As an aside, four times $85 billion is $340 billion which is roughly a quarter of what actually is in the discretionary part of the US budget. Spending on the military alone is double that.
after all personnel finance adviser is going to advise you cut your spending and you income at the same time?
That depends on your life goals. It's worth noting here that there is no evidence of correlation between government spending and long term changes in tax revenue.
Metaphors comparing personal and government spending tend to fall apart once you reach that question, because personal and government spending do not fundamentally operate the same way.
The difference isn't that significant. I think the better analogy would be a person who spends too much and supplements their income by stealing in an uncatchable way from work (the government analogue is inflation and some taxation gimmicks). If they steal too much, then their employer might be unable to maintain their income.
Unfortunately both parties color their cuts with their ideology. Instead of making across the board cuts and making agencies make do with less, they target specific programs. You accuse the democrats of singling out the 1% with their revenue increases and cuts in subsidies to corporations, yet the republicans aim their cuts almost exclusively on social programs.
Now, it's worth noting here that cutting social programs isn't a bad idea when they're at least half (including the entitlements) of an oversized budget. Second, we have a situation where a broad spectrum spending cut is being opposed via deliberately caused pain as opposed to specific programs being targeted for spending cuts.
I don't otherwise have an issue with your argument.
If your currency is deflating by, say, 1% per annum, you can, without any risk at all, increase the buying power of your money just by sitting on it.
The risk is that this money doesn't continue to deflate at a constant rate.
This is in comparison to an inflationary currency where, if you don't invest it, its buying power eventually dwindles away to nothing.
If you don't do anything with your deflationary currency either, then it is functionally equivalent to a inflationary currency. This is the time value of money. At some point, a holder will spend that currency, or the currency is effectively worthless.
It's also worth noting that in practice, inflation is brutal to any investment in a situation where you have a capital gains tax. Even if the investment keeps up with inflation, you're having to pay taxes merely because the notional value of your investment went up due to inflation.
For example, suppose I have an investment made in 1980 that exactly matches the US consumer price index (CPI) and I pay a capital gains tax of 35% on it. The CPI increase over that time was 2.8 times higher. So for tax purposes, the investment is considered to have gone up roughly 180%. 35% of that is 22.5% of my total investment. So I get to pay a capital gains tax of 22.5% of my investment for something that barely tracks one index of inflation. That's pretty bad.
According to my calculations, the CPI inflation rate over that time period (including some rather high inflation in the 80s) was roughly 3.2% and you'd have to earn 4% per year or better over that time frame to keep up with CPI in an environment with a capital gains tax that applies when you sell the investment. If you have to pay capital gains at the end of each year, then you have to earn almost 5% per year in order to keep up with CPI.
But with some sort of long deflation in the same taxation situation, even minor ROI generates positive return.
True â" but it rewards those who have wealth today and discourages investment in tomorrow.
To the contrary, if you hadn't invested in getting bitcoins when they weren't as popular and their value as a result was lower, then you wouldn't be sitting on wealth. This dynamic is rewarding an existing investment.
It has to stop at some point. Bitcoins aren't ever going to be worth trillions of current dollars apiece.
Wealth people get free value for holding onto money â" so they tend to do so. Debtors are at a disadvantage â" want to finance that college education?
And when things transition from deflation to inflation, how is that money doing? It has risk just like any other investment.
At this point the flyoff is between actual production aircraft (e.g., SH, Gripen, Eurofighter, F-15SE, etc.) versus the LM F-35 brochure made into a pointy paper airplane.
I wonder why they don't make more planes out of paper. They're truly amazing compared to those planes made out of other things.
you have a currency that is going into a deflationary spiral
What exactly is wrong with that? Eventually people start spending money again because ultimately, a currency doesn't have any value to you, if you don't spend it. You'll want to buy stuff as well since the whole point of holding on to bitcoins is to eventually buy something with them.
I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who tries to play the "no one else can play with my stuff" card can be shown to be getting some tax break that others of us don't get.
Or just wants to pay less taxes which is equivalent as far as the purse is concerned. There is a fundamental difference between people who earn substantial income and those who don't. The former pay most of the taxes collectively (though obviously there are those who find loopholes). The latter have most of the votes.
Well, he didn't call it an argument in that post. He called it an opinion
Ok, it's a inherently wrong opinion.
I just felt like answering his question about you
And your answer was:
Not much will be gained to dwell on why he has this need to be right (or make you wrong).
I have a "need" to be "right" because well, I have beliefs just like anyone else, and well, beliefs that are more consistent with each other tend to cause less weirdness in the brain ("cognitive dissonance" is the pop-psych term).
I don't have a "need" to "make" anyone wrong. I didn't post all that because I needed to make AK Marc wrong. Instead, it was to point out that his beliefs (opinions, arguments, etc) contradicted each other. Such contradiction is inherently wrong no matter what an outsider "needs" and I think it hurts the person holding the contradictory beliefs. Cognitive dissonance can't be that good for you.
Has that been a problem here? I see one or more AC who has been rather diligent, but I only posted three times to him plus twice (including my current post) to you. He's posted something like sixteen times in this thread. Who isn't "backing off"?
I didn't say you should hold back. If anything I told AK Marc to back off, accept that you're the kind of person you are, and let you do your thing. I told him not much would be gained trying to question you.
And when will he get around to "questioning" me? Keep in mind that what created this whole thread was some AC just stating unconditionally that NASCAR wasn't a sport. AK Marc pretty much has just been saying over and over again that he too doesn't believe that NASCAR is a sport. I have no trouble with that though other people did, simply because AK Marc wasn't using a standard definition of "sport".
But what he also did was justify that claim on the basis that there was no amateur car racing akin to NASCAR, and that the amateurs, who did race cars akin to NASCAR, agreed with him that NASCAR wasn't a sport (for likely different reasons, I might add than AK Marc's). When your argument is at its core an inherent logical contradiction, then you aren't "different", you are merely wrong.
Not to mention, that mission should be banned for the waste of earth's resources that could better be spent applying new energy technologies, food production and clean water preservation.
Why would that money be better spent? It's worth noting here that we spend far more than the alleged billion dollars on each of these things. And there isn't that much really that an extra billion dollars can do now. The enduring problems (such as governments which fail to deliver infrastructure for clean water) aren't due to a lack of funding.
But if it gets spent on a successful Mars flyby, then that money was spent developing a new capability that humanity didn't have before.
It comes from the freeloaders that benefited from these improvements all their life but don't want to do anything for their kids.
There's only so much lunch to go around. When you got too many freeloaders for the free meal, they'll turn on each other. It's worth noting that the same sort of selfishness came out in people who aren't boomers.
Social Security was a known problem for decades and while they did make some fixes to it, there also was some crazy stuff like the one percent "kicker" (the amount of benefit was increased by CPI-indexed inflation plus 1% each year) that was implemented for a brief while in the 70s and the accounting fraud, which would be illegal, if it were done by private businesses. That mess which was broken on arrival wasn't started by the Boomers. They were born into the system.
Similarly, we have some pretty crazy stuff going on with student loans and credit cards to an extent. I gather a number of the borrowers either had way off expectations of how much they'd be earning or they thought they could weasel out of it. Sure, the government side of this particular mess is remarkably incompetent and to a degree malicious (who thinks we're really helping people by guaranteeing huge loans for them and then passing onerous laws to make sure that student loan debt is almost unique a burden to bankrupt ex-students?), but it's all above board. You just need to look at people who've run through the gantlet to see how risky it is to take big debt for an attempt at a degree of dubious value. These people aren't for the most part, Boomers.
These sort of games are what happens when you let entitlement spending get out of control so that even things which you can put together an ok argument for, like subsidizing internet hookups in rural areas, are difficult to fund, because ultimately, you're taking that money from some other freeloader.
And this leads to the corporatism symptom. Who's going to fare the best in such an environment? It's not going to be some particular age bloc, no matter how numerous they might be. It'll be the businesses and non-profits which specialize in obtaining public funds, usually with the connivance of the politicians who hold the purse strings. It's a natural breeding ground for all kinds of corruption.
Power and telephone service to rural areas were subsidized in the US, back before everyone got the "no one else can play with my stuff" attitude that permeates this country today.
Ever wonder how the "no one else can play with my stuff" attitude came about? If the politicians had stopped long ago with stuff like the above, it wouldn't even be an issue. There wouldn't be enough people to care to obstruct your sort of proposal. But since a significant fraction of the US's economy is just being shuffled around as a result, it has become an issue.
The Ada Initiative takes the position that any sex content at a technical conference is out of bounds and hostile to women--and there's a good argument for that.
There was a good argument for killing six million Jews too. It was based on lies, deception, and incredible delusion, but it was a good argument too.
At some point, rather than merely make "good arguments", we have to recognize that the harm from suppressing speech greatly outweighs any vague, hypothetical harm of the sort that the Ada Initiative claims to be protecting against.
Slashdot Mirror
The President has one vote, just like any of the rest of us.
The President's vote can block any bill from Congress unless they pass with veto-proof supermajorities. My vote doesn't have that kind of pull.
I know sure as hell I would never take such a "deal".
I think such a deal would die in the courts (being unconstitutional and all), but if that weren't a problem, I'd love to make a go of it.
As an aside, four times $85 billion is $340 billion which is roughly a quarter of what actually is in the discretionary part of the US budget. Spending on the military alone is double that.
How could the belts affect the sun?
Putting on sunscreen lotion doesn't change the Sun either, but it does change how the Sun affects you.
after all personnel finance adviser is going to advise you cut your spending and you income at the same time?
That depends on your life goals. It's worth noting here that there is no evidence of correlation between government spending and long term changes in tax revenue.
As opposed to the Friedmanian nightmare being tried here in the UK?
The UK has a public debt of 86% of its GDP (which is considerably higher than the US's current 68% of its GDP). That didn't come from Friedman.
And I doubt the Friedmanian nightmare would have been so nightmarish, if they had tried it when they weren't in such desperate straits.
Well, I would highly prefer that to giving in to the rent-seekers.
Metaphors comparing personal and government spending tend to fall apart once you reach that question, because personal and government spending do not fundamentally operate the same way.
The difference isn't that significant. I think the better analogy would be a person who spends too much and supplements their income by stealing in an uncatchable way from work (the government analogue is inflation and some taxation gimmicks). If they steal too much, then their employer might be unable to maintain their income.
It also doesn't work, if you think you think the other side will lose more by the process (that is, there is no "mutual" destruction at hand).
Unfortunately both parties color their cuts with their ideology. Instead of making across the board cuts and making agencies make do with less, they target specific programs. You accuse the democrats of singling out the 1% with their revenue increases and cuts in subsidies to corporations, yet the republicans aim their cuts almost exclusively on social programs.
Now, it's worth noting here that cutting social programs isn't a bad idea when they're at least half (including the entitlements) of an oversized budget. Second, we have a situation where a broad spectrum spending cut is being opposed via deliberately caused pain as opposed to specific programs being targeted for spending cuts.
I don't otherwise have an issue with your argument.
Yes, there's no incentive to make budget cuts in an "intelligent" matter. But there is plenty of incentive to do the Washington Monument strategy.
As an aside, who here really thinks deflation in bitcoins is risk free?
If your currency is deflating by, say, 1% per annum, you can, without any risk at all, increase the buying power of your money just by sitting on it.
The risk is that this money doesn't continue to deflate at a constant rate.
This is in comparison to an inflationary currency where, if you don't invest it, its buying power eventually dwindles away to nothing.
If you don't do anything with your deflationary currency either, then it is functionally equivalent to a inflationary currency. This is the time value of money. At some point, a holder will spend that currency, or the currency is effectively worthless.
It's also worth noting that in practice, inflation is brutal to any investment in a situation where you have a capital gains tax. Even if the investment keeps up with inflation, you're having to pay taxes merely because the notional value of your investment went up due to inflation. For example, suppose I have an investment made in 1980 that exactly matches the US consumer price index (CPI) and I pay a capital gains tax of 35% on it. The CPI increase over that time was 2.8 times higher. So for tax purposes, the investment is considered to have gone up roughly 180%. 35% of that is 22.5% of my total investment. So I get to pay a capital gains tax of 22.5% of my investment for something that barely tracks one index of inflation. That's pretty bad.
According to my calculations, the CPI inflation rate over that time period (including some rather high inflation in the 80s) was roughly 3.2% and you'd have to earn 4% per year or better over that time frame to keep up with CPI in an environment with a capital gains tax that applies when you sell the investment. If you have to pay capital gains at the end of each year, then you have to earn almost 5% per year in order to keep up with CPI.
But with some sort of long deflation in the same taxation situation, even minor ROI generates positive return.
True â" but it rewards those who have wealth today and discourages investment in tomorrow.
To the contrary, if you hadn't invested in getting bitcoins when they weren't as popular and their value as a result was lower, then you wouldn't be sitting on wealth. This dynamic is rewarding an existing investment.
It has to stop at some point. Bitcoins aren't ever going to be worth trillions of current dollars apiece.
Wealth people get free value for holding onto money â" so they tend to do so. Debtors are at a disadvantage â" want to finance that college education?
And when things transition from deflation to inflation, how is that money doing? It has risk just like any other investment.
At this point the flyoff is between actual production aircraft (e.g., SH, Gripen, Eurofighter, F-15SE, etc.) versus the LM F-35 brochure made into a pointy paper airplane.
I wonder why they don't make more planes out of paper. They're truly amazing compared to those planes made out of other things.
you have a currency that is going into a deflationary spiral
What exactly is wrong with that? Eventually people start spending money again because ultimately, a currency doesn't have any value to you, if you don't spend it. You'll want to buy stuff as well since the whole point of holding on to bitcoins is to eventually buy something with them.
I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who tries to play the "no one else can play with my stuff" card can be shown to be getting some tax break that others of us don't get.
Or just wants to pay less taxes which is equivalent as far as the purse is concerned. There is a fundamental difference between people who earn substantial income and those who don't. The former pay most of the taxes collectively (though obviously there are those who find loopholes). The latter have most of the votes.
Well, he didn't call it an argument in that post. He called it an opinion
Ok, it's a inherently wrong opinion.
I just felt like answering his question about you
And your answer was:
Not much will be gained to dwell on why he has this need to be right (or make you wrong).
I have a "need" to be "right" because well, I have beliefs just like anyone else, and well, beliefs that are more consistent with each other tend to cause less weirdness in the brain ("cognitive dissonance" is the pop-psych term).
I don't have a "need" to "make" anyone wrong. I didn't post all that because I needed to make AK Marc wrong. Instead, it was to point out that his beliefs (opinions, arguments, etc) contradicted each other. Such contradiction is inherently wrong no matter what an outsider "needs" and I think it hurts the person holding the contradictory beliefs. Cognitive dissonance can't be that good for you.
AK Marc asked you why you won't back off
Has that been a problem here? I see one or more AC who has been rather diligent, but I only posted three times to him plus twice (including my current post) to you. He's posted something like sixteen times in this thread. Who isn't "backing off"?
I didn't say you should hold back. If anything I told AK Marc to back off, accept that you're the kind of person you are, and let you do your thing. I told him not much would be gained trying to question you.
And when will he get around to "questioning" me? Keep in mind that what created this whole thread was some AC just stating unconditionally that NASCAR wasn't a sport. AK Marc pretty much has just been saying over and over again that he too doesn't believe that NASCAR is a sport. I have no trouble with that though other people did, simply because AK Marc wasn't using a standard definition of "sport".
But what he also did was justify that claim on the basis that there was no amateur car racing akin to NASCAR, and that the amateurs, who did race cars akin to NASCAR, agreed with him that NASCAR wasn't a sport (for likely different reasons, I might add than AK Marc's). When your argument is at its core an inherent logical contradiction, then you aren't "different", you are merely wrong.
Not to mention, that mission should be banned for the waste of earth's resources that could better be spent applying new energy technologies, food production and clean water preservation.
Why would that money be better spent? It's worth noting here that we spend far more than the alleged billion dollars on each of these things. And there isn't that much really that an extra billion dollars can do now. The enduring problems (such as governments which fail to deliver infrastructure for clean water) aren't due to a lack of funding.
But if it gets spent on a successful Mars flyby, then that money was spent developing a new capability that humanity didn't have before.
You are essentially saying that "We shouldn't pursue progress because future progress will make current progress obsolete.".
I'm sure there's a flaw somewhere in your argument. And I'll see what that flaw is once the Singularity comes.
It comes from the freeloaders that benefited from these improvements all their life but don't want to do anything for their kids.
There's only so much lunch to go around. When you got too many freeloaders for the free meal, they'll turn on each other. It's worth noting that the same sort of selfishness came out in people who aren't boomers.
Social Security was a known problem for decades and while they did make some fixes to it, there also was some crazy stuff like the one percent "kicker" (the amount of benefit was increased by CPI-indexed inflation plus 1% each year) that was implemented for a brief while in the 70s and the accounting fraud, which would be illegal, if it were done by private businesses. That mess which was broken on arrival wasn't started by the Boomers. They were born into the system.
Similarly, we have some pretty crazy stuff going on with student loans and credit cards to an extent. I gather a number of the borrowers either had way off expectations of how much they'd be earning or they thought they could weasel out of it. Sure, the government side of this particular mess is remarkably incompetent and to a degree malicious (who thinks we're really helping people by guaranteeing huge loans for them and then passing onerous laws to make sure that student loan debt is almost unique a burden to bankrupt ex-students?), but it's all above board. You just need to look at people who've run through the gantlet to see how risky it is to take big debt for an attempt at a degree of dubious value. These people aren't for the most part, Boomers.
These sort of games are what happens when you let entitlement spending get out of control so that even things which you can put together an ok argument for, like subsidizing internet hookups in rural areas, are difficult to fund, because ultimately, you're taking that money from some other freeloader.
And this leads to the corporatism symptom. Who's going to fare the best in such an environment? It's not going to be some particular age bloc, no matter how numerous they might be. It'll be the businesses and non-profits which specialize in obtaining public funds, usually with the connivance of the politicians who hold the purse strings. It's a natural breeding ground for all kinds of corruption.
How about you RTFA before you start flapping your retard hole.
I have. From the abstract:
We estimate that environmental heat stress has reduced labour capacity to 90% in peak months over the past few decades.
That's for a historical temperature increase of no more than 1 C during those "peak months".
Power and telephone service to rural areas were subsidized in the US, back before everyone got the "no one else can play with my stuff" attitude that permeates this country today.
Ever wonder how the "no one else can play with my stuff" attitude came about? If the politicians had stopped long ago with stuff like the above, it wouldn't even be an issue. There wouldn't be enough people to care to obstruct your sort of proposal. But since a significant fraction of the US's economy is just being shuffled around as a result, it has become an issue.
The Ada Initiative takes the position that any sex content at a technical conference is out of bounds and hostile to women--and there's a good argument for that.
There was a good argument for killing six million Jews too. It was based on lies, deception, and incredible delusion, but it was a good argument too.
At some point, rather than merely make "good arguments", we have to recognize that the harm from suppressing speech greatly outweighs any vague, hypothetical harm of the sort that the Ada Initiative claims to be protecting against.