Let me spell it out for you. It is an example of a principle from the book "The Peter Principle", but it is not "The Peter Principle". Just because it came from the same book doesn't mean he was using the term appropriately. The Peter Principle is a well known business principle in its own right.
Oh, common. By that definition you have military grade boots, and military grade flashlights, and military grade sleeping bags... yes, all technically true, and all beside the point.
They didn't use anything (to my knowledge) that isn't normally stocked by large police departments. If the police and military happen to use the same tear gas, that doesn't make it military grade from a protest suppression point-of-view. (Using it in this context may be controversial in its own right, but there are legitimate police uses of the stuff.)
The Peter Principle is the principle that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
Federal resources are appreciated in an emergency. They save lives. Federal bullying is not appreciated in an emergency. It can jeopardize lives. There are examples of them doing it right, and of them doing it wrong. This UAV incident seems to be the latter.
That's a major part of the problem, thinking that the place is so different and magic is possible. People in politics in California attempt to defy reality and then it turns around and fucks them over.
Isn't that the truth.
You can't get the outcomes they are chasing with the revenue available and the current drains on the system.
There are two major classes of outcome being chased in California. The impossibly absurd, and the reasonably sane. The first is prevented by physics, psychology, or graft. The second is prevented by the people supporting the first. (This doesn't fall strictly on party lines. If the Republicans in CA had more power, I think there would be a near equal mix.)
Meanwhile the people with the actual power try to blame those that can't make as much noise.
True everywhere. CA isn't special in that.
You're just a bit confused over where the power in CA really is.
Does that sum up the point I've been trying to get across well enough?
Oh, they don't believe that about themselves. They think that we believe it. That's the problem.
As far as "distancing yourself" from Putin... he's just another dictator, albeit of a softer variety.
True. And you're right about the dangers of being buddy-buddy with him. We've certainly made that mistake in enough places. I just think that it's also a mistake to shun, slight, and/or belittle him.
There was no organisation, no goals, just a loose gathering of people who had nothing in common besides "I dont like something" and thought it would be a good idea to stand in one place together.
Uh, yeah. Very Tiananmen Square like. And there was organization, it just wasn't particularly centralized or well coordinated.
"University students who marched and gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu also voiced grievances against inflation, limited career prospects, and corruption of the party elite. They called for government accountability, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the restoration of workers' control over industry." -- wikipedia
Sound familiar?
Occupy Wall Street was nowhere near a serious protest, let alone actual rebellion.
Neither was Tiananmen Square. It was merely the seed of something the Chinese leaders saw as dangerous. It could have eventually lead to revolution. Here we've got the same thing, but our leaders are going to use very different tactics to defuse it. We're already pre-conditioned to be passive with short attention spans, and easily befuddled by complex issues.
To be fair, Tiananmen square did have at least an order of magnitude more protesters. How much of that may be a function of their larger population is unclear.
I mean they didn't have an actual goal, no manifesto, not even a somewhat clear idea of what they wanted.
Yes, they did... they had several (I haven't read them either, but they had them)... and yes they did.
Look kid - or at least I hope you are a kid and not some grown idiot wandering about with their eyes closed... Nice strawman... We don't all live in little unmoving bubbles without being aware of what is outside
Glass houses. You have not been more polite. I just chose to throw mud back. If you really want to get that petty, please note that you started it.
Low government revenue per head of population
California collects more taxes per capita than most other US states. It collects the most in absolute terms. You'll need to rethink this leg of your theory.
high expectations of outcomes from the low revenue
Sometimes reasonably high expectations from high tax revenue, wasted in ludicrous ways, or outright embezzled. Sometimes wasted voting on rainbows and unicorns.
and shortcuts which leave big enough holes that blood sucking weasels can get in to feast on what there is
Shortcut isn't the right word... but that's otherwise accurate. We seem to have a special case of that in CA.
Either way we are just arguing about what seems to me to be a textbook example of blame shifting from the powerful to the relatively powerless (unions, hippies, whoever shocks the most people and sells the most papers)
Here's one of those brilliant blind spots of yours. In CA, some unions are quite powerful politically. These unions share a real chunk of the blame for our fiscal problems. It's not a majority of the problem, but it is still quite real, and worth getting upset over. It is also emblematic of the fiscal mindset that has created the problem in the first place. You gain powerful political allies by buying them with public funds, taking no thought for the tax payers, or the solvency of the state. In a few years, you'll be out of office (term limits), and it will be someone else's problem.
If you lived here, you might already know this.
I can't remember the name of the elected piece of shit that got on the TV and radio and directly blamed California's economic problems on a pay rise for prison officers
So? Your skin is so thin that a blatant lie like that will offend you from another country? I'm going to assume that your portrayal is accurate, for the moment, and ask: Don't you think we also saw that statement for the trash that it was? That's actually fairly mild as blathering US rhetoric goes. (doubly so in CA)
Such avoidance of responsibility directly relates to your post way above and I'm sorry if I've insulted whatever political tribe you swear alliegence to by bringing up such a blatantly obvious example that I thought many readers would be familiar with.
You want to know what's got me so ticked (aside from the personal insult that you started with)? It's the chronic avoidance of responsibility that's been coming from the Democrat party in California. The knee-jerk rush to defend unions is an endemic part of the problem. You actually sounded like a career politician when defending them. "They are unions. They are sacred. They can do no evil, for they are holy." That is far worse than the statement that you're deriding, because many sleepwalking voters still believe it. Until we can call the special interests in CA for what they are, and call them on their lies and hypocrisies, we can't have a straight political conversation. It's all muddied in wishful idealism (Which CA has developed to an art-form).
And no lifeboat in sight over the last few decades plus nobody with the will to put one together in the next few decades.
Reread what I said. We'll default long before our infrastructure gasps its last breath. And I mean that literally. We actually might default. Some of our municipalities
That still leaves people looking for work in the event someone figures out you have to spend money to hire people again.
Not necessarily. That depends on the size of the rebate, and the effect is really hard to predict aforehand.
And GDP is a lousy indicator of the country's productive wealth, by the way. It's artificially propped up to bolster US swagger. It includes lots of massive financial transactions where no goods are produced, and no real products are exchanged. It's useless for most purposes.
Perhaps a good start would be a compromise. We should remove the regulations on food stamps and welfare that actually prohibit what would otherwise be considered financial responsibility for the poor. Allow them to start having actual on-the-books savings so they can work their way out of the hole (save for transportation, save for education, etc)...
There's some value here, especially in the area of training them to be responsible. But, oh, the mess it would make politically. Even if it were pulled off, it would be chock full of loopholes, abuses, and other problems. Yes, I have grown quite cynical of government processes.
... and make sure that the benefits never fall faster than wages rise (no more loosing $1000 in benefits for making an extra $100 in wages)
I'm tracking with you on this one. It seems like a no-brainer. The argument could even be made from either side of the aisle. Has nobody in government heard of gradated change? (We need to convince some systems people to run for office. This is ridiculous.)
We need to start in that direction now so political inertia and anti-poor agendas don't cause mass suffering and rioting in the streets when the need comes along.
I don't think there are any anti-poor agendas, strictly speaking. There are pro-being-poor agendas, mismanaged. There are anti-being-poor agendas, also mismanaged. There are pro-scamming-everybody agendas...
At this point, just getting the political machinery accustomed to doing as much as we can rather than doing the very least we can get away with will be a plus.
Hear, hear. More than a plus -- a major accomplishment.
I'm beginning to think that you're simply trolling.
We don't all live in little unmoving bubbles without being aware of what is outside or where the bubble has been before.
No, but I'm not stupid enough to tell you the root cause of the Greek financial collapse, for instance. I can see a bunch of the causes... but I can't unabashedly declare root causes. I don't live there, and I can only theorize based on what has been reported.
Why you seem to think you've got California pegged is beyond me. You're clueless, but I just can't figure out why you don't know that.
Also in CALIFORNIA the problem used to be republicans (particularly with the electricity hassles that were a global laughing stock - brownouts in a large economy? What a joke!)
Both parties had some responsibility for that one... but primarily private fraud. The Democrats held power at that point. I don't know if either party would have seen through the scams, but I know the Democrats didn't. And no, the Republicans didn't mastermind it. It was the same kind of crooks that caused the housing bubble.
California is heading towards the sort of infrastructure problems that had the Chinese importing "chinese gooseberries" as kiwifruit from New Zealand because they just couldn't move their local stuff around reliably.
We have a criminally aging infrastructure, but we're several decades away from anything on that order of magnitude. We'll either have fixed our budget problems by then, or have defaulted in a major way.
Those who are not looking now will still not be looking.
Ok, but:
10 - 9 = 1
Those who are looking will stop. That is what you were using those numbers to represent, were you not? And those who might otherwise start looking again, won't.
They're not productively working now. In fact, there was so little need for their labor that they have given up the possibility that someone might hire them.
You've got that dangerously wrong. There was, and IS a demand for them by employers across the country. The problem lies with government and wall street. The government has enacted all kinds of disincentives to hire or retain workers (specifics of the ACA are only the latest blunders). Wall street has control of the pocket book (of big corporations) and credit lines (of everyone else) and won't budge while they're spooked. All this talk about the recovery going swell is to try to convince medium sized investment firms to loosen up and let the recovery truly start.
It's infuriating that we have people who need to work, and work that needs to be done, but the cowards in power won't permit the two to come together.
Owners, managers, and CEOs are tearing their hair out trying to figure out how to expand their business (read: hire more people), but can't, primarily due to artificial external forces.
I don''t want the basic income implemented 'later', I want it implemented now
I know you do. We just can't do it. The only reason we live as well as we do is because of the trade deficit we have with China. It's a lot like buying stuff on credit. We (and they) can't sustain it forever. We'll need to pay the piper.
When we can actually sustain a guaranteed minimum rebate, it is a solution worth discussing. It addresses (or tries to address) problems looming on the horizon. Until then, it's just a dream.
Because we are on the verge of something tianamin square level in the states. Despite how much people want to bury their heads in the sand.
The irony here is thick. If we were going to have a Tianamin Square incident, it would have happened at Occupy Wall Street. This regime has far more subtly techniques to placate the masses (civilized?). They don't need to use military force for it.
I think you read me backwards. If 10% are unemployed and seeking a job and a new program causes 9% to stop looking for work, how many are left unemployed and looking? (1%) That's fairly self-evident.
Yes... 10 - 9 = 1... but that's beside the point. The issue with unemployment isn't how many people are looking for work, it's how many people aren't working. The unemployment rate right now looks almost halfway decent, but it's deceptive because people have stopped looking for work, and therefore are no longer counted. The true unemployment rate is higher. If you pay people, and they voluntarily drop out of the work force, you've successfully incentivized raising the true unemployment levels, or masking them.
I find it interesting that my plan (not really mine, I am one of many that advocates it) cannot work because the government would never get rid of regulations but the very first step in your plan...
You noticed. It's a difference in approach and emphasis. To borrow the quote: "You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays."
It's what we need today. It can be done today. We don't need this years, from now. We certainly don't need it decades from now. We need it today.
Your plan says that we'll get around to it eventually, if things start to look good enough. When politicians do that, the activity in question almost never happens. Instead, they readjust the precondition, or forget about it. If conditions become right for a guaranteed government rebate attempt, we can revisit these issue further... but we need them now.
Besides, I did admit that the political will is simply not present. That is the issue that must be tackled first.
Though I do agree with you that regulations need to be reduced and simplified. I also agree that corporations in their current form must go.
Good. That means we're not as far off as it otherwise sounds.
Unions of course rarely have anything to do with such waste but are a convenient "other" to blame. The most insane example I've seen of such blame shifting was an attempt to blame the enormous and long running government budget problems in California on a single instance of prison officers asking for higher wages - trying to shift the blame for a couple of decades of incompetance onto a single action by a union!
Nice strawman you've attacked but I'm not even in your country but I'm able to see the problem goes across party lines.
Oh, so you're going to diagnose the fiscal problems of California, but you don't even live in the country. Smart.
The problems in the USA cross party lines. I'm really ticked at the national Republican and Democrat parties. But in CALIFORNIA the problem is DEMOCRATS. The US isn't homogeneous. There are states being ruined by the Republicans, states being ruined by the Democrats, and states being ruined by both. Unions here are lousy because they are permitted and incentivized to be.
But then, you don't care. You don't live here. You just want to feel smarter than someone who does.
You, sir, are a jerk. And they say that Americans are arrogant. What a farce.
Debt money loaned to nations at compounded interest can never pay that debt...
I'm going to assume that you're aware that this is an oversimplification.
(Things get more complex in the EU, so I'm not positive that this is always the case.)
Governments don't take out loans. They sell bonds. Bonds have a face value, and a maturation date. Bonds sell for as high a value as they can fetch in the market place. The sales price reflects confidence in the agency's ability to pay-out at maturation. When bonds come due, governments sell more bonds, to pay off the old ones. Because bonds are payed out at face value, but don't sell for quite as much, they must either pay the difference, or issue more bonds to make up for it. Technically, there is no compound interest, but the effect is almost the same (follows the same mathematical rules). Perhaps the key difference is that the rate is not fixed, but floating, and is driven by some measure of perceived trustworthiness.
Bonds are the credit cards of government. And like credit cards, they allow both responsible use, and reckless spending. Governments that don't zero out their account periodically (pay off all bonds without fresh issuance) are living on credit. The end results are predictable, and tragic.
(Said as a resident of the State of California, where we too, are broke.)
You come across as a moron with a reading comprehension problem. Then again, you are a random poster on the Internet. Who'da thought?
Since you're having such problems with the obvious, let me spell it out for you:
THE PROBLEM IS THE THIEVING CABAL OF DEMOCRATS IN THE STATE LEGISLATURE
The unions are a problem, but are a relative footnote.
Let me guess, you're registered as a Democrat, and therefore you feel they can do nothing wrong. You feel a need to defend them, even as they fleece you because your pride is at stake. You can't even admit it to yourself. If that's the case, then you ought to feel deeply, deeply ashamed for being a part of the problem. I, on the other hand, realize that the Republican party is run by a different variety of crooks. But here in California, it is the DEMOCRAT variety of crooks that are dooming us.
And you have the gall to tell me my eyes are closed. Open yours.
In international politics, surprises are bad, bad news. They make you look like you're not in control. That's precisely why Putin went along with this in the first place. It makes the US look like it's not in control, and Russia is. Kerry absolutely didn't see this one coming. (He may have secretly been hoping for something like it, but he really didn't expect the Russian back-hand.)
If only it was a single action of a single union. California is broke. The Democrats have spent us into oblivion. The unions (with their ridiculous retirement packages) are only one way that they've managed to squander our money, and all the money they've managed to borrow.
And no, I recognize that it's not all unions in CA. It's not even all public employee unions.
It's going to be a real eye-opener to the rest of the country when we start defaulting. If the rest of the country doesn't bail us out (and with what?), it could easily be the first domino towards a real depression.
When you hear someone cry wolf about a union it's best to see where the money is really going instead of listening to the distraction.
No, when you hear someone warn you about a union, you should ask two questions: "What else have they been up to?" and "What else is this an indication of?"
Slashdot Mirror
When I quote wikipedia it's usually because I'm too lazy to go look for a better source.
Just don't start out with insults. You'll find a lot fewer thin-skinned people that way.
Granted. Glad our pain is good for something.
Not that one, near as I know. (but not entirely impossible)
Let me spell it out for you. It is an example of a principle from the book "The Peter Principle", but it is not "The Peter Principle". Just because it came from the same book doesn't mean he was using the term appropriately. The Peter Principle is a well known business principle in its own right.
Oh, common. By that definition you have military grade boots, and military grade flashlights, and military grade sleeping bags... yes, all technically true, and all beside the point.
They didn't use anything (to my knowledge) that isn't normally stocked by large police departments. If the police and military happen to use the same tear gas, that doesn't make it military grade from a protest suppression point-of-view. (Using it in this context may be controversial in its own right, but there are legitimate police uses of the stuff.)
Uhm, no. This is the Peter Principle:
Federal resources are appreciated in an emergency. They save lives. Federal bullying is not appreciated in an emergency. It can jeopardize lives. There are examples of them doing it right, and of them doing it wrong. This UAV incident seems to be the latter.
Sure. What's your noun to define, in general, a remote controlled unmanned vehicle?
We'll start a campaign to have your word replace "drone" in the Oxford English, Merriam Webster, Collins dictionaries immediately.
Before the word "drone" really took off, they were called UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle).
(Drone is actually a broader term that could refer to land or sea based semi/fully-autonomous vehicles.)
Isn't that the truth.
There are two major classes of outcome being chased in California. The impossibly absurd, and the reasonably sane. The first is prevented by physics, psychology, or graft. The second is prevented by the people supporting the first. (This doesn't fall strictly on party lines. If the Republicans in CA had more power, I think there would be a near equal mix.)
True everywhere. CA isn't special in that.
You're just a bit confused over where the power in CA really is.
I think so.
Not military force. Overzealous police force has been reported, but nothing military grade.
True. And you're right about the dangers of being buddy-buddy with him. We've certainly made that mistake in enough places. I just think that it's also a mistake to shun, slight, and/or belittle him.
It's not a strawman. It's just not true in most of the world, and you're having trouble coming to grips with it. It is true in California.
Uh, yeah. Very Tiananmen Square like. And there was organization, it just wasn't particularly centralized or well coordinated.
"University students who marched and gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu also voiced grievances against inflation, limited career prospects, and corruption of the party elite. They called for government accountability, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the restoration of workers' control over industry." -- wikipedia
Sound familiar?
Neither was Tiananmen Square. It was merely the seed of something the Chinese leaders saw as dangerous. It could have eventually lead to revolution. Here we've got the same thing, but our leaders are going to use very different tactics to defuse it. We're already pre-conditioned to be passive with short attention spans, and easily befuddled by complex issues.
To be fair, Tiananmen square did have at least an order of magnitude more protesters. How much of that may be a function of their larger population is unclear.
Yes, they did... they had several (I haven't read them either, but they had them)... and yes they did.
Glass houses. You have not been more polite. I just chose to throw mud back. If you really want to get that petty, please note that you started it.
California collects more taxes per capita than most other US states. It collects the most in absolute terms. You'll need to rethink this leg of your theory.
Sometimes reasonably high expectations from high tax revenue, wasted in ludicrous ways, or outright embezzled. Sometimes wasted voting on rainbows and unicorns.
Shortcut isn't the right word... but that's otherwise accurate. We seem to have a special case of that in CA.
Here's one of those brilliant blind spots of yours. In CA, some unions are quite powerful politically. These unions share a real chunk of the blame for our fiscal problems. It's not a majority of the problem, but it is still quite real, and worth getting upset over. It is also emblematic of the fiscal mindset that has created the problem in the first place. You gain powerful political allies by buying them with public funds, taking no thought for the tax payers, or the solvency of the state. In a few years, you'll be out of office (term limits), and it will be someone else's problem.
If you lived here, you might already know this.
So? Your skin is so thin that a blatant lie like that will offend you from another country? I'm going to assume that your portrayal is accurate, for the moment, and ask: Don't you think we also saw that statement for the trash that it was? That's actually fairly mild as blathering US rhetoric goes. (doubly so in CA)
You want to know what's got me so ticked (aside from the personal insult that you started with)? It's the chronic avoidance of responsibility that's been coming from the Democrat party in California. The knee-jerk rush to defend unions is an endemic part of the problem. You actually sounded like a career politician when defending them. "They are unions. They are sacred. They can do no evil, for they are holy." That is far worse than the statement that you're deriding, because many sleepwalking voters still believe it. Until we can call the special interests in CA for what they are, and call them on their lies and hypocrisies, we can't have a straight political conversation. It's all muddied in wishful idealism (Which CA has developed to an art-form).
Reread what I said. We'll default long before our infrastructure gasps its last breath. And I mean that literally. We actually might default. Some of our municipalities
Not necessarily. That depends on the size of the rebate, and the effect is really hard to predict aforehand.
And GDP is a lousy indicator of the country's productive wealth, by the way. It's artificially propped up to bolster US swagger. It includes lots of massive financial transactions where no goods are produced, and no real products are exchanged. It's useless for most purposes.
There's some value here, especially in the area of training them to be responsible. But, oh, the mess it would make politically. Even if it were pulled off, it would be chock full of loopholes, abuses, and other problems. Yes, I have grown quite cynical of government processes.
I'm tracking with you on this one. It seems like a no-brainer. The argument could even be made from either side of the aisle. Has nobody in government heard of gradated change? (We need to convince some systems people to run for office. This is ridiculous.)
I don't think there are any anti-poor agendas, strictly speaking. There are pro-being-poor agendas, mismanaged. There are anti-being-poor agendas, also mismanaged. There are pro-scamming-everybody agendas...
Hear, hear. More than a plus -- a major accomplishment.
No, but I'm not stupid enough to tell you the root cause of the Greek financial collapse, for instance. I can see a bunch of the causes... but I can't unabashedly declare root causes. I don't live there, and I can only theorize based on what has been reported.
Why you seem to think you've got California pegged is beyond me. You're clueless, but I just can't figure out why you don't know that.
Both parties had some responsibility for that one... but primarily private fraud. The Democrats held power at that point. I don't know if either party would have seen through the scams, but I know the Democrats didn't. And no, the Republicans didn't mastermind it. It was the same kind of crooks that caused the housing bubble.
We have a criminally aging infrastructure, but we're several decades away from anything on that order of magnitude. We'll either have fixed our budget problems by then, or have defaulted in a major way.
Ok, but:
10 - 9 = 1
Those who are looking will stop. That is what you were using those numbers to represent, were you not? And those who might otherwise start looking again, won't.
You've got that dangerously wrong. There was, and IS a demand for them by employers across the country. The problem lies with government and wall street. The government has enacted all kinds of disincentives to hire or retain workers (specifics of the ACA are only the latest blunders). Wall street has control of the pocket book (of big corporations) and credit lines (of everyone else) and won't budge while they're spooked. All this talk about the recovery going swell is to try to convince medium sized investment firms to loosen up and let the recovery truly start.
It's infuriating that we have people who need to work, and work that needs to be done, but the cowards in power won't permit the two to come together.
Owners, managers, and CEOs are tearing their hair out trying to figure out how to expand their business (read: hire more people), but can't, primarily due to artificial external forces.
I know you do. We just can't do it. The only reason we live as well as we do is because of the trade deficit we have with China. It's a lot like buying stuff on credit. We (and they) can't sustain it forever. We'll need to pay the piper.
When we can actually sustain a guaranteed minimum rebate, it is a solution worth discussing. It addresses (or tries to address) problems looming on the horizon. Until then, it's just a dream.
The irony here is thick. If we were going to have a Tianamin Square incident, it would have happened at Occupy Wall Street. This regime has far more subtly techniques to placate the masses (civilized?). They don't need to use military force for it.
Uh, yes, and yes? The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Yes... 10 - 9 = 1 ... but that's beside the point. The issue with unemployment isn't how many people are looking for work, it's how many people aren't working. The unemployment rate right now looks almost halfway decent, but it's deceptive because people have stopped looking for work, and therefore are no longer counted. The true unemployment rate is higher. If you pay people, and they voluntarily drop out of the work force, you've successfully incentivized raising the true unemployment levels, or masking them.
You noticed. It's a difference in approach and emphasis. To borrow the quote: "You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays."
It's what we need today. It can be done today. We don't need this years, from now. We certainly don't need it decades from now. We need it today.
Your plan says that we'll get around to it eventually, if things start to look good enough. When politicians do that, the activity in question almost never happens. Instead, they readjust the precondition, or forget about it. If conditions become right for a guaranteed government rebate attempt, we can revisit these issue further... but we need them now.
Besides, I did admit that the political will is simply not present. That is the issue that must be tackled first.
Good. That means we're not as far off as it otherwise sounds.
Oh, so you're going to diagnose the fiscal problems of California, but you don't even live in the country. Smart.
The problems in the USA cross party lines. I'm really ticked at the national Republican and Democrat parties. But in CALIFORNIA the problem is DEMOCRATS. The US isn't homogeneous. There are states being ruined by the Republicans, states being ruined by the Democrats, and states being ruined by both. Unions here are lousy because they are permitted and incentivized to be.
But then, you don't care. You don't live here. You just want to feel smarter than someone who does.
You, sir, are a jerk. And they say that Americans are arrogant. What a farce.
I'm going to assume that you're aware that this is an oversimplification.
(Things get more complex in the EU, so I'm not positive that this is always the case.)
Governments don't take out loans. They sell bonds. Bonds have a face value, and a maturation date. Bonds sell for as high a value as they can fetch in the market place. The sales price reflects confidence in the agency's ability to pay-out at maturation. When bonds come due, governments sell more bonds, to pay off the old ones. Because bonds are payed out at face value, but don't sell for quite as much, they must either pay the difference, or issue more bonds to make up for it. Technically, there is no compound interest, but the effect is almost the same (follows the same mathematical rules). Perhaps the key difference is that the rate is not fixed, but floating, and is driven by some measure of perceived trustworthiness.
Bonds are the credit cards of government. And like credit cards, they allow both responsible use, and reckless spending. Governments that don't zero out their account periodically (pay off all bonds without fresh issuance) are living on credit. The end results are predictable, and tragic.
(Said as a resident of the State of California, where we too, are broke.)
Only in California.
You come across as a moron with a reading comprehension problem. Then again, you are a random poster on the Internet. Who'da thought?
Since you're having such problems with the obvious, let me spell it out for you:
THE PROBLEM IS THE THIEVING CABAL OF DEMOCRATS IN THE STATE LEGISLATURE
The unions are a problem, but are a relative footnote.
Let me guess, you're registered as a Democrat, and therefore you feel they can do nothing wrong. You feel a need to defend them, even as they fleece you because your pride is at stake. You can't even admit it to yourself. If that's the case, then you ought to feel deeply, deeply ashamed for being a part of the problem. I, on the other hand, realize that the Republican party is run by a different variety of crooks. But here in California, it is the DEMOCRAT variety of crooks that are dooming us.
And you have the gall to tell me my eyes are closed. Open yours.
In international politics, surprises are bad, bad news. They make you look like you're not in control. That's precisely why Putin went along with this in the first place. It makes the US look like it's not in control, and Russia is. Kerry absolutely didn't see this one coming. (He may have secretly been hoping for something like it, but he really didn't expect the Russian back-hand.)
If only it was a single action of a single union. California is broke. The Democrats have spent us into oblivion. The unions (with their ridiculous retirement packages) are only one way that they've managed to squander our money, and all the money they've managed to borrow.
And no, I recognize that it's not all unions in CA. It's not even all public employee unions.
It's going to be a real eye-opener to the rest of the country when we start defaulting. If the rest of the country doesn't bail us out (and with what?), it could easily be the first domino towards a real depression.
No, when you hear someone warn you about a union, you should ask two questions: "What else have they been up to?" and "What else is this an indication of?"