanent cure for insatiable greed yet, but we have applied some temporary cures. Unfortunately, the temporary cure always seems to be bloody revolution. It kind of seems that with the fall of the communist states, the capitalist owners are starting to feel like they have nothing to fear. It seems they have forgotten or never learned the lessons of the communist revolutions. They no longer understand that if they choose to treat their workers poorly enough, the workers will eventually choose to gamble that killing their masters is a better strategy than serving them.
Libertarianism will be an interesting ideology to keep an eye on. In practice, it convinces the ruled that if they are starving that it's because they deserve to starve and that violence is never the solution to any problem except other violence. It's almost like it was designed to prevent the inevitable results of capitalists run amok. Unfortunately, I think libertarianism is also toxic to the owners and their most loyal minions because it makes them believe that they deserve to take the wealth generated by their employees simply because they own things. It makes them blind to the suffering of others, and thus blind to the seeds of revolution that they are sowing.
In the end, I suppose the only slave more pitiful than one who believes he deserves to be a slave is the one who believes he too will one day be a slave owner, if he only works hard enough for his master.
I can only hope that my speculation is wrong, because a non-violent solution to the coming crisis of automation and wealth would be preferable. I not sure that we will be allowed to have one, though.
On the contrary, I think it will strengthen Damore's case, because Google has tacitly agreed that there has been unacceptable behavior from the so-called "diversity" camp. In which case, firing Damore shows even less justifiable bias against his position.
I think even the best lawyers are going to have a hard time convincing a judge that actions that display even-handedness on Google's part, is actually evidence of bias. However, if Google enters Chevalier's firing into evidence, which they likely will, I'm fairly certain that Damore's lawyers will try a similar argument. I just doubt that the judge will accept it as anything more than a desperate reach by a floundering lawyer.
The problem was Netflix was demanding free bandwidth ("peering") from Comcast, who, uncharacteristically, wasn't the asshole in that exchange.
Sorry, but you should realize if you are saying that Comcast wasn't the asshole, then you're probably wrong.
Netflix wasn't demanding anything from anyone. Comcast was demanding that Netflix pay them a bribe to do the job they are paid to do by their actual customers.
My god, this should be common sense. People pay Comcast to deliver internet service to them. Netflix charges it's customers to send them the movies and shows they ask for. Netflix pays it's ISP to send that data. Comcast's customers are already paying Comcast to receive that data. The asshole is the one who refuses to do what's he's being paid to do, unless other people agree to pay him extra to do it. Clearly, the asshole is Comcast.
Steele wasn't some random person who just sent Hillary an email, he was essentially her employee. Hillary's campaign specifically contracted the dossiers creation and then pushed it to the FBI to try and trigger an investigation without the slightest attempt at verification.
Steele worked for Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton's campaign contracted them to do opposition research on Trump. In no way was Steele "essentially her employee". Also, it was Fusion GPS, not Hillary nor Steele who made the decision to provide the dossier to the FBI.
You either very ignorant or deliberately lying.
How is she not responsible for it?
Clinton's campaign received the dossier and then did nothing with it. In what way are they responsible for things they didn't create and didn't publish?
There's also the very strong likelihood (due to the specific nature and wording of some of the details) that large parts or even the entire document was in fact created by people even closer to Hillary than just paid contractors (Blumenthal being the top suspect) and Steele was only used as a go between to give it a semi-respectable face.
Yeah, sure. Why don't you discredit yourself further with even more conspiracy theories?
Any right leaning association with Fusion and their Trump research was over months before Steele was ever hired to create the dossier. The dossier and all the twisted details associated with it are 100% a DNC/Hillary 2018 creation.
Do you understand the chronology here? The dossier was compiled for Hillary by Steele, thus claiming it's Hillary's creation is like shooting the recipient of the message because you don't like what the message said. Your conclusion is so incredibly stupid, that most idiots can't even get it that wrong.
So what you're saying is that they are talking about cash flow (your $5 surplus), and I'm talking about debt (your $5 increase in debt). You used an increase in debt to create the surplus. I guess that's like using your credit card to pay your mortgage - yes, it gives you more "cash today" to use, but it increases your debt - and it happened simply because you spent more (mortgage) than you have. Why else would you take on debt, unless you believe you can make more in the long run?
Yes, most people only take on debt so they can pay for a large expense, be it medical (in the United States), a car, or a house. Also, they sometimes take on short term debt if they think they will be able to recover from a temporary deficit (because of a lost job, for example, where it's cheaper to finance a short term debt than it is to sell a house and move). There are also a lot people who can't balance a budget and don't know how to handle a credit card, but that's a completely different topic...
In my fictitious example, it doesn't matter why I borrowed $5 from you, as long as I don't actually spend enough money to put me in a deficit position. For example, if I borrowed $5 from you to buy some lunch because I forgot my wallet, I could make a net $20 profit from working the day and I am running a surplus and increased my debt. The next day I pay you back $6, and my net profit from yesterday has gone down to $19, but I still ran a surplus for the previous day and my debt increased (temporarily).
In the government's case, it is required to issue debt to itself for the purposes of investing the surplus money from the Social Security and Medicare funds. It has to issue the debt, because Social Security is only allowed, by law, to buy special government bonds. By law, the Social Security fund can not invest in private equity, or even publicly issued government bonds.
Let me first say that the U.S. Government is weird, but here's the convoluted analogy to what's actually going on. Let's say you have a bank account that you are supposed to be saving money in, but you can't actually save any money into it because you're not allowed to (the bank is weird). So instead you keep track of all the money that you wanted to put in there, even though that went into your regular bank account instead. You are making enough money to cover all your living costs and even have enough to pay off a little of your debt after all expenses are paid. However, your total debt (Treasury) is increasing because of the money you are supposed to be paying into your retirement account, while your actual debt held by other people (CBO) is decreasing because you paid off some of the money you owe to other people (mortgage, credit cards, whatever). Most people would count that as running a surplus even though you may owe yourself more money than you used to.
So, how do you add to your debt when you run a surplus? Simple question. If you can answer that with anything other than "you can't", then you've figured out how they can increase the national debt (which the US Treasury shows at Treasury Direct) while running a surplus.
I did some more research, and the discrepancy appears to be government held debt. The CBO doesn't count bonds issued by the government and held by the government, while the Treasury does. Thus the increase of $113 billion in debt in the Treasury numbers between 1997 and 1998 is from $34.2 billion in additional cash issued (according to the Federal Reserve numbers) and the rest, $69 billion, is bonds issued to the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds and the Federal Financing Bank.
So to go back to your example above, if I promise myself that I'm going to go to a Movie Theatre and see the final Star Wars movie when it comes out, let's say it's probably going to cost me $20. The question is whether that's a debt incurred today. The Treasury says yes because I promised to spend something, and the CBO says no because I haven't spent anything yet.
Also as to how I can increase my debt when I'm running a surplus, that's easy. I give you an I-owe-you $5 promissory note and collect $5 from you. My debt has increased and I'm running a $5 surplus.
No, according to the CBO, there were real BUDGET surpluses, which only counts the on-budget spending. For example, the Federal Government does not consider spending on Social Security, the US Postal Service, Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae [thebalance.com], and several other large ticket items as "on budget". So you can keep the rest of spending just under budget, but blow trillions on these via borrowing - and still be, per the CBO, under budget and in surplus.
Well that's certainly not right. There's a column for the US Postal Service, and another for Social Security in the chart. Now Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae aren't listed, but then they weren't taken over until 2008, so they wouldn't have been listed for any of the years that I cited, anyway.
This would be akin to you having a $10,000/month take-home pay. You spend $9,000 per month on food, utilities, travel, clothing. You spend $3,000 per month on housing, and you spend $2,000 per month on your IRA/401K. Your total spending is $14,000 - with only $10,000 income. BUT, because you consider housing and your IRA/401K not "on budget", you actually ran a surplus! Never mind that your actual net worth dropped by $4,000 (you accumulated $4,000 of debt - excess spending relative to income). You were below your budget on the other things you want to put into your budget, so you're all good.
Except that doesn't appear to be what has happened. All the items you listed were either accounted for, or in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not run by the federal government at the time. As an aside, in your scenario, my net worth would only drop by $2000. Assuming that I borrowed money to bridge the gap, I would have incurred $4000 in debt, but also acquired $2000 in assets.
Another interesting thing to note is that the difference between Treasury Direct's Debt numbers and the Congressional Budget Office debt numbers is actually really big. For 1998, the CBO says the debt held by the public is ~$3,721.1 billion, and Treasure Direct says ~$5,526.1 billion in outstanding debt. That's a difference of ~1.8 trillion. According to the Federal Reserve there was about $492.2 billion in currency in 1998, which leaves an unexplained 1,312.8 billion discrepancy between the numbers.
The only way for the debt to increase is to spend more than was brought in.
Actually, no. You seem to have missed the words "Includes legal tender notes, gold and silver certificates, etc."
The debt on that page can increase when the government prints more money.
The "surplus" was in name only, because it only dealt with some of the spending of the Federal Government. But we haven't had a surplus since 1957, back when Ike was rolling out the Interstate highway system.
According to the Congressional Budget Office there were real surpluses in the years 1969, and 1998-2001. You'll have to go to Historical Budget Data and open some Excel files to see the actual numbers, but if you do you will see that the debt held by the public decreased in each of those years.
However, that's neither here nor there. Quibbling over the exact numbers doesn't change the fact that Bill Clinton (and a Republican congress) either generated a surplus, or brought America as close as it has been since 1957. But in either case, George W. Bush (and a Republican congress) turned it into the largest deficits in America's history, through a combination of new spending, tax cuts and a disastrous recession.
AC the problematic part is having the gov find the budget every year to keep everything working and presenting the USA as a modern nation.
The next part is the total upgrade of the parts people look at and use. That 1960's styling that needs a lot of work and budget just to keep as is.
Other nations sell off their airports and let the private sector take that huge risk.
No more having to cover the costs of upkeep every year and new design work every few years, over the decades.
That tax money once used to keep an airport looking nice can then go to bridges, roads around the USA and other vital work that really needs doing.
Ok so you sell off the airports this year because you have pay to upgrade them, and use that money on bridges instead. What do you do next year? Sell the bridges and roads?
Prove what? The fact that they omitted to say that dossier was paid by political adversaries of Trump? The fact that they omitted to say that the corroborating source Yahoo News was in fact the same source? The fact that Steele was a known critic of Trump, per Ohr testimony? They used a libellous source at best.
These are claims. You are not able to prove they are true, and I am not able to prove they are false because neither of us is allowed to see the actual warrant applications, hearing transcripts, or any of the related classified materials.
Nunes says there is something improper, but he has all the motivation in the world to find something improper and other people say he's wrong. Furthermore, Nunes' chose to prevent the minority party on the intelligence committee from releasing their opposing viewpoint, which tells me that he is not confident that his criticisms will withstand actual scrutiny. You can't be "for transparency" while only allowing half of the story to be told.
There is nothing to prove there: there is something improper about the warrant.
Not until you prove it.
Those who filed the application used fabricated evidence and they knew it.
No one has yet proven that any substantial amount of the material in the Steele dossier is actually false. It is unverified and the FISA courts deal with unverified information all the time. Warrants are frequently granted on the word of known drug addicts and petty criminals, they're not the most trustworthy people, but if the evidence seems credible enough, then further investigation is warranted.
I repeat it, because it seems that many here do not get it: someone used fabricated evidence knowingly to get a FISA warrant. That is a very serious, concerning fact by itself.
First of all, it's not "fabricated evidence" because the FBI didn't make it up. It's questionable evidence because Steele or Steele's Russian sources might have lied. Secondly, that's only a problem if the FBI concealed those facts from the judge and the judge was incompetent enough to not ask about the providence of the Steele document. There is no claim that the FBI lied to the judge in the memo. However, Nunes' memo may have cleverly led you to believe that the judge was misled by stating something that may be true (that the FBI evidence submission didn't indicate that Hillary Clinton's campaign paid Fusion GPS for the dossier) but irrelevant (for example because the FBI evidence submission indicated it was opposition research paid for by a political campaign). Since neither your nor I will likely be allowed to see the warrant evidence until it long past having any meaning except to historians, I'm sceptical of the claims in the Nunes' memo. Which unlike the FBI warrant application, has no legal duty to state the truth, the whole truth and nothing but truth.
That memos shows the FBI lying on a probable cause affidavit, to a secret court, to get a warrant for nearly godlike power to spy on a member of an anti-establishment political campaign.
No, it doesn't. For the simple fact that the Trump campaign had already fired Page (Sep 2016) when the warrant was granted (Oct 2016). Furthermore, Page claims to have never talked to or met Trump. So your claim can not be true unless the FBI has invented wire taps that can travel back in time.
The only reason it's valued above $0 is the perception that it has more value than that. I can't tell you whether Bitcoin will ever be valued above $10k in 2017 equivalent dollars, again because that's mostly down to the actions of speculators and possibly currency manipulators. There's also the small problem that there isn't really anything special about Bitcoin that make it inherently more valuable than Litecoin, Namecoin, Swiftcoin, Bytecoin, Peercoin, Dogecoin, Emercoin, Feathercoin, Gridcoin, Omni, Primecoin, Ripple, Nxt, Auroracoin, BlackCoin, Burstcoin, Dash, NEO, MazaCoin, Monero, NEM, PotCoin, Titcoin, Verge, Stellar, Vertcoin, Ether, IOTA, Sia, sixEleven, Decred, Waves, Lisk, Zcash, Komodo, Ubiq, EOS, Electroneum, TRON, Cardano, or Petro. It's value is basically based on speculation and name recognition.
Note, I left Tether off that list because Tether is inherently more valuable than Etherium because it is tied to $1 USD, but because it's tied it's value shouldn't fluctuate making it speculative value approximately $0.
It will go back up. Things always continue upwards.
As a warning, it's been almost 400 years since the peak of Tulip mania and looking at a Dutch flower exporter, the highest price is approximately $2 per bulb, but the high price in 1637 was reported to be around $100 guilders. That means the current price is approximately 3.6% of the peak value (using today's exchange rate). At that rate, the price will have fully recovered in approximately 10,000 years. Now inflation will surely cause it to reach $100 sooner than that (using historic rates, it would still take over 100 years), but the point is it could take a very, very long time to recover.
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Basically, anyone I can find who has any direct experience with the issue and any sort of credentials which might lend them some credibility seems to agree that guns are not the problem and there's some greater force making us want to kill each other in the US. Unanimously, and regardless of their status as a gun owner, anyone who's actually dealt with or earnestly studied gun violence and is qualified to understand human interaction and behavior agrees that guns would just be replaced with some other weapon if we didn't have them.
I simply don't believe this statement. It defies not only logic, but reality. It's simple economics. Guns are an easy way to kill people, knives are more personal, more dangerous to use, require more effort, and are less effective. It's much easier to shoot 100 people, than it is to stab 100 people. That means reducing access to guns will both reduce the number of incidents, and reduce the severity of the incidents as it becomes harder to obtain guns. Basically, the desire to kill people is a demand curve, and the easier it is to carry out the objective the more people die. And beyond the simple logical understanding, there is plenty of research that disagrees. Which makes your comments fail the "no true Scotsman" sniff test because you seem to be excluding everyone who disagrees with you from your pool of experts.
And think about it: what makes guns so powerful? There's nothing magical about a gun that makes it more deadly as the best available weapon than a knife would be if that was the best we had. A bit easier to kill with? Sure, and harder to stop with anything other than another gun. But a knife will kill you just as dead as a gun and, if we didn't have anything more powerful than a knife, someone with a knife would be just as hard to stop with anything but a knife.
Do you even know what a gun is? It's point and shoot. It's not magic that makes it more deadly than a knife. It's the little pieces of metal travelling at around 1,700 mph that we call bullets that make them more deadly than running around trying to stab people with a knife.
So we get rid of guns. Then what? Knives take their place. We get rid of knives? Okay, then we've got people running each other down in vehicles. So we get rid of those, right? What next? You can sharpen a spoon into a weapon, we should get rid of those as well. Follow that to its logical conclusion and we find ourselves back in the stone age.
This is both a strawman argument and a slippery slope argument. Most people don't want to get rid of all guns, they'd just like to see more restrictions on who can own them, and more respect for their death dealing capabilities. Also, restricting access to knives is not likely to significantly impact murder and assault rates, because the difference between a knife and a blunt object isn't nearly as big as the difference between a knife and a gun.
My friend, again, you are absolutely correct. But you need to realize that you're arguing against people who fear guns more than they fear people wielding guns; as though it's the gun who wants to kill them, rather than the person holding it. They won't ever admit that there's a people problem, because it would force them to admit that they, themselves, are flawed.
Once again, you are completely wrong. Murder is a people problem, but there are many different ways to deal with the problem, and reduced access to guns is one method that will reduce the effects of the people problem. Increase the barrier to commit the crime, and there is less of that crime. There are other approaches that also need to be taken, because it's a demand curve, so increasing barriers only reduces the effect of the problem, it doesn't eliminate it. It's not a silver bullet. So reducing violent
Mankind has never found a cure for the disease of insatiable greed, and that chasm between the worlds multi-billionaires and the other 99.9999% of the human population isn't shrinking.
Hmm. I suppose we haven't found a permanent cure for insatiable greed yet, but we have applied some temporary cures. Unfortunately, the temporary cure always seems to be bloody revolution. It kind of seems that with the fall of the communist states, the capitalist owners are starting to feel like they have nothing to fear. It seems they have forgotten or never learned the lessons of the communist revolutions. They no longer understand that if they choose to treat their workers poorly enough, the workers will eventually choose to gamble that killing their masters is a better strategy than serving them.
Libertarianism will be an interesting ideology to keep an eye on. In practice, it convinces the ruled that if they are starving that it's because they deserve to starve and that violence is never the solution to any problem except other violence. It's almost like it was designed to prevent the inevitable results of capitalists run amok. Unfortunately, I think libertarianism is also toxic to the owners and their most loyal minions because it makes them believe that they deserve to take the wealth generated by their employees simply because they own things. It makes them blind to the suffering of others, and thus blind to the seeds of revolution that they are sowing.
In the end, I suppose the only slave more pitiful than one who believes he deserves to be a slave is the one who believes he too will one day be a slave owner, if he only works hard enough for his master.
I can only hope that my speculation is wrong, because a non-violent solution to the coming crisis of automation and wealth would be preferable. I not sure that we will be allowed to have one, though.
Read between the lines, he's now a part-time fry cook at McDonalds, or possibly a greeter at Walmart.
On the contrary, I think it will strengthen Damore's case, because Google has tacitly agreed that there has been unacceptable behavior from the so-called "diversity" camp. In which case, firing Damore shows even less justifiable bias against his position.
I think even the best lawyers are going to have a hard time convincing a judge that actions that display even-handedness on Google's part, is actually evidence of bias. However, if Google enters Chevalier's firing into evidence, which they likely will, I'm fairly certain that Damore's lawyers will try a similar argument. I just doubt that the judge will accept it as anything more than a desperate reach by a floundering lawyer.
The problem was Netflix was demanding free bandwidth ("peering") from Comcast, who, uncharacteristically, wasn't the asshole in that exchange.
Sorry, but you should realize if you are saying that Comcast wasn't the asshole, then you're probably wrong.
Netflix wasn't demanding anything from anyone. Comcast was demanding that Netflix pay them a bribe to do the job they are paid to do by their actual customers.
My god, this should be common sense. People pay Comcast to deliver internet service to them. Netflix charges it's customers to send them the movies and shows they ask for. Netflix pays it's ISP to send that data. Comcast's customers are already paying Comcast to receive that data. The asshole is the one who refuses to do what's he's being paid to do, unless other people agree to pay him extra to do it. Clearly, the asshole is Comcast.
You're right. Why try? Let's start handing out pistols when kids get their driver's license and let them fend for themselves!
Why wait until then? Let's start handing them semi-automatic pistols when they enrol in kindergarten.
This message has been approved by your friendly local neighbourhood NRA dealers.
Yup. When did Slashdot because this self-pity-party for right-wing whiners and cry-babies?
Steele wasn't some random person who just sent Hillary an email, he was essentially her employee. Hillary's campaign specifically contracted the dossiers creation and then pushed it to the FBI to try and trigger an investigation without the slightest attempt at verification.
Steele worked for Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton's campaign contracted them to do opposition research on Trump. In no way was Steele "essentially her employee". Also, it was Fusion GPS, not Hillary nor Steele who made the decision to provide the dossier to the FBI.
You either very ignorant or deliberately lying.
How is she not responsible for it?
Clinton's campaign received the dossier and then did nothing with it. In what way are they responsible for things they didn't create and didn't publish?
There's also the very strong likelihood (due to the specific nature and wording of some of the details) that large parts or even the entire document was in fact created by people even closer to Hillary than just paid contractors (Blumenthal being the top suspect) and Steele was only used as a go between to give it a semi-respectable face.
Yeah, sure. Why don't you discredit yourself further with even more conspiracy theories?
If America goes down that road, your neighbours to the North and South are going to be building walls to keep you out.
Any right leaning association with Fusion and their Trump research was over months before Steele was ever hired to create the dossier. The dossier and all the twisted details associated with it are 100% a DNC/Hillary 2018 creation.
Do you understand the chronology here? The dossier was compiled for Hillary by Steele, thus claiming it's Hillary's creation is like shooting the recipient of the message because you don't like what the message said. Your conclusion is so incredibly stupid, that most idiots can't even get it that wrong.
So what you're saying is that they are talking about cash flow (your $5 surplus), and I'm talking about debt (your $5 increase in debt). You used an increase in debt to create the surplus. I guess that's like using your credit card to pay your mortgage - yes, it gives you more "cash today" to use, but it increases your debt - and it happened simply because you spent more (mortgage) than you have. Why else would you take on debt, unless you believe you can make more in the long run?
Yes, most people only take on debt so they can pay for a large expense, be it medical (in the United States), a car, or a house. Also, they sometimes take on short term debt if they think they will be able to recover from a temporary deficit (because of a lost job, for example, where it's cheaper to finance a short term debt than it is to sell a house and move). There are also a lot people who can't balance a budget and don't know how to handle a credit card, but that's a completely different topic...
In my fictitious example, it doesn't matter why I borrowed $5 from you, as long as I don't actually spend enough money to put me in a deficit position. For example, if I borrowed $5 from you to buy some lunch because I forgot my wallet, I could make a net $20 profit from working the day and I am running a surplus and increased my debt. The next day I pay you back $6, and my net profit from yesterday has gone down to $19, but I still ran a surplus for the previous day and my debt increased (temporarily).
In the government's case, it is required to issue debt to itself for the purposes of investing the surplus money from the Social Security and Medicare funds. It has to issue the debt, because Social Security is only allowed, by law, to buy special government bonds. By law, the Social Security fund can not invest in private equity, or even publicly issued government bonds.
Let me first say that the U.S. Government is weird, but here's the convoluted analogy to what's actually going on. Let's say you have a bank account that you are supposed to be saving money in, but you can't actually save any money into it because you're not allowed to (the bank is weird). So instead you keep track of all the money that you wanted to put in there, even though that went into your regular bank account instead. You are making enough money to cover all your living costs and even have enough to pay off a little of your debt after all expenses are paid. However, your total debt (Treasury) is increasing because of the money you are supposed to be paying into your retirement account, while your actual debt held by other people (CBO) is decreasing because you paid off some of the money you owe to other people (mortgage, credit cards, whatever). Most people would count that as running a surplus even though you may owe yourself more money than you used to.
So, how do you add to your debt when you run a surplus? Simple question. If you can answer that with anything other than "you can't", then you've figured out how they can increase the national debt (which the US Treasury shows at Treasury Direct) while running a surplus.
I did some more research, and the discrepancy appears to be government held debt. The CBO doesn't count bonds issued by the government and held by the government, while the Treasury does. Thus the increase of $113 billion in debt in the Treasury numbers between 1997 and 1998 is from $34.2 billion in additional cash issued (according to the Federal Reserve numbers) and the rest, $69 billion, is bonds issued to the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds and the Federal Financing Bank.
So to go back to your example above, if I promise myself that I'm going to go to a Movie Theatre and see the final Star Wars movie when it comes out, let's say it's probably going to cost me $20. The question is whether that's a debt incurred today. The Treasury says yes because I promised to spend something, and the CBO says no because I haven't spent anything yet.
Also as to how I can increase my debt when I'm running a surplus, that's easy. I give you an I-owe-you $5 promissory note and collect $5 from you. My debt has increased and I'm running a $5 surplus.
No, according to the CBO, there were real BUDGET surpluses, which only counts the on-budget spending. For example, the Federal Government does not consider spending on Social Security, the US Postal Service, Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae [thebalance.com], and several other large ticket items as "on budget". So you can keep the rest of spending just under budget, but blow trillions on these via borrowing - and still be, per the CBO, under budget and in surplus.
Well that's certainly not right. There's a column for the US Postal Service, and another for Social Security in the chart. Now Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae aren't listed, but then they weren't taken over until 2008, so they wouldn't have been listed for any of the years that I cited, anyway.
This would be akin to you having a $10,000/month take-home pay. You spend $9,000 per month on food, utilities, travel, clothing. You spend $3,000 per month on housing, and you spend $2,000 per month on your IRA/401K. Your total spending is $14,000 - with only $10,000 income. BUT, because you consider housing and your IRA/401K not "on budget", you actually ran a surplus! Never mind that your actual net worth dropped by $4,000 (you accumulated $4,000 of debt - excess spending relative to income). You were below your budget on the other things you want to put into your budget, so you're all good.
Except that doesn't appear to be what has happened. All the items you listed were either accounted for, or in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not run by the federal government at the time. As an aside, in your scenario, my net worth would only drop by $2000. Assuming that I borrowed money to bridge the gap, I would have incurred $4000 in debt, but also acquired $2000 in assets.
Another interesting thing to note is that the difference between Treasury Direct's Debt numbers and the Congressional Budget Office debt numbers is actually really big. For 1998, the CBO says the debt held by the public is ~$3,721.1 billion, and Treasure Direct says ~$5,526.1 billion in outstanding debt. That's a difference of ~1.8 trillion. According to the Federal Reserve there was about $492.2 billion in currency in 1998, which leaves an unexplained 1,312.8 billion discrepancy between the numbers.
But Ajit Pai would never lie to us. I know that because I got a totally legitimate email from Agot Paed that says so.
We never had a surplus. The national debt has increased every year since 1957.
That's an interesting chart.
The only way for the debt to increase is to spend more than was brought in.
Actually, no. You seem to have missed the words "Includes legal tender notes, gold and silver certificates, etc."
The debt on that page can increase when the government prints more money.
The "surplus" was in name only, because it only dealt with some of the spending of the Federal Government. But we haven't had a surplus since 1957, back when Ike was rolling out the Interstate highway system.
According to the Congressional Budget Office there were real surpluses in the years 1969, and 1998-2001. You'll have to go to Historical Budget Data and open some Excel files to see the actual numbers, but if you do you will see that the debt held by the public decreased in each of those years.
However, that's neither here nor there. Quibbling over the exact numbers doesn't change the fact that Bill Clinton (and a Republican congress) either generated a surplus, or brought America as close as it has been since 1957. But in either case, George W. Bush (and a Republican congress) turned it into the largest deficits in America's history, through a combination of new spending, tax cuts and a disastrous recession.
AC the problematic part is having the gov find the budget every year to keep everything working and presenting the USA as a modern nation. The next part is the total upgrade of the parts people look at and use. That 1960's styling that needs a lot of work and budget just to keep as is. Other nations sell off their airports and let the private sector take that huge risk. No more having to cover the costs of upkeep every year and new design work every few years, over the decades. That tax money once used to keep an airport looking nice can then go to bridges, roads around the USA and other vital work that really needs doing.
Ok so you sell off the airports this year because you have pay to upgrade them, and use that money on bridges instead. What do you do next year? Sell the bridges and roads?
Ultimately, you have to trust someone.
No, you don't. Politics are just a form of insanity. Free yourself from the grip of delusions and live a free life.
Why are telling me that? What's in it for you? Apparently, I don't have to trust you, either.
Prove what? The fact that they omitted to say that dossier was paid by political adversaries of Trump? The fact that they omitted to say that the corroborating source Yahoo News was in fact the same source? The fact that Steele was a known critic of Trump, per Ohr testimony? They used a libellous source at best.
These are claims. You are not able to prove they are true, and I am not able to prove they are false because neither of us is allowed to see the actual warrant applications, hearing transcripts, or any of the related classified materials.
Nunes says there is something improper, but he has all the motivation in the world to find something improper and other people say he's wrong. Furthermore, Nunes' chose to prevent the minority party on the intelligence committee from releasing their opposing viewpoint, which tells me that he is not confident that his criticisms will withstand actual scrutiny. You can't be "for transparency" while only allowing half of the story to be told.
Since the right decided they should accuse the left of doing everything that the right actually does?
I believe that is called "Reagoning" your testimony.
For clarity, "Clintoning" your testimony is when you question the meaning of every word in every question.
There is nothing to prove there: there is something improper about the warrant.
Not until you prove it.
Those who filed the application used fabricated evidence and they knew it.
No one has yet proven that any substantial amount of the material in the Steele dossier is actually false. It is unverified and the FISA courts deal with unverified information all the time. Warrants are frequently granted on the word of known drug addicts and petty criminals, they're not the most trustworthy people, but if the evidence seems credible enough, then further investigation is warranted.
I repeat it, because it seems that many here do not get it: someone used fabricated evidence knowingly to get a FISA warrant. That is a very serious, concerning fact by itself.
First of all, it's not "fabricated evidence" because the FBI didn't make it up. It's questionable evidence because Steele or Steele's Russian sources might have lied. Secondly, that's only a problem if the FBI concealed those facts from the judge and the judge was incompetent enough to not ask about the providence of the Steele document. There is no claim that the FBI lied to the judge in the memo. However, Nunes' memo may have cleverly led you to believe that the judge was misled by stating something that may be true (that the FBI evidence submission didn't indicate that Hillary Clinton's campaign paid Fusion GPS for the dossier) but irrelevant (for example because the FBI evidence submission indicated it was opposition research paid for by a political campaign). Since neither your nor I will likely be allowed to see the warrant evidence until it long past having any meaning except to historians, I'm sceptical of the claims in the Nunes' memo. Which unlike the FBI warrant application, has no legal duty to state the truth, the whole truth and nothing but truth.
That memos shows the FBI lying on a probable cause affidavit, to a secret court, to get a warrant for nearly godlike power to spy on a member of an anti-establishment political campaign.
No, it doesn't. For the simple fact that the Trump campaign had already fired Page (Sep 2016) when the warrant was granted (Oct 2016). Furthermore, Page claims to have never talked to or met Trump. So your claim can not be true unless the FBI has invented wire taps that can travel back in time.
What is the actual value of a bitcoin?
The actual (intrinsic) value of a bitcoin is $0.
The only reason it's valued above $0 is the perception that it has more value than that. I can't tell you whether Bitcoin will ever be valued above $10k in 2017 equivalent dollars, again because that's mostly down to the actions of speculators and possibly currency manipulators. There's also the small problem that there isn't really anything special about Bitcoin that make it inherently more valuable than Litecoin, Namecoin, Swiftcoin, Bytecoin, Peercoin, Dogecoin, Emercoin, Feathercoin, Gridcoin, Omni, Primecoin, Ripple, Nxt, Auroracoin, BlackCoin, Burstcoin, Dash, NEO, MazaCoin, Monero, NEM, PotCoin, Titcoin, Verge, Stellar, Vertcoin, Ether, IOTA, Sia, sixEleven, Decred, Waves, Lisk, Zcash, Komodo, Ubiq, EOS, Electroneum, TRON, Cardano, or Petro. It's value is basically based on speculation and name recognition.
Note, I left Tether off that list because Tether is inherently more valuable than Etherium because it is tied to $1 USD, but because it's tied it's value shouldn't fluctuate making it speculative value approximately $0.
It will go back up. Things always continue upwards.
As a warning, it's been almost 400 years since the peak of Tulip mania and looking at a Dutch flower exporter, the highest price is approximately $2 per bulb, but the high price in 1637 was reported to be around $100 guilders. That means the current price is approximately 3.6% of the peak value (using today's exchange rate). At that rate, the price will have fully recovered in approximately 10,000 years. Now inflation will surely cause it to reach $100 sooner than that (using historic rates, it would still take over 100 years), but the point is it could take a very, very long time to recover.
Do you realize how similar Trump's actual public policies are to Obama's public policies?
Do you? Because your words indicate you have very little understanding of politics, policies, or governance.
Do you realize how incredibly stupid you look spouting this nonsense after Trump's election?