You miss the whole point of those tax breaks. The states didn't sacrifice anything to attract his business there. If they hadn't offered tax breaks, they wouldn't receive ANY tax revenue from Dell because the company wouldn't have set up shop there. It was a calculated decision by the state that resulted in a large net gain in tax revenue, and a net gain in employment, regardless of the makeup of that employment, and it was an agreement entered into willingly by both parties. Dell has no obligation to the state beyond that.
I sincerely hope that people with such attitudes never buy imported products. It's always easy to criticize others' decisions to use their own resources in the most efficient manner, but when the tables are turned they claw for rationalizations to make themselves exceptions to their rule.
Well you're only partially right, that bailout money came mostly from China, but some did come from Europe too. Don't go yelling about how taxpayers funded the bailout because we were in a deficit long before a bailout was even 'needed.' All that bailout money and upcoming stimulus money is borrowed money. None of which came from the US taxpayer.
But we will be paying for eventually through 'quantitative easing' which is going to hit us with one of the largest inflation taxes this country has ever experienced.
You're assuming that the government actually pays back what it borrows. If you took a gander at the ever increasing national debt, you would see that's not the case. Government has been doing nothing but printing money to pay for deficit spending.
You ignore the spillover benefit of used game sales. The first owner of the game is able to recover some of the initial cost of buying a game, making him more likely to purchase yet another game. Most people going into a Gamestop to sell back their games aren't using that money to go buy a sandwich; they're in there to buy new games.
Think about the used car market. Who would want to buy a new car if they knew there would be significant obstacles to selling it on to another person after a few years? The auto industry has capitalized on this by making it easy to trade in a car when buying a new car, and they've also created a pretty successful model of pre-owned certification to further benefit. Used car sales are hardly cannibalizing new car sales.
The short sale ban only applies to certain financial companies. After the ban was enacted, technology stocks in particular were heavily targeted by short sellers who could no longer short financials.
I'd say Ireland is smarter. They've come a long way in terms of standard of living and per capita income, directly attributable to their favorable tax structure. The country is attracting businesses and bright minds, all of which provide taxable income that was not there before.
That's exactly what it is. I bought a nice new 46" 1080p LCD TV and I couldn't bear to watch any SD content on it because it looked so terrible. I caved and bought a PS3 just to see what a true 1080p picture looked like and it's definitely a huge leap in clarity. Upscaled DVDs are only barely tolerable, I've really been hooked on blu-ray quality. However, I only own 2 blu-ray movies and do not intend to buy another one unless it's something really special or the price is down to 10 bucks.
I now get my movie fix through netflix which ends up costing me 3 bucks for a movie I'd probably only watch once anyway and if I want to see again can just add to my queue. Why pay 25-30 bucks to own it?
The movie industry really struggles with this whole supply and demand concept. There's an abundance of films available on blu-ray but a tiny demand for them. The laws of economics would have you expect the price to come down, but not in the world of the MPAA.
Exactly. Thank the gods someone sees this. Nobody saves. That's the problem. Of course you have to keep working if you went through life without putting aside money for when you no longer have a source of income. It's really easy to have a comfortable retirement if you start saving early, but most younger Americans embrace a lifestyle of debt that precludes years of savings with compounding interest. Even if you start piling in a large chunk of your income later in life, it just doesn't have a lot of time to grow to become a fixed-income source in retirement.
The other problem is that all the while these young adults are racking up debt, their parents are often shelling out money for college, cars, helping them buy a house, etc. So parents today are spending more on their kids for a longer period of time that makes them in turn potentially dependent upon those kids in old age.
If only government gave us some basic value for our money. Instead we pay taxes and rack up an enormous national debt to finance wars and our representatives' pet projects. The problem isn't limited to just the corporate world. People should demand accountability product/service they receive, whether the provider is private or public.
Yeah well my beautiful new Vista laptop requires a reboot every week because RAM usage heads northward of 1.5gb on a 2gb machine. Firefox 3.0 stops loading any pages after a few minutes of use, Opera often chokes after a a few hours of use (perhaps something with Vista's network settings?). I cannot VNC to it for whatever reason, tried with 3 different VNC servers and turned off the windows firewall (yet it still notified me once that an application was trying to use the internet). I could go on and on, but boy am I sorry for giving Vista a chance.
To each his own. I bought a 46" 1080p HDTV about 6 weeks ago and immediately couldn't stand watching SD content on it, whether it be digital cable or DVDs. The picture was just too grainy and distorted. I went out and bought a PS3 just so I could see what blu-ray had to offer (it pained me to do this as an Xbox 360 owner) and upon finally viewing 1080p content on the TV I felt much better about my purchase. Upscaled DVDs on the PS3 are acceptable, but I can still easily notice a difference between them and the blu-ray discs. The only shame is that blu-ray discs are also priced way too high for me to go out and buy them. I gladly bought DVDs at 10 bucks a pop, or even 30 for a criterion collection film, but 30 bucks for a standard blu-ray disc is out of the question.
For some time Buffalo was prohibited from selling 802.11a and 802.11g devices in the US due to legal issues, so their mindshare has been hurt a good deal by people who were forced to by the WRT54GL if they wanted a good DD-WRT compatible solution.
I want to know who is actually buying these PS2s. The only people I know who have bought a PS2 in the past 2 years is because the one they already owned died on them.
And that's exactly my point. You pay for a card that only plays todays games, but it will be inadequate for games in 5 years. That's not the case for consoles. Games in the next 5 years are written specifically for that hardware.
While this generation has been full of great games already, with even more on the way, you have to wonder how far this boom will go on given the dismal picture of the economy that some economists paint. The Fed just used a Depression-era rule to bail out a non-member investment bank, Bear Stearns, on Friday and just oversaw a fire sale of the bank today for $2 a share down from it's 52 week high of $159. That's a bank failure of colossal proportions and likely not the last major crisis we'll see in the financial world. The dollar is going to continue taking big hits with news like that, which combined with rising prices of fuel and food is going to take a lot of steam out of entertainment markets like video games.
What you described is more of a problem with the current controller-centric trend in console gaming rather than the concept of console gaming itself. Adding keyboard and mouse support to the 360 or PS3 should be trivial because both systems use USB inputs.
As a former hardcore PC gamer I struggled with the same keyboard/mouse ideology when I first played Halo. I kept telling my friends, "the controller sucks, I would be demolishing you with a mouse." Yet I adapted and sucked it up because playing games on a system that is built primarily for playing games has numerous overwhelming advantages that eventually trumped the limitations of the controller in FPS.
When you buy a console you get the comfort of knowing that your system will only be obsolete in 5 years and will be able to play every game made specifically for it. You don't have to worry about games coming out a year later that were designed for the latest greatest GPUs but struggle on your computer. You can also enjoy multiplayer gaming on your large screen HDTV in the comfort of your living room. Developers can direct more of their resources to actual gameplay when developing for a single, stable platform rather than having to support a myriad of hardware configurations. The list goes on and on, and it's no surprise that the market for consoles is growing while PC gaming in the traditional sense is dying.
Yet there is no law stating that the economy must be cyclical. On the contrary there is a strong argument that government intervention is a major contributor to the business cycle. Recessions need not be as frequent and as deep as they have been in the past if the market were able to achieve equilibrium on interest rates without a Board of Governors determining how it should work.
Forming a unified ticket wouldn't solve matters. In the end there is a large section of the population that just won't vote for an administration where Hillary Clinton has a policy role. I wasn't particularly disposed to vote for her before, but now after the sickening negative campaigning and dirty tactics I will never vote for her. There are many other people who have been completely turned off by her tactics, who in addition to those conservatives that reviled her before will give McCain a substantial edge in the general election.
I'm sorry, but the Democratic party has for whatever reason bought into the inevitability of Hillary Clinton as a presidential contender when her electability outside of the Democratic party is severely impeded by her negatives. Everybody knew that she was using her Senate seat as a stepping stone to the presidency the minute she announced her bid in a state she never lived in. That started the myth of inevitability which was clearly in retrospect a calculated plan leading up to this run for the Presidency.
A lot of people see through right through this and have serious doubts about her sincerity. Those doubts have only been exacerbated with her recent kitchen sink campaign tactics, but much of the Democratic establishment is still blind to this and thinks she will be competitive against McCain.
Her campaign has been based on her vaunted experience, but serving one term plus one year in the Senate is hardly experience when cast against McCain's undeniable experience in politics. She has only been an elected government official since 2000 and previously had no substantial role in any policy except the failed Hillarycare plan. Republicans will jump all over this, so she needs something else to sell herself to voters, but what is there? When compared to McCain she's equal to Obama in almost every way except for her negatives and lack of charisma.
Microsoft certainly did not damage its gaming platform by siding with HD-DVD. HD-DVD was always an add-on for the 360 and never a major selling point. This (along with questionable quality control) allowed Microsoft to release the 360 a year ahead of the PS3, gaining significant market share and pressuring developers to focus on creating games for the 360 rather than its competition. This strategy has paid off for Microsoft because those who wanted a gaming system got a gaming system as well as a large library of games. The attach rate for the 360 is currently the highest by far among the 3 consoles competing in this generation. As a gaming platform the 360 is doing pretty well for itself.
Sony, on the other hand, has been making progress in terms of consoles sold undoubtedly because of its blu-ray capabilities, but the slow start due to blue laser shortages and the high expense of blu-ray components has significantly hurt their sales. PS3 is still in 3rd place in terms of the attach rate and has suffered from developers supporting the 360 as the PS3's expense. In the end, these machines are primarily games consoles and their media playing capabilities are a secondary function. Microsoft focused on games as a selling point and has been the most successful in that respect while Sony focused on the media capability with Blu-Ray, but at significant expense. High manufacturing costs as well as studio support both took a toll on Sony's bottom line for a high-def disc market that is still in its infancy.
To the average Xbox 360 owner, the format war has been a non-issue because their console uses DVDs. Cross platform games still look equally good on both platforms, so the size constraints of DVDs is not yet apparent. This may change in the coming years, but for now DVD is still king in most living rooms.
The unfortunate truth is that a great deal of the pro-freedom, small-government crowd ARE a little wacky (see: reinstitute the gold standard, abolish central bank, sorry if I'm offending anyone but those are crazy) and many I have met (I doubt most though) are at least latently racist.
You just slandered a large group of people and call it an 'unfortunate truth' after admitting the Republican party is large and diverse? There's nothing crazy about reinstituting the gold standard. You should read a little economic history before dismissing it so readily.
Ronald Reagan also incorporated a return to the gold standard into his platform in 1980, yet nobody thought it was crazy then because the dollar had been linked to gold up until 1971. If one believes in the efficiency of the free market and private enterprise, as many Republicans claim to do, one would also have to acknowledge that in the long varied history of commerce on earth, bimetallism had emerged as a dominant currency regime in the majority of economies until government fiat disrupted it. Nobel Prize economist Robert Mundell, one of the prime architects of the 'supply side revolution' which has greatly altered US fiscal policy since the 1980s is also an outspoken supporter of the gold standard. He's so wacky that the European Monetary Union is based on his concept of optimum currency areas and China and Turkey think he's so wacky they pay him to advise them on their currency policies. You could find a multitude of sane and intelligent economists who would extol the virtues of a gold standard and condemn the disruptive nature of central banks.
Everyone who laughs off the idea of abolishing the Fed turns around and decries the housing slump and subprime mortgage mess which unsurprisingly was an unwitting creation of the Fed, just as the Dot Com bust was. Yet it's crazy to want to get rid of an institution that is answerable to no one and has the ability to manipulate the wealth of the entire nation. I eat, sleep, and drink economics and am in awe at some of the elegant models that economists create, but I still think it is utterly insane that board of 12 unelected officials is tasked with the goal of looking at an incredibly large and complicated global economy and directing growth while trying to manage unemployment and inflation just by manipulating the interest rate. The largest single actor in the economy is expected to intervene without unforeseen consequences, yet getting rid of that actor is deemed crazy only because people are used to it (and its offshoot, the business cycle) in their lives.
People think a return to the gold standard and abolition of the Fed are crazy because somehow they seem like new concepts, but they're not. People are shocked because these ideas aren't introduced all too often in mainstream debate and Ron Paul doesn't do them justice when mentions them in the same sentence and goes on to the multitude of other ills in the economy. It's unfortunate that many of these ideas and warnings of crises to come seem crazy, but they aren't very far off base. Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani literally laughed at Ron Paul in the debates when he suggested that we're borrowing from China to pay for the war because it seemed like such an absurd idea. But afterwards when their advisers explained who the largest foreign holder of US bonds was, and that Paul was in fact correct, they started using it as their own talking points in the following debates.
And the racism claim is just a little bit disingenuous when you use your anecdotal evidence to pass judgment on a large group of people. Sure, there may be racists who are also in favor of small government, but there are far more people who care about small government and freedom for all people. I've witnessed racism among big government Democrat union members on election day no less. All that says is that racism unfortunately is still alive and well in America.
You know, I was thinking the same thing, but then I realized that the Secret Service is pretty good at what they do. You gotta think there are more people in the world who want to assassinate the current POTUS for the myriad of wrongs he's committed/overseen while in office than would want to do the same to Obama just because he's black. If it hasn't happened to Bush, I'm not too worried about Obama.
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You miss the whole point of those tax breaks. The states didn't sacrifice anything to attract his business there. If they hadn't offered tax breaks, they wouldn't receive ANY tax revenue from Dell because the company wouldn't have set up shop there. It was a calculated decision by the state that resulted in a large net gain in tax revenue, and a net gain in employment, regardless of the makeup of that employment, and it was an agreement entered into willingly by both parties. Dell has no obligation to the state beyond that.
I sincerely hope that people with such attitudes never buy imported products. It's always easy to criticize others' decisions to use their own resources in the most efficient manner, but when the tables are turned they claw for rationalizations to make themselves exceptions to their rule.
Well you're only partially right, that bailout money came mostly from China, but some did come from Europe too. Don't go yelling about how taxpayers funded the bailout because we were in a deficit long before a bailout was even 'needed.' All that bailout money and upcoming stimulus money is borrowed money. None of which came from the US taxpayer.
But we will be paying for eventually through 'quantitative easing' which is going to hit us with one of the largest inflation taxes this country has ever experienced.
You're assuming that the government actually pays back what it borrows. If you took a gander at the ever increasing national debt, you would see that's not the case. Government has been doing nothing but printing money to pay for deficit spending.
No, they're saying that the humans drafting regulations are certainly not omniscient and clairvoyant. Regulating markets is guaranteeing imperfection.
You ignore the spillover benefit of used game sales. The first owner of the game is able to recover some of the initial cost of buying a game, making him more likely to purchase yet another game. Most people going into a Gamestop to sell back their games aren't using that money to go buy a sandwich; they're in there to buy new games.
Think about the used car market. Who would want to buy a new car if they knew there would be significant obstacles to selling it on to another person after a few years? The auto industry has capitalized on this by making it easy to trade in a car when buying a new car, and they've also created a pretty successful model of pre-owned certification to further benefit. Used car sales are hardly cannibalizing new car sales.
The short sale ban only applies to certain financial companies. After the ban was enacted, technology stocks in particular were heavily targeted by short sellers who could no longer short financials.
I'd say Ireland is smarter. They've come a long way in terms of standard of living and per capita income, directly attributable to their favorable tax structure. The country is attracting businesses and bright minds, all of which provide taxable income that was not there before.
That's exactly what it is. I bought a nice new 46" 1080p LCD TV and I couldn't bear to watch any SD content on it because it looked so terrible. I caved and bought a PS3 just to see what a true 1080p picture looked like and it's definitely a huge leap in clarity. Upscaled DVDs are only barely tolerable, I've really been hooked on blu-ray quality. However, I only own 2 blu-ray movies and do not intend to buy another one unless it's something really special or the price is down to 10 bucks.
I now get my movie fix through netflix which ends up costing me 3 bucks for a movie I'd probably only watch once anyway and if I want to see again can just add to my queue. Why pay 25-30 bucks to own it?
The movie industry really struggles with this whole supply and demand concept. There's an abundance of films available on blu-ray but a tiny demand for them. The laws of economics would have you expect the price to come down, but not in the world of the MPAA.
Exactly. Thank the gods someone sees this. Nobody saves. That's the problem. Of course you have to keep working if you went through life without putting aside money for when you no longer have a source of income. It's really easy to have a comfortable retirement if you start saving early, but most younger Americans embrace a lifestyle of debt that precludes years of savings with compounding interest. Even if you start piling in a large chunk of your income later in life, it just doesn't have a lot of time to grow to become a fixed-income source in retirement.
The other problem is that all the while these young adults are racking up debt, their parents are often shelling out money for college, cars, helping them buy a house, etc. So parents today are spending more on their kids for a longer period of time that makes them in turn potentially dependent upon those kids in old age.
If only government gave us some basic value for our money. Instead we pay taxes and rack up an enormous national debt to finance wars and our representatives' pet projects. The problem isn't limited to just the corporate world. People should demand accountability product/service they receive, whether the provider is private or public.
Yeah well my beautiful new Vista laptop requires a reboot every week because RAM usage heads northward of 1.5gb on a 2gb machine. Firefox 3.0 stops loading any pages after a few minutes of use, Opera often chokes after a a few hours of use (perhaps something with Vista's network settings?). I cannot VNC to it for whatever reason, tried with 3 different VNC servers and turned off the windows firewall (yet it still notified me once that an application was trying to use the internet). I could go on and on, but boy am I sorry for giving Vista a chance.
To each his own. I bought a 46" 1080p HDTV about 6 weeks ago and immediately couldn't stand watching SD content on it, whether it be digital cable or DVDs. The picture was just too grainy and distorted. I went out and bought a PS3 just so I could see what blu-ray had to offer (it pained me to do this as an Xbox 360 owner) and upon finally viewing 1080p content on the TV I felt much better about my purchase. Upscaled DVDs on the PS3 are acceptable, but I can still easily notice a difference between them and the blu-ray discs. The only shame is that blu-ray discs are also priced way too high for me to go out and buy them. I gladly bought DVDs at 10 bucks a pop, or even 30 for a criterion collection film, but 30 bucks for a standard blu-ray disc is out of the question.
For some time Buffalo was prohibited from selling 802.11a and 802.11g devices in the US due to legal issues, so their mindshare has been hurt a good deal by people who were forced to by the WRT54GL if they wanted a good DD-WRT compatible solution.
...where are we, Digg?
I want to know who is actually buying these PS2s. The only people I know who have bought a PS2 in the past 2 years is because the one they already owned died on them.
And that's exactly my point. You pay for a card that only plays todays games, but it will be inadequate for games in 5 years. That's not the case for consoles. Games in the next 5 years are written specifically for that hardware.
While this generation has been full of great games already, with even more on the way, you have to wonder how far this boom will go on given the dismal picture of the economy that some economists paint. The Fed just used a Depression-era rule to bail out a non-member investment bank, Bear Stearns, on Friday and just oversaw a fire sale of the bank today for $2 a share down from it's 52 week high of $159. That's a bank failure of colossal proportions and likely not the last major crisis we'll see in the financial world. The dollar is going to continue taking big hits with news like that, which combined with rising prices of fuel and food is going to take a lot of steam out of entertainment markets like video games.
What you described is more of a problem with the current controller-centric trend in console gaming rather than the concept of console gaming itself. Adding keyboard and mouse support to the 360 or PS3 should be trivial because both systems use USB inputs.
As a former hardcore PC gamer I struggled with the same keyboard/mouse ideology when I first played Halo. I kept telling my friends, "the controller sucks, I would be demolishing you with a mouse." Yet I adapted and sucked it up because playing games on a system that is built primarily for playing games has numerous overwhelming advantages that eventually trumped the limitations of the controller in FPS.
When you buy a console you get the comfort of knowing that your system will only be obsolete in 5 years and will be able to play every game made specifically for it. You don't have to worry about games coming out a year later that were designed for the latest greatest GPUs but struggle on your computer. You can also enjoy multiplayer gaming on your large screen HDTV in the comfort of your living room. Developers can direct more of their resources to actual gameplay when developing for a single, stable platform rather than having to support a myriad of hardware configurations. The list goes on and on, and it's no surprise that the market for consoles is growing while PC gaming in the traditional sense is dying.
Yet there is no law stating that the economy must be cyclical. On the contrary there is a strong argument that government intervention is a major contributor to the business cycle. Recessions need not be as frequent and as deep as they have been in the past if the market were able to achieve equilibrium on interest rates without a Board of Governors determining how it should work.
So you're saying make it an Obama/McCain ticket?
Forming a unified ticket wouldn't solve matters. In the end there is a large section of the population that just won't vote for an administration where Hillary Clinton has a policy role. I wasn't particularly disposed to vote for her before, but now after the sickening negative campaigning and dirty tactics I will never vote for her. There are many other people who have been completely turned off by her tactics, who in addition to those conservatives that reviled her before will give McCain a substantial edge in the general election.
I'm sorry, but the Democratic party has for whatever reason bought into the inevitability of Hillary Clinton as a presidential contender when her electability outside of the Democratic party is severely impeded by her negatives. Everybody knew that she was using her Senate seat as a stepping stone to the presidency the minute she announced her bid in a state she never lived in. That started the myth of inevitability which was clearly in retrospect a calculated plan leading up to this run for the Presidency.
A lot of people see through right through this and have serious doubts about her sincerity. Those doubts have only been exacerbated with her recent kitchen sink campaign tactics, but much of the Democratic establishment is still blind to this and thinks she will be competitive against McCain.
Her campaign has been based on her vaunted experience, but serving one term plus one year in the Senate is hardly experience when cast against McCain's undeniable experience in politics. She has only been an elected government official since 2000 and previously had no substantial role in any policy except the failed Hillarycare plan. Republicans will jump all over this, so she needs something else to sell herself to voters, but what is there? When compared to McCain she's equal to Obama in almost every way except for her negatives and lack of charisma.
Microsoft certainly did not damage its gaming platform by siding with HD-DVD. HD-DVD was always an add-on for the 360 and never a major selling point. This (along with questionable quality control) allowed Microsoft to release the 360 a year ahead of the PS3, gaining significant market share and pressuring developers to focus on creating games for the 360 rather than its competition. This strategy has paid off for Microsoft because those who wanted a gaming system got a gaming system as well as a large library of games. The attach rate for the 360 is currently the highest by far among the 3 consoles competing in this generation. As a gaming platform the 360 is doing pretty well for itself.
Sony, on the other hand, has been making progress in terms of consoles sold undoubtedly because of its blu-ray capabilities, but the slow start due to blue laser shortages and the high expense of blu-ray components has significantly hurt their sales. PS3 is still in 3rd place in terms of the attach rate and has suffered from developers supporting the 360 as the PS3's expense. In the end, these machines are primarily games consoles and their media playing capabilities are a secondary function. Microsoft focused on games as a selling point and has been the most successful in that respect while Sony focused on the media capability with Blu-Ray, but at significant expense. High manufacturing costs as well as studio support both took a toll on Sony's bottom line for a high-def disc market that is still in its infancy.
To the average Xbox 360 owner, the format war has been a non-issue because their console uses DVDs. Cross platform games still look equally good on both platforms, so the size constraints of DVDs is not yet apparent. This may change in the coming years, but for now DVD is still king in most living rooms.
You just slandered a large group of people and call it an 'unfortunate truth' after admitting the Republican party is large and diverse? There's nothing crazy about reinstituting the gold standard. You should read a little economic history before dismissing it so readily.
Ronald Reagan also incorporated a return to the gold standard into his platform in 1980, yet nobody thought it was crazy then because the dollar had been linked to gold up until 1971. If one believes in the efficiency of the free market and private enterprise, as many Republicans claim to do, one would also have to acknowledge that in the long varied history of commerce on earth, bimetallism had emerged as a dominant currency regime in the majority of economies until government fiat disrupted it. Nobel Prize economist Robert Mundell, one of the prime architects of the 'supply side revolution' which has greatly altered US fiscal policy since the 1980s is also an outspoken supporter of the gold standard. He's so wacky that the European Monetary Union is based on his concept of optimum currency areas and China and Turkey think he's so wacky they pay him to advise them on their currency policies. You could find a multitude of sane and intelligent economists who would extol the virtues of a gold standard and condemn the disruptive nature of central banks.
Everyone who laughs off the idea of abolishing the Fed turns around and decries the housing slump and subprime mortgage mess which unsurprisingly was an unwitting creation of the Fed, just as the Dot Com bust was. Yet it's crazy to want to get rid of an institution that is answerable to no one and has the ability to manipulate the wealth of the entire nation. I eat, sleep, and drink economics and am in awe at some of the elegant models that economists create, but I still think it is utterly insane that board of 12 unelected officials is tasked with the goal of looking at an incredibly large and complicated global economy and directing growth while trying to manage unemployment and inflation just by manipulating the interest rate. The largest single actor in the economy is expected to intervene without unforeseen consequences, yet getting rid of that actor is deemed crazy only because people are used to it (and its offshoot, the business cycle) in their lives.
People think a return to the gold standard and abolition of the Fed are crazy because somehow they seem like new concepts, but they're not. People are shocked because these ideas aren't introduced all too often in mainstream debate and Ron Paul doesn't do them justice when mentions them in the same sentence and goes on to the multitude of other ills in the economy. It's unfortunate that many of these ideas and warnings of crises to come seem crazy, but they aren't very far off base. Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani literally laughed at Ron Paul in the debates when he suggested that we're borrowing from China to pay for the war because it seemed like such an absurd idea. But afterwards when their advisers explained who the largest foreign holder of US bonds was, and that Paul was in fact correct, they started using it as their own talking points in the following debates.
And the racism claim is just a little bit disingenuous when you use your anecdotal evidence to pass judgment on a large group of people. Sure, there may be racists who are also in favor of small government, but there are far more people who care about small government and freedom for all people. I've witnessed racism among big government Democrat union members on election day no less. All that says is that racism unfortunately is still alive and well in America.
You know, I was thinking the same thing, but then I realized that the Secret Service is pretty good at what they do. You gotta think there are more people in the world who want to assassinate the current POTUS for the myriad of wrongs he's committed/overseen while in office than would want to do the same to Obama just because he's black. If it hasn't happened to Bush, I'm not too worried about Obama.