Put yourself into the position of a potential employer who needs backers, would you hire somebody who used to work for Hostess? Think about it for a little bit and you will come to the only correct conclusion: nobody who worked for Hostess and especially as part of the baker union is going to be hired by any employer who has 2 brain cells to rub together.
There is always a buck to be made if you are innovative and smart.
- a buck can be made, the question is can that buck be retained or will it be confiscated.
That's the reason that the jobs (savings and investments especially in manufacturing sectors) have disappeared and gone to other economies.
I said dividends, capital gains is a separate issue, I was specifically referring to dividends.
As a stock holder you own part of the company, you bought that with your after tax income in the first place. The value of stock is a function of earnings (multiple of earnings), and those are after tax earnings, so price of a stock is very specifically tied to what a company is earning after it's been taxed, that's first. Thus when you buy part of a company (or you built one), the taxes that company pays reduce the earnings of that company. When company gets taxed on corporate level, that is your money as a shareholder that is taxed.
Maybe you are unaware, but dividends are not tax deductible, so company cannot reduce its pre-tax revenue by dividends it pays out either. So the company is taxed on the corporate level, and whatever remains after the corporate taxes is used to invest and pay dividends. Dividends are the second tax, and as a stock owner to you it doesn't matter where the taxes are applied, they are all your taxes.
There is always a buck to be made if you are innovative and smart.
- no poor person does anything for me. Rich people that run businesses allow me to get my hands on all sorts of products and services that I want to buy and use, poor people do not provide me with anything I want. Rich people create all of the wealth (and when I say 'rich', I use the term loosely - anybody who runs a profitable business).
The moment a poor person builds a product and sells it in the market he becomes useful to the economy at large, until that happens he is not useful to the economy, in fact if he gets government benefits he is a drain on the economy.
A society in which one day you have 100% employment and X production, is no more productive the day after 20% of the workers are laid off.
- the society may not be "more productive" after 20% of workers are laid off, but if the jobs were automated away then the society is not less productive either. Actually if the 20% of workers are laid off without causing any drop off of the productivity of companies, then the society can now grow its productivity (if people want to) by using those laid off workers to do something else.
Not unless those workers actual get another job.
- government will make you believe that people do not value leisure, because GDP doesn't take leisure into account. From POV of gov't taxes that may be a problem, but from POV of individuals it's a great thing not to have to work as long as you can keep your level of consumption.
In a competitive capitalist, free market society there is no such concept as "all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots".
First of all if we could replace every piece of production that exists up to right now with robots, that would be great, but in many cases it would mean that prices would go up, not down for a little while until the robots are paid for with the increased productive output.
However after a while the robots will be cheaper and their work output is going to be better. BUT people are more versatile. There is always a balance between what you can do with a more and more advanced robot and what you can do with a human. Humans can change the tasks before them in a very short time with little training. Robots require complex programming and retooling for such changes.
Of-course if we automate everything that we do today, eventually the prices will fall. They will have to fall not only because of the increased productivity itself, but also because for a while, the disruption on salaries paid for work will leave people with less money in their pockets, so this will drive deflation basically, which is a good thing, it will push prices down so it's easier to survive in the meanwhile, and the salaries will be pushed down until people with some savings will see that it is possible to hire some of these unemployed people to do something NEW.
That's right, when you say: "all low skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots", I hear: "amazing efficiency will be achieve, that will cause deflation and an eventual restart of business activity, as people with savings will be able to come up with new ideas and hire all that help at lower prices".
The lower prices for labor will be offset by the falling prices of the products produced by the robots.
More waste of time and resources, what's the purpose forcing people to stay at school for years and years (making it illegal to quit it and look for a job)?
What is the point teaching kids who do not want to be taught? Allow people to achieve different levels and do something else with their time once they achieved a level beyond which they don't see a point staying in school in the first place.
As to the question of files and all that, easy enough, have the final result only visible with 3D glasses or be of lower quality than what the requirement is. But really, this is just trying to create a 'DRM' like solution to a problem that is misstated.
"Fiscal uncertainty" isn't going to dissuade anyone from making a buck if it can be made.
- and if there isn't a buck to be made? What if the barrier to making a buck in USA is now so hight, that it makes no sense to do it there compared to the risks of doing it some other place?
In fact that has been the situation for 40 years now and it's getting progressively worse with time. The uncertainty of the last 40 years gave way to certainty. The certainty is that the government will take every step in the wrong direction, every step in the populist direction, every step to grow the government further, which means taking out of the private sector to do it. Be it taxes, regulations or inflation it doesn't matter, and taxes are not what the rates are, taxes is what the government spends plus interest, and the interest rates will not stay where they are forever, they will go up and then it's going to be the real fiscal grand canyon.
The 'fiscal cliff' of today is nothing, in fact it is just a reason for politicians to cry. They had to cut spending to avoid having US debt being downgraded by S&P and Moody's and such (of-course Egan Jones downgraded USA three times already from AAA to AA-).
The "fiscal cliff" means actually paying for the government spending. Apparently now to avoid the 'cliff' the spending must continue without being paid for.
No no, people aren't 'uncertain', they are certain. They are certain that US government will do everything to destroy the business and economy and currency itself, that's why the productive people have been moving their savings and thus capital investments and jobs out of USA for decades and that's why finally the VCs, who have been helped in the last 2 decades by the Federal reserve helicopter money dumping operations, now they are finally at the end of that road, they can't live off of inflation and thus government bubbles any longer.
providing good lives and good jobs for people right here in this country
- that's not why companies are started, that's not why I run my companies, it's not to provide anybody with anything except to provide myself with my own earnings and profits, my own purchasing power. And it's not like I was actually suffering back when I was just a contractor at about 200K per year (as a corporation, so corporate tax rates and all that). No, people start businesses to make a profit for themselves.
Building products, hiring people, all of this is a consequence of making a profit. Companies that succeed do so by providing people with products and services and they create jobs as a consequence of their activity, but it's definitely not the purpose. In fact in the current inflation, taxation and regulatory environment in USA you have to be nearly insane to hire anybody. You are painting a huge bulls eye right on your forehead if you hire anybody. The government is clear: hire somebody and become a victim of government persecution. Fuck that, people should do everything in their power to reduce hiring and to fire as many people as they can and to do whatever it takes to make do without all those employees.
Outsource, have contractors, part time employees maybe, use capital to replace labor with labor saving devices (machines, tools). You don't want to be a 'job creator' in today's America (and most of Europe).
if there's a buck to be made, even if taxes are high, people will line up to get it, regardless of the tax rates.
- or we can look at what is really happening: * capital has been leaving for decades, so jobs are leaving * outsourcing * automating jobs away * getting by without some jobs that in an otherwise healthy economy would be created
There is no buck to be made in an inflationary environment, in a country with people who believe they have a god given right to tax business people much more than they themselves are taxed from point of view of percentages, to regulate i
As usual the actual discrimination comes from government.
the state of Virginia's board of education has decided to institute different passing scores for standardized tests, based on the racial and cultural background of the students taking the test.
- so how do they figure if you are a white or a black or an Asian or have a disability?
Is it self reporting? Because if it is, everybody should report themselves as a mix of Native American and shade of slavery black, with a number of disabilities, who is also a gay transsexual transvestite communist ex-female ex-male and then ex-female again. How are they going to check and what can they check for exactly in a legal manner?
With that sort of background you should be able not just to pass any exam without even showing up, but they will have to give you two Asians and a white guy just for you to beat on a daily basis and work for you because you deserve it.
As I explained for years now, US economy is so unproductive (see trade deficits and debt) that it will have to become a net energy, food and raw material exporter to pay for what it imports because soon the dollar won't cut it.
Why the hell should the government make it certain for the VCs? This is free market, pal? Cant stand the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
- so you do not understand what free market and 'certainty' is in this case.
There is no certainty but not in the free market, there is no certainty about what will exactly be happening to the free market given the government manipulation of it.
Actually there is plenty of certainty that everything that government will do will end up hurting the free market, that is actually the problem. It used to be that it wasn't certain whether the Fed will raise or lower the interest rates or whether they will stay the same, at this point it is certain that the Fed cannot afford to raise interest rates because it will crash the banks and the stock market and the government debt (all forms of it, including now the funded 16T, unfunded liabilities, SS, Medicare, 222T but also the contingency liabilities, like FDIC, FHA, HUD another thousand T)
By the way, government provides certainty to the banks and various businesses today that it will step in and drown them in new credit and cash created by the Fed (never mind Congress). The certainty is inflation, debt, taxes, regulations, further erosion of individual liberties and further growth of government, that's a certainty. It would be nice to have uncertainty in that, but unfortunately that is certain.
As to government creating new rules every 2 and 4 years, that is the problem, it shouldn't be that way at all. That, plus inflation, plus regulations, plus taxes, plus debt... no, nobody wants to play anymore.
Oh yeah, 'fiscal cliff', paying for government spending is a cliff, borrowing more with an Adjustable Rate, Short Term Mortgage is a good thing.
You think the interest rates are low because there is a glut of savings? You are wrong, there is no glut of savings, the interest rates are low because the Federal reserve and other central banks of the world are printing enough money (creating enough fake credit) to buy the debts.
However that money is not savings and those debts are not good assets, they are not providing any earning potential, worse than that, they cannot be repaid at all.
If there were real savings, real interest rates were low, then it would makes sense to borrow to expand a business (borrowing for consumption is really a bad thing to do unless you already have enough money to cover that).
LENDING in an economy that has fake interest rates is a bad idea, that is why there are no private lenders that will give you tiny interest rates, real lenders expect a real return that should be higher than the real inflation, and this puts the interest rates above 21% today at the minimum.
The only entity that can 'borrow' today is government because it borrows money that central banks create and funnel to gov't via the proxy member banks, who in these fake transactions can show high profits because of the spread between 0% borrowing and 2-3% lending to gov't.
By the way, if you can lock a 30 year mortgage at low rates (3-4%) you definitely should do it, just don't buy a property in a place that won't have any jobs in the future, you won't be able to rent it and you won't want to live there yourself. It's better to buy a farm if you can get a mortgage like that, but I don't believe you can get a mortgage like that for a business for the aforementioned reasons.
Why are you putting the word inflation in double quotes I wonder?
1970s was a very much real inflation, in fact it was the reason behind the gov't introducing wage and price controls, the inflation was calculated at 4% and it was enough to do that for them. At least at the time people believed that inflation at 4% is a real problem, not that wage and price controls are a correct response to that problem, the correct response is to stop inflation by stopping the printing presses.
Nixon defaulted on the dollar, gold went up from a fixed exchange rate of 19USD per ounce to 800 in a decade, then corrected to 200-250 when Volcker actually stopped inflation by setting the interest rates to 21.5%.
So Volcker implemented a measure to fight inflation, and you are under impression that inflation was not """real""" what that is.
Stagflation means that money was being debased and productivity was dropping off so fast that wages didn't keep up with the inflation, that's all. Sure salaries can increase nominally during that time, but did salaries to up by an equivalent of gold going up, from 19 to 800 bucks? No.
And it wasn't an extreme case at all, actually it was a fairly simple case, similar to the current depression, but of-course during the 70s USA still had most of its production capacity intact unlike today and USA didn't have a massive debt as it does today and USA had balanced trade, there was no trade deficit.
Of-course you do not understand what Nazism or Fascism is, to you those are some 'right-wing' ideologies, that is what you believe, but you are wrong.
Fascists and nazis are just special cases of a more broad concept: collectivists. Collectivism can take many forms, but they all share one trait, they hate competitive capitalism, free markets, individualism, so they are anti-humanist in nature.
The Fascists in Germany rose to power when the much more moderate socialists lost their mass appeal, the turn of the tide from liberal (classic) values towards socialism only happened when the moderate socialists, who believed in nonsense - the desire of people to live in a communal like state voluntarily, when this nonsense completely disintegrated and gave way for the ultra-left and the ultra-right socialists to combine their efforts. This happened in Germany after 1914. Before that time socialists didn't have a leg to stand on.
The reason it happened in Germany at that moment was the lack of a strong bourgeoisie, lack of individual entrepreneurship, lack of business minded individuals.
Fichte, Rodbertus, Lassall were the fathers of National-Socialism in Germany. The original socialism in its Marxist form was directing German labour movement before 1914, after that it was the authoritarian and nationalist element that came to light. The war hysteria of 1914 never cured (well, Germany lost), that was the beginning of National-Socialism, it was done with the efforts of the old socialists.
I suggest reading Prof. Werner Sombart, who basically singlehandedly started the Nazi movement in Germany with his 'Handler und Helden' in 1915.
I also suggest reading August Bebel, who told Bismark even back in 1892: "The Imperial Chancellor can rest assured that German Social Democracy is a sort of preparatory school for militarism".
So Werner Sombart spread anti-capitalist ideas more than anybody else before him in Germany. He welcomed 'German War' as the inevitable conflict between "heroic Germany and commercial civilization of England", he had pure contempt for commerce and anything business related, similar to Democrats of today.
Fichte, Lassale and Rodbertus formulated the idea of the State as 'Volksgemeinschaft', the State, where the individual exists only to serve the interests of the state and individual interests are completely irrelevant, absolutely forbidden even to be expressed.
It is an interesting factoid that H.G. Wells (the sci fi writer), was actually a committed fascist and was described by Prof. Johahn Plenge as "one of the outstanding figures of modern socialism".
Free speech exists so that you can protect yourself from government intervention, so that you can make your case without being violated and abused by the powerful political figures.
Without the right to own and operate private property you have nothing, not even the right to your own body, the government can take everything from you. Without free speech you can't protect your private property.
Free speech without the right to own and operate private property is an interesting artifact, but it is very much pointless in itself, it only makes sense as an extension of your right to self-determination.
Democracy is tyranny. Tyranny of the majority (mobocracy) is when the majority agrees to abuse a minority and votes to do it. For good examples of it see all of the issues surrounding wealth redistribution and taxing income, progressive taxes, business regulations, all that. Because the majority are not running businesses, they are not earning large incomes, but the majority doesn't actually have a moral problem voting to tax others to subsidize themselves.
This is why USA was not in fact established as a Democracy but as a Representative Republic by the Founders, who knew the dangers of Democracy and understood tyranny too well. So they tried their best to set up a system of government that would prevent popular public opinions from running the government!
That's why you have electoral college (the delegates should be able to vote conscience and not party lines), that's why the Senators unlike Congressmen were supposed to be not elected, but nominated by State legislature, so that they would not be beholden to the interest of the majority voters but instead could act in a way that would protect the Constitution, the Law, regardless of what the public (and the Congress) wanted to do.
That's why the POTUS has his veto and to override, 70% of Congressmen must vote together. That's why SCOTUS can negate laws that are unconstitutional.
Unfortunately all of this is broken, it's borked, one man-one vote gave the mob the tyranny they wanted and they are not going to relinquish that power until that power in their own hands will destroy the economy completely (and it has already, it's just the consequences are not fully obvious yet to the majority).
First of all that's false, stagflation of the seventies proved it to be false. Secondly even if your paycheck goes up nominally, it does not help if you can buy nothing with that cash.
I remember more than one hyper inflation, not only in USSR but also in Ukraine and Russia it didn't matter if you had money, the question was can you actually buy anything with it? In USSR around late eighties and then in Ukraine in the early nineties you had to have 'coupons' and cash to buy anything, and this didn't help either. People just didn't sell, everything went to the black markets.
SS and Medicare paid in the less and less valuable currency, the real rate of inflation is underreported by a large factor, the house that people 'own' has no equity and while it could grow in price nominally, it won't be any good once the food and fuel prices also start growing since the rest of the world will stop accumulating dollars at some point in the next couple of years.
It is stagflation now, actually USA is in a depression, I know it's not what the CBO says, etc., but the real rate of inflation has been underreported for a couple of decades, so GDP has been shrinking for that same amount of time, not growing, because the deflaters are completely fake and the sectors that are in GDP are consumption of foreign goods, military, government spending and a large service sector, which does nothing to improve the balance of trade.
Actually inflation in USA is high, you can stop looking at gov't numbers and start looking at your grocery bills, you can look at the diminished quality of goods, diminished quantity of what you buy for the same amount of money, etc.
The foreign central banks are the main culprit in holding off the inflation for USA, that's because for over 30 years now, they have been buying US dollars off the hands of the producers, manufacturers, that exported their goods to USA for little green pieces of paper, which the foreign banks then took off the hands of the manufacturers by printing their own local currencies and then bought long term US bonds with those.
However remember that Clinton financed his 'balanced budget' with a short term adjustable rate mortgage, same stuff that inflated the housing bubble. This was done during Greenspan's Put, this was Clinton and Rubin working together to ensure that USA could keep borrowing without pushing the bond interest rates up.
So now the Chinese and many others hold 6 month, 1 year, maybe 3 year bills, when those mature they have to be rolled over, if they are not, then USA has to take them back automatically for cash, and of-course you know where that cash is going to come from, yes? Printing presses, so it's double inflation.
The Chinese have been buying up real assets around the world, companies, commodities, they are a large producer of gold, yet you wont find a SINGLE bar of Chinese gold in any of the vaults of any of the foreign nations, they keep every ounce.
Real inflation in USA is huge, it caused the depression of 1921, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the seventies, all of the bubbles that happened in the meantime, including the stock market bubble of the nineties and the housing bubble, and the largest bubble of all bubbles, the credit bubble, the bubble in government, in US debt and dollars.
When this one goes, it takes down the economy of USA. Not that USA is not bankrupt right now, it is. It can't repay any of the debts. But right now the world is still not dumping US debt and dollars. When the world starts with that, that will be the true 'fiscal grand canyon', something the politicians are not talking about at all.
The companies that hold cash in offshore banks may hold cash or maybe they buy back their own bonds and stock. They may be diversifying into other assets already, maybe they are holding national debts of various countries, maybe they are holding other currencies, this is not clear right now.
What is clear is that banks IN USA are holding US Treasuries by buying them with the Fed 0% credit, and the spread of 2-3% means that they will be eliminated, bankrupt again once the interest rates go up because the world starts dumping the dollars, so all of that goes belly up.
Everybody who was bailed out once will go belly up again, gov't will of-course print more and more to try and 'save' everybody, so the real crisis that is coming is currency collapse.
In the last couple of years the info was coming out that people are deleveraging, but whatever people did to increase their personal savings was more than offset by government spending and growth of debt.
Every American owes over a million bucks via the government debt. 16 Trillion by 330Million people is about 53K per person. 222Trillion of Medicare and SS and some State pension liabilities are another 740K per person.
Then there is the contingency, and you can bet on it that this will come up, just like the banks failed during the crash of 2009, they will fail again, but this time it will be a currency crisis, which the government will 'fight' with more and more inflation and buying back of the obligations. FDIC, mortgages insured by FHA and F&F and mortgages on Fed's balance sheet (which means they are automatically on Treasury's balance sheet given the change of laws a year ago). The student debt and probably more things I don't even remember right now, all of these contingencies will come up during the next crash, so the 793K I mentioned earlier is probably close to half of the actual debt per person.
Given that, the actual debt is on the government, but it means it is on the American public, and this truly means on the 'middle class' (whatever it is today) and the rest, but not the top 1 or so percent, they are highly mobile and their capital is even more mobile.
So you are looking at the last 40 years and you think that what is missing is inflation?
Inflation is what causes the capital to leave. Well, inflation, which is the 'solution' that governments have to their actual problem: growth of government spending.
Inflation is what governments have been creating for decades, generations now, to prop up government spending. The private sector is chocking on inflation. The businesses cannot get any loans while the only credit that is available is fake one, from the Fed to the treasury, and the member banks are used as the proxy to make this look legit (while having this same process prop up their balance sheets in the mean while), but in reality the governments and the banks are bankrupt right now.
The 1921 depression was caused by the same problem - the Fed.
The 1970s stagflation was caused by the spending and printing and borrowing of the 50s and 60s, all of this was growing the gov't (Medicare was new, SS was expanding, wars), but to pay for it the taxes were never enough, they always had to print more and more and eventually Nixon defaulted on the dollar, because the gov't fixed the exchange rate of dollar to gold and this was never sustainable.
Inflation was stopped once, it was done by Volcker in 1981, when he took interest rates up to 21.5%, and after that there were a few years of economic growth, but very shortlived, the capital was still leaving due to the interest falling sharply again, and so jobs were leaving, manufacturing was decimated over the last 40 years in USA.
Inflation causes people with savings to search for a way to escape it, not to invest in the economy that is being inflated by the gov't, because everybody knows, the government will never stop until it destroys the currency.
Turn inflation up, go ahead, the credit bubble is already today bigger than multiple of all economies combined, when it blows, it will be spectacular. You can't even stop it anymore.
Seriously though, let the free market take over the economy, get rid of government regulations surrounding nuclear energy, allow people to research and develop better nuclear energy solutions.
Financial system may not be broken for those specific people that get the Fed and the Congress to give them money, but that's not 1%, that's maybe 1% of 1%, but the financial system is broken for 99.99% of people because it prevents the economy from working, it destroys the economy and nobody wins in a destroyed economy (what I mean is, everybody's quality of life suffers).
It's much better to have an actual working economy, but that's something that the population doesn't understand, a working economy can only exist if the government is not allowed to mess with it and people are absolutely hell bent against that idea.
It will start as a 'Strategic Alliance for Economic Cooperation' of some sort and in the beginning there will be no loss of power among the North Korean political elite.
The deal will be brokered by China and it will provide a way for South Korean and Chinese companies to employ North Korean labor and except for the salary, there will be various special deals and perks included into this, just enough to save the face of the North Korean leadership, to show how 'great' they are for the North Korean people, etc.
As long as it is framed this way, it will work and within 4-8 years it will create enough momentum to move towards a more open solution. What will it look like in 20 years? I think more or less like China does.
'rent seeking', the favorite words of the inflation happy, government touting idiots. "Rent seeking" means applying savings to the market and getting a return on that investment.
Just like the case of a person with a second car and a full tank of gas in it, the gas is his savings, the market is the disaster area and the return on investment is the profit that he makes in case he sells the gas.
So now you would come alone and punish the guy with the savings, you'd call him a 'rent seeker' and I suppose you'd use legal system against him, because somehow it should be obvious that his actions, of finding another voluntary side to complete the transaction is 'immoral' in your eyes.
All you are talking about is greed, and it's NOT the person who sells the gas that is greedy, it's you.
There was an AC in this story, saying that he'd rather have no gas himself as long as nobody else could get gas at higher price and as long as nobody would make a profit on a transaction like that.
Now that is telling. There is no honor among thieves and the real thieves are people who want to steal other people's ability to live freely and trade with others freely.
You call people with savings 'rent seekers' as if it is a pejorative of some sort. So the people who saved are bad people, but the people who haven't saved and have nothing are the virtuous ones.
So the people who create jobs by using their savings and risking their savings and time to start an enterprise are greedy profiteers.
The people who vote as a mob to elect politicians that promise to take from the ones that have more and give to the mob, those are good, honorable people. And those are the same type of people who'd say: if I cannot have it, then nobody should have it.
I realized some time ago that you are mentally challenged, I just didn't know it was to this degree.
Slaves? Make slaves out of North Koreans?
They ARE slaves. Their government is running slave labor camps, prevents them from having any property rights (and thus all other rights, because all rights are extension of property rights).
Saying that 'free market will turn them into slaves' is ridiculously retarded, but I am sure that you are not going to see any dissent to your opinion on these intratubes on/.
Chinese used to be slaves of the government, which killed them just like the North Koreans do, now they are working in factories, where they are free to quit any time and get another job, higher paying one, which they do all the time and their purchasing power is growing while they are becoming more and more skilled with more and more experience.
What is a North Korean worker worth in the Free Market today, with no skills, no experience, no capital, no tools, no idea how to run a business? Not much at all. But they are used as meat by their Communist regime.
What will they be worth after 5 years of work at some enterprises set up by free market if the North and South unite?
Certainly they cannot buy most of anything in North Korea that they can in South Korea. South Korea is living under constant threat of war and North Korea is running concentration labor camps.
Slaves? ALL people must learn to do something useful in the market before they see their earning potential rise and that is exactly what happens and the Chinese today are an excellent example.
In fact I think Koreas are going to unite and China will broker the deal.
What Germany did was terrible, putting people from one centralized system into a state ran welfare system, that the East didn't even work to create. You haven't been in Eastern Germany and you haven't compared it to the Western part. Ghost town after ghost town, with huge number of those people now living on social assistance, not being productive members of society as the free market would have made them be.
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Put yourself into the position of a potential employer who needs backers, would you hire somebody who used to work for Hostess? Think about it for a little bit and you will come to the only correct conclusion: nobody who worked for Hostess and especially as part of the baker union is going to be hired by any employer who has 2 brain cells to rub together.
There is always a buck to be made if you are innovative and smart.
- a buck can be made, the question is can that buck be retained or will it be confiscated.
That's the reason that the jobs (savings and investments especially in manufacturing sectors) have disappeared and gone to other economies.
I said dividends, capital gains is a separate issue, I was specifically referring to dividends.
As a stock holder you own part of the company, you bought that with your after tax income in the first place. The value of stock is a function of earnings (multiple of earnings), and those are after tax earnings, so price of a stock is very specifically tied to what a company is earning after it's been taxed, that's first. Thus when you buy part of a company (or you built one), the taxes that company pays reduce the earnings of that company. When company gets taxed on corporate level, that is your money as a shareholder that is taxed.
Maybe you are unaware, but dividends are not tax deductible, so company cannot reduce its pre-tax revenue by dividends it pays out either. So the company is taxed on the corporate level, and whatever remains after the corporate taxes is used to invest and pay dividends. Dividends are the second tax, and as a stock owner to you it doesn't matter where the taxes are applied, they are all your taxes.
There is always a buck to be made if you are innovative and smart.
- no poor person does anything for me. Rich people that run businesses allow me to get my hands on all sorts of products and services that I want to buy and use, poor people do not provide me with anything I want. Rich people create all of the wealth (and when I say 'rich', I use the term loosely - anybody who runs a profitable business).
The moment a poor person builds a product and sells it in the market he becomes useful to the economy at large, until that happens he is not useful to the economy, in fact if he gets government benefits he is a drain on the economy.
A society in which one day you have 100% employment and X production, is no more productive the day after 20% of the workers are laid off.
- the society may not be "more productive" after 20% of workers are laid off, but if the jobs were automated away then the society is not less productive either. Actually if the 20% of workers are laid off without causing any drop off of the productivity of companies, then the society can now grow its productivity (if people want to) by using those laid off workers to do something else.
Not unless those workers actual get another job.
- government will make you believe that people do not value leisure, because GDP doesn't take leisure into account. From POV of gov't taxes that may be a problem, but from POV of individuals it's a great thing not to have to work as long as you can keep your level of consumption.
In a competitive capitalist, free market society there is no such concept as "all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots".
First of all if we could replace every piece of production that exists up to right now with robots, that would be great, but in many cases it would mean that prices would go up, not down for a little while until the robots are paid for with the increased productive output.
However after a while the robots will be cheaper and their work output is going to be better. BUT people are more versatile. There is always a balance between what you can do with a more and more advanced robot and what you can do with a human. Humans can change the tasks before them in a very short time with little training. Robots require complex programming and retooling for such changes.
Of-course if we automate everything that we do today, eventually the prices will fall. They will have to fall not only because of the increased productivity itself, but also because for a while, the disruption on salaries paid for work will leave people with less money in their pockets, so this will drive deflation basically, which is a good thing, it will push prices down so it's easier to survive in the meanwhile, and the salaries will be pushed down until people with some savings will see that it is possible to hire some of these unemployed people to do something NEW.
That's right, when you say: "all low skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots", I hear: "amazing efficiency will be achieve, that will cause deflation and an eventual restart of business activity, as people with savings will be able to come up with new ideas and hire all that help at lower prices".
The lower prices for labor will be offset by the falling prices of the products produced by the robots.
More waste of time and resources, what's the purpose forcing people to stay at school for years and years (making it illegal to quit it and look for a job)?
What is the point teaching kids who do not want to be taught? Allow people to achieve different levels and do something else with their time once they achieved a level beyond which they don't see a point staying in school in the first place.
As to the question of files and all that, easy enough, have the final result only visible with 3D glasses or be of lower quality than what the requirement is. But really, this is just trying to create a 'DRM' like solution to a problem that is misstated.
"Fiscal uncertainty" isn't going to dissuade anyone from making a buck if it can be made.
- and if there isn't a buck to be made? What if the barrier to making a buck in USA is now so hight, that it makes no sense to do it there compared to the risks of doing it some other place?
In fact that has been the situation for 40 years now and it's getting progressively worse with time. The uncertainty of the last 40 years gave way to certainty. The certainty is that the government will take every step in the wrong direction, every step in the populist direction, every step to grow the government further, which means taking out of the private sector to do it. Be it taxes, regulations or inflation it doesn't matter, and taxes are not what the rates are, taxes is what the government spends plus interest, and the interest rates will not stay where they are forever, they will go up and then it's going to be the real fiscal grand canyon.
The 'fiscal cliff' of today is nothing, in fact it is just a reason for politicians to cry. They had to cut spending to avoid having US debt being downgraded by S&P and Moody's and such (of-course Egan Jones downgraded USA three times already from AAA to AA-).
The "fiscal cliff" means actually paying for the government spending. Apparently now to avoid the 'cliff' the spending must continue without being paid for.
No no, people aren't 'uncertain', they are certain. They are certain that US government will do everything to destroy the business and economy and currency itself, that's why the productive people have been moving their savings and thus capital investments and jobs out of USA for decades and that's why finally the VCs, who have been helped in the last 2 decades by the Federal reserve helicopter money dumping operations, now they are finally at the end of that road, they can't live off of inflation and thus government bubbles any longer.
providing good lives and good jobs for people right here in this country
- that's not why companies are started, that's not why I run my companies, it's not to provide anybody with anything except to provide myself with my own earnings and profits, my own purchasing power. And it's not like I was actually suffering back when I was just a contractor at about 200K per year (as a corporation, so corporate tax rates and all that). No, people start businesses to make a profit for themselves.
Building products, hiring people, all of this is a consequence of making a profit. Companies that succeed do so by providing people with products and services and they create jobs as a consequence of their activity, but it's definitely not the purpose. In fact in the current inflation, taxation and regulatory environment in USA you have to be nearly insane to hire anybody. You are painting a huge bulls eye right on your forehead if you hire anybody. The government is clear: hire somebody and become a victim of government persecution. Fuck that, people should do everything in their power to reduce hiring and to fire as many people as they can and to do whatever it takes to make do without all those employees.
Outsource, have contractors, part time employees maybe, use capital to replace labor with labor saving devices (machines, tools). You don't want to be a 'job creator' in today's America (and most of Europe).
if there's a buck to be made, even if taxes are high, people will line up to get it, regardless of the tax rates.
- or we can look at what is really happening:
* capital has been leaving for decades, so jobs are leaving
* outsourcing
* automating jobs away
* getting by without some jobs that in an otherwise healthy economy would be created
There is no buck to be made in an inflationary environment, in a country with people who believe they have a god given right to tax business people much more than they themselves are taxed from point of view of percentages, to regulate i
As usual the actual discrimination comes from government.
the state of Virginia's board of education has decided to institute different passing scores for standardized tests, based on the racial and cultural background of the students taking the test.
- so how do they figure if you are a white or a black or an Asian or have a disability?
Is it self reporting? Because if it is, everybody should report themselves as a mix of Native American and shade of slavery black, with a number of disabilities, who is also a gay transsexual transvestite communist ex-female ex-male and then ex-female again. How are they going to check and what can they check for exactly in a legal manner?
With that sort of background you should be able not just to pass any exam without even showing up, but they will have to give you two Asians and a white guy just for you to beat on a daily basis and work for you because you deserve it.
As I explained for years now, US economy is so unproductive (see trade deficits and debt) that it will have to become a net energy, food and raw material exporter to pay for what it imports because soon the dollar won't cut it.
Why the hell should the government make it certain for the VCs? This is free market, pal? Cant stand the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
- so you do not understand what free market and 'certainty' is in this case.
There is no certainty but not in the free market, there is no certainty about what will exactly be happening to the free market given the government manipulation of it.
Actually there is plenty of certainty that everything that government will do will end up hurting the free market, that is actually the problem. It used to be that it wasn't certain whether the Fed will raise or lower the interest rates or whether they will stay the same, at this point it is certain that the Fed cannot afford to raise interest rates because it will crash the banks and the stock market and the government debt (all forms of it, including now the funded 16T, unfunded liabilities, SS, Medicare, 222T but also the contingency liabilities, like FDIC, FHA, HUD another thousand T)
By the way, government provides certainty to the banks and various businesses today that it will step in and drown them in new credit and cash created by the Fed (never mind Congress). The certainty is inflation, debt, taxes, regulations, further erosion of individual liberties and further growth of government, that's a certainty. It would be nice to have uncertainty in that, but unfortunately that is certain.
As to government creating new rules every 2 and 4 years, that is the problem, it shouldn't be that way at all. That, plus inflation, plus regulations, plus taxes, plus debt... no, nobody wants to play anymore.
Oh yeah, 'fiscal cliff', paying for government spending is a cliff, borrowing more with an Adjustable Rate, Short Term Mortgage is a good thing.
You think the interest rates are low because there is a glut of savings? You are wrong, there is no glut of savings, the interest rates are low because the Federal reserve and other central banks of the world are printing enough money (creating enough fake credit) to buy the debts.
However that money is not savings and those debts are not good assets, they are not providing any earning potential, worse than that, they cannot be repaid at all.
If there were real savings, real interest rates were low, then it would makes sense to borrow to expand a business (borrowing for consumption is really a bad thing to do unless you already have enough money to cover that).
LENDING in an economy that has fake interest rates is a bad idea, that is why there are no private lenders that will give you tiny interest rates, real lenders expect a real return that should be higher than the real inflation, and this puts the interest rates above 21% today at the minimum.
The only entity that can 'borrow' today is government because it borrows money that central banks create and funnel to gov't via the proxy member banks, who in these fake transactions can show high profits because of the spread between 0% borrowing and 2-3% lending to gov't.
By the way, if you can lock a 30 year mortgage at low rates (3-4%) you definitely should do it, just don't buy a property in a place that won't have any jobs in the future, you won't be able to rent it and you won't want to live there yourself. It's better to buy a farm if you can get a mortgage like that, but I don't believe you can get a mortgage like that for a business for the aforementioned reasons.
Why are you putting the word inflation in double quotes I wonder?
1970s was a very much real inflation, in fact it was the reason behind the gov't introducing wage and price controls, the inflation was calculated at 4% and it was enough to do that for them. At least at the time people believed that inflation at 4% is a real problem, not that wage and price controls are a correct response to that problem, the correct response is to stop inflation by stopping the printing presses.
Nixon defaulted on the dollar, gold went up from a fixed exchange rate of 19USD per ounce to 800 in a decade, then corrected to 200-250 when Volcker actually stopped inflation by setting the interest rates to 21.5%.
So Volcker implemented a measure to fight inflation, and you are under impression that inflation was not """real""" what that is.
Stagflation means that money was being debased and productivity was dropping off so fast that wages didn't keep up with the inflation, that's all. Sure salaries can increase nominally during that time, but did salaries to up by an equivalent of gold going up, from 19 to 800 bucks? No.
And it wasn't an extreme case at all, actually it was a fairly simple case, similar to the current depression, but of-course during the 70s USA still had most of its production capacity intact unlike today and USA didn't have a massive debt as it does today and USA had balanced trade, there was no trade deficit.
Of-course you do not understand what Nazism or Fascism is, to you those are some 'right-wing' ideologies, that is what you believe, but you are wrong.
Fascists and nazis are just special cases of a more broad concept: collectivists. Collectivism can take many forms, but they all share one trait, they hate competitive capitalism, free markets, individualism, so they are anti-humanist in nature.
The Fascists in Germany rose to power when the much more moderate socialists lost their mass appeal, the turn of the tide from liberal (classic) values towards socialism only happened when the moderate socialists, who believed in nonsense - the desire of people to live in a communal like state voluntarily, when this nonsense completely disintegrated and gave way for the ultra-left and the ultra-right socialists to combine their efforts. This happened in Germany after 1914. Before that time socialists didn't have a leg to stand on.
The reason it happened in Germany at that moment was the lack of a strong bourgeoisie, lack of individual entrepreneurship, lack of business minded individuals.
Fichte, Rodbertus, Lassall were the fathers of National-Socialism in Germany. The original socialism in its Marxist form was directing German labour movement before 1914, after that it was the authoritarian and nationalist element that came to light. The war hysteria of 1914 never cured (well, Germany lost), that was the beginning of National-Socialism, it was done with the efforts of the old socialists.
I suggest reading Prof. Werner Sombart, who basically singlehandedly started the Nazi movement in Germany with his 'Handler und Helden' in 1915.
I also suggest reading August Bebel, who told Bismark even back in 1892: "The Imperial Chancellor can rest assured that German Social Democracy is a sort of preparatory school for militarism".
So Werner Sombart spread anti-capitalist ideas more than anybody else before him in Germany. He welcomed 'German War' as the inevitable conflict between "heroic Germany and commercial civilization of England", he had pure contempt for commerce and anything business related, similar to Democrats of today.
Fichte, Lassale and Rodbertus formulated the idea of the State as 'Volksgemeinschaft', the State, where the individual exists only to serve the interests of the state and individual interests are completely irrelevant, absolutely forbidden even to be expressed.
It is an interesting factoid that H.G. Wells (the sci fi writer), was actually a committed fascist and was described by Prof. Johahn Plenge as "one of the outstanding figures of modern socialism".
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As to Free Speech, it is an extension of the right to own and operate private property, starting with your body and covering everything you produce (fruits of your labour)
Free speech exists so that you can protect yourself from government intervention, so that you can make your case without being violated and abused by the powerful political figures.
Unfortunately it doesn't work very well anymore, and here is an example of a Democrat denying the free speech rights.
Without the right to own and operate private property you have nothing, not even the right to your own body, the government can take everything from you. Without free speech you can't protect your private property.
Free speech without the right to own and operate private property is an interesting artifact, but it is very much pointless in itself, it only makes sense as an extension of your right to self-determination.
Well, if you are going to turn this into a partisan discussion, then here is a comment I made on a Democrat, violating the free speech right.
Democracy is tyranny. Tyranny of the majority (mobocracy) is when the majority agrees to abuse a minority and votes to do it. For good examples of it see all of the issues surrounding wealth redistribution and taxing income, progressive taxes, business regulations, all that. Because the majority are not running businesses, they are not earning large incomes, but the majority doesn't actually have a moral problem voting to tax others to subsidize themselves.
This is why USA was not in fact established as a Democracy but as a Representative Republic by the Founders, who knew the dangers of Democracy and understood tyranny too well. So they tried their best to set up a system of government that would prevent popular public opinions from running the government!
That's why you have electoral college (the delegates should be able to vote conscience and not party lines), that's why the Senators unlike Congressmen were supposed to be not elected, but nominated by State legislature, so that they would not be beholden to the interest of the majority voters but instead could act in a way that would protect the Constitution, the Law, regardless of what the public (and the Congress) wanted to do.
That's why the POTUS has his veto and to override, 70% of Congressmen must vote together. That's why SCOTUS can negate laws that are unconstitutional.
Unfortunately all of this is broken, it's borked, one man-one vote gave the mob the tyranny they wanted and they are not going to relinquish that power until that power in their own hands will destroy the economy completely (and it has already, it's just the consequences are not fully obvious yet to the majority).
First of all that's false, stagflation of the seventies proved it to be false. Secondly even if your paycheck goes up nominally, it does not help if you can buy nothing with that cash.
I remember more than one hyper inflation, not only in USSR but also in Ukraine and Russia it didn't matter if you had money, the question was can you actually buy anything with it? In USSR around late eighties and then in Ukraine in the early nineties you had to have 'coupons' and cash to buy anything, and this didn't help either. People just didn't sell, everything went to the black markets.
SS and Medicare paid in the less and less valuable currency, the real rate of inflation is underreported by a large factor, the house that people 'own' has no equity and while it could grow in price nominally, it won't be any good once the food and fuel prices also start growing since the rest of the world will stop accumulating dollars at some point in the next couple of years.
It is stagflation now, actually USA is in a depression, I know it's not what the CBO says, etc., but the real rate of inflation has been underreported for a couple of decades, so GDP has been shrinking for that same amount of time, not growing, because the deflaters are completely fake and the sectors that are in GDP are consumption of foreign goods, military, government spending and a large service sector, which does nothing to improve the balance of trade.
Actually inflation in USA is high, you can stop looking at gov't numbers and start looking at your grocery bills, you can look at the diminished quality of goods, diminished quantity of what you buy for the same amount of money, etc.
The foreign central banks are the main culprit in holding off the inflation for USA, that's because for over 30 years now, they have been buying US dollars off the hands of the producers, manufacturers, that exported their goods to USA for little green pieces of paper, which the foreign banks then took off the hands of the manufacturers by printing their own local currencies and then bought long term US bonds with those.
However remember that Clinton financed his 'balanced budget' with a short term adjustable rate mortgage, same stuff that inflated the housing bubble. This was done during Greenspan's Put, this was Clinton and Rubin working together to ensure that USA could keep borrowing without pushing the bond interest rates up.
So now the Chinese and many others hold 6 month, 1 year, maybe 3 year bills, when those mature they have to be rolled over, if they are not, then USA has to take them back automatically for cash, and of-course you know where that cash is going to come from, yes? Printing presses, so it's double inflation.
The Chinese have been buying up real assets around the world, companies, commodities, they are a large producer of gold, yet you wont find a SINGLE bar of Chinese gold in any of the vaults of any of the foreign nations, they keep every ounce.
Real inflation in USA is huge, it caused the depression of 1921, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the seventies, all of the bubbles that happened in the meantime, including the stock market bubble of the nineties and the housing bubble, and the largest bubble of all bubbles, the credit bubble, the bubble in government, in US debt and dollars.
When this one goes, it takes down the economy of USA. Not that USA is not bankrupt right now, it is. It can't repay any of the debts. But right now the world is still not dumping US debt and dollars. When the world starts with that, that will be the true 'fiscal grand canyon', something the politicians are not talking about at all.
The companies that hold cash in offshore banks may hold cash or maybe they buy back their own bonds and stock. They may be diversifying into other assets already, maybe they are holding national debts of various countries, maybe they are holding other currencies, this is not clear right now.
What is clear is that banks IN USA are holding US Treasuries by buying them with the Fed 0% credit, and the spread of 2-3% means that they will be eliminated, bankrupt again once the interest rates go up because the world starts dumping the dollars, so all of that goes belly up.
Everybody who was bailed out once will go belly up again, gov't will of-course print more and more to try and 'save' everybody, so the real crisis that is coming is currency collapse.
The government, thus the poor.
In the last couple of years the info was coming out that people are deleveraging, but whatever people did to increase their personal savings was more than offset by government spending and growth of debt.
Every American owes over a million bucks via the government debt. 16 Trillion by 330Million people is about 53K per person. 222Trillion of Medicare and SS and some State pension liabilities are another 740K per person.
Then there is the contingency, and you can bet on it that this will come up, just like the banks failed during the crash of 2009, they will fail again, but this time it will be a currency crisis, which the government will 'fight' with more and more inflation and buying back of the obligations. FDIC, mortgages insured by FHA and F&F and mortgages on Fed's balance sheet (which means they are automatically on Treasury's balance sheet given the change of laws a year ago). The student debt and probably more things I don't even remember right now, all of these contingencies will come up during the next crash, so the 793K I mentioned earlier is probably close to half of the actual debt per person.
Given that, the actual debt is on the government, but it means it is on the American public, and this truly means on the 'middle class' (whatever it is today) and the rest, but not the top 1 or so percent, they are highly mobile and their capital is even more mobile.
So you are looking at the last 40 years and you think that what is missing is inflation?
Inflation is what causes the capital to leave. Well, inflation, which is the 'solution' that governments have to their actual problem: growth of government spending.
Inflation is what governments have been creating for decades, generations now, to prop up government spending. The private sector is chocking on inflation. The businesses cannot get any loans while the only credit that is available is fake one, from the Fed to the treasury, and the member banks are used as the proxy to make this look legit (while having this same process prop up their balance sheets in the mean while), but in reality the governments and the banks are bankrupt right now.
Inflation is what caused the people who shouldn't have been getting into the stock market get into it, this inflates bubbles, I explained it for years and years here, is anybody home? In fact the Great Depression was caused by inflation, the Fed was buying bad UK debt and inflating a bubble in the stock market because people were looking for a way to hedge against it, the bubble burst and started the recession, which then was turned into depression by Hoover printing ever more money for bailout and stimulus and then more of the same by FDR.
The 1921 depression was caused by the same problem - the Fed.
The 1970s stagflation was caused by the spending and printing and borrowing of the 50s and 60s, all of this was growing the gov't (Medicare was new, SS was expanding, wars), but to pay for it the taxes were never enough, they always had to print more and more and eventually Nixon defaulted on the dollar, because the gov't fixed the exchange rate of dollar to gold and this was never sustainable.
Inflation was stopped once, it was done by Volcker in 1981, when he took interest rates up to 21.5%, and after that there were a few years of economic growth, but very shortlived, the capital was still leaving due to the interest falling sharply again, and so jobs were leaving, manufacturing was decimated over the last 40 years in USA.
Inflation causes people with savings to search for a way to escape it, not to invest in the economy that is being inflated by the gov't, because everybody knows, the government will never stop until it destroys the currency.
Turn inflation up, go ahead, the credit bubble is already today bigger than multiple of all economies combined, when it blows, it will be spectacular. You can't even stop it anymore.
Nuke the storms. You know it's coming.
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Seriously though, let the free market take over the economy, get rid of government regulations surrounding nuclear energy, allow people to research and develop better nuclear energy solutions.
It is broken for the 1%.
Financial system may not be broken for those specific people that get the Fed and the Congress to give them money, but that's not 1%, that's maybe 1% of 1%, but the financial system is broken for 99.99% of people because it prevents the economy from working, it destroys the economy and nobody wins in a destroyed economy (what I mean is, everybody's quality of life suffers).
It's much better to have an actual working economy, but that's something that the population doesn't understand, a working economy can only exist if the government is not allowed to mess with it and people are absolutely hell bent against that idea.
It will start as a 'Strategic Alliance for Economic Cooperation' of some sort and in the beginning there will be no loss of power among the North Korean political elite.
The deal will be brokered by China and it will provide a way for South Korean and Chinese companies to employ North Korean labor and except for the salary, there will be various special deals and perks included into this, just enough to save the face of the North Korean leadership, to show how 'great' they are for the North Korean people, etc.
As long as it is framed this way, it will work and within 4-8 years it will create enough momentum to move towards a more open solution. What will it look like in 20 years? I think more or less like China does.
'rent seeking', the favorite words of the inflation happy, government touting idiots. "Rent seeking" means applying savings to the market and getting a return on that investment.
Just like the case of a person with a second car and a full tank of gas in it, the gas is his savings, the market is the disaster area and the return on investment is the profit that he makes in case he sells the gas.
So now you would come alone and punish the guy with the savings, you'd call him a 'rent seeker' and I suppose you'd use legal system against him, because somehow it should be obvious that his actions, of finding another voluntary side to complete the transaction is 'immoral' in your eyes.
All you are talking about is greed, and it's NOT the person who sells the gas that is greedy, it's you.
There was an AC in this story, saying that he'd rather have no gas himself as long as nobody else could get gas at higher price and as long as nobody would make a profit on a transaction like that.
Now that is telling. There is no honor among thieves and the real thieves are people who want to steal other people's ability to live freely and trade with others freely.
You call people with savings 'rent seekers' as if it is a pejorative of some sort. So the people who saved are bad people, but the people who haven't saved and have nothing are the virtuous ones.
So the people who create jobs by using their savings and risking their savings and time to start an enterprise are greedy profiteers.
The people who vote as a mob to elect politicians that promise to take from the ones that have more and give to the mob, those are good, honorable people. And those are the same type of people who'd say: if I cannot have it, then nobody should have it.
As I said, no honor among thieves.
I realized some time ago that you are mentally challenged, I just didn't know it was to this degree.
Slaves? Make slaves out of North Koreans?
They ARE slaves. Their government is running slave labor camps, prevents them from having any property rights (and thus all other rights, because all rights are extension of property rights).
Saying that 'free market will turn them into slaves' is ridiculously retarded, but I am sure that you are not going to see any dissent to your opinion on these intratubes on /.
Chinese used to be slaves of the government, which killed them just like the North Koreans do, now they are working in factories, where they are free to quit any time and get another job, higher paying one, which they do all the time and their purchasing power is growing while they are becoming more and more skilled with more and more experience.
What is a North Korean worker worth in the Free Market today, with no skills, no experience, no capital, no tools, no idea how to run a business? Not much at all. But they are used as meat by their Communist regime.
What will they be worth after 5 years of work at some enterprises set up by free market if the North and South unite?
Certainly they cannot buy most of anything in North Korea that they can in South Korea. South Korea is living under constant threat of war and North Korea is running concentration labor camps.
Slaves? ALL people must learn to do something useful in the market before they see their earning potential rise and that is exactly what happens and the Chinese today are an excellent example.
In fact I think Koreas are going to unite and China will broker the deal.
What Germany did was terrible, putting people from one centralized system into a state ran welfare system, that the East didn't even work to create. You haven't been in Eastern Germany and you haven't compared it to the Western part. Ghost town after ghost town, with huge number of those people now living on social assistance, not being productive members of society as the free market would have made them be.
You are ridiculous.
Aah, fans.