"checks and balances in our system would make it virtually impossible for his administration to ruin the currency."
It wouldn't be the President's fault entirely. However, the government is running $1T+ deficits and there is no solid plan to balance the budget anytime soon. You also have the Federal Reserve's "Quantitative Easing" policy where they artificially inflate the money supply to purchase treasury securities that enable those deficits.
The fact that QE is necessary clearly indicates that demand for U.S. Treasury debt (at these low interest rates) has weakened significantly. How long can the artificial expansion of the money supply continue before people start to lose faith in the currency?
I'm not predicting imminent collapse, but I think that shorting the U.S. dollar is a pretty good investment, and there's no way in hell I would make a 10 year loan to the federal government at a yield of 1.71%.
The only reason the federal government can borrow at such absurdly low rates is because the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air to buy up treasury securities.
If the federal government had to sell over $1T worth of debt on the open market every year, yields would be considerably higher.
The very existence of the 'QE' program is a signal that demand for U.S. debt at these rates is drying up.
"...gold's value is inflated by speculators and wealth storage..."
Gold's usefulness as a medium of wealth storage is definitely a huge portion of the value. Ten years from now (barring some unprecedented discovery or new matter transmutation technique) it will STILL be a huge portion of the value. Wouldn't that qualify as "intrinsic" value?
Can we at least conclude that they were not TEA-party sympathizers who were pissed off about tax day and gun control... and then decided to murder innocent people to somehow vent their frustrations?
We had almost zero information earlier in the week, but that didn't stop people from making wild guesses suggesting that it was anti-government, christian, tax protestor, NRA members, now did it?
If government could be trusted to serve the people and to be genuinely transparent in its activities AND if we had a MSM which still acted as the "fourth estate" rather than serving as the propaganda wing of the establishment, there wouldn't BE an 'infowars.com'
When they act in their own self interest and exploit sensational incidents like 9-11 and falsify intelligence data to pursue a pre-planned political agenda (Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, Iraq War, etc.) it raises natural doubts as to the truth of any narrative they try to sell. The media is largely complicit, for instance in selling the 'WMD' story.
Sadly, I think the sociopaths who control our government would be more than willing to hurt innocent Americans to further their objectives. The coincidence of this attack with tax day and the active gun control debate definitely had me concerned about the possibility.
Wish I had some mod points. The coincidence with tax day has had the political left excited all week with the hopes that this was someone with anti-government views. Now you're getting modded troll/flamebait for rubbing their faces in it.
Unfortunately, the bill got 288 votes with 10 abstentions. They would only need 290 to get the 2/3 majority required to override a veto. I think We, The People have lost another round to the feds.
If we had only 50K people in a district, there would be over 6000 people in the House of Reps.
What we need is a small federal government that exercises only its specifically delegated powers, with ALL other powers being reserved to the states or to the people. You could keep districts small for the state legislatures. I wouldn't want any more A$$#0!Z in DC than we already have.
If you dilute the money supply by printing, you simply de-value every existing unit of currency. This is inflation by the most basic definition. More money chasing a fixed supply of goods.
"governments are forever... They have forever to pay back."
I'll accept this premise for the sake of argument. They may have "forever" to pay back, but there is a limit on the amount of debt they can carry. When interest expense overwhelms their capacity to generate revenue, they simply cannot keep borrowing more.
"in fact, by spending, they can even make [economic recovery] happen sooner:)"
Utterly naive. If it was THAT simple, why wouldn't every government in the world just keep borrowing and printing until they attained prosperity? Why wouldn't government print money and give everyone a government job which pays $100K per year? Wouldn't we all be prosperous then?
GDP = C + I + G + (x-i)
Debt can give you a short term increase in GDP, but you absolutely cannot keep borrowing to prop up GDP on an ongoing basis.
"in the long run the economy always grows..."
There has been ZERO material growth in the U.S. economy in the last 30 years. There has not been a single year in which GDP growth exceeded growth in the total amount of debt in the economy.
2008 should have clued people in to the fact that you cannot build a sustainable economy based on debt-financed consumption. No matter how much the government borrows and spends, there is no chance that this spending will re-start the 30 year borrowing binge. The consumer is tapped out. That's why $5T in deficit spending over the past 4 years has done nothing to fix the economy.
I stopped paying for television service about 10 years ago.
The OP is claiming that government deficit spending is necessary to fund research, make investments and create opportunities. THAT is the "socialist nonsense" to which I was referring.
Austerity means cutting government spending so that expenditures are = tax revenues. Something that should be a total no-brainer. Only fools think that deficit spending is a solution to a debt problem.
I think that's exactly what the OP (Industrial Complex) was pointing out. We have a "left" and a "right" but they all committed to big government and authoritarianism.
The president threatened to veto the 2012 NDAA as well. Then, they amended the bill to grant government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without charge trial or access to legal counsel and he signed.
Guess he's holding out for the "Internet kill switch" provision he's been wanting for years.
"we're proposing a ban on the ultimate object that makes pulling a trigger the difference between life and death."
No, you're not. You're only proposing to take those objects away from law abiding citizens. Criminals who prey upon law abiding citizens will not comply with your ban. AFAIK, you're not planning to disarm government employees either.
The frustration of this whole gun debate is talking with people who refuse to acknowledge the pointlessness of making new laws based on the assumption that criminals will obey them and being labeled "paranoid" because you understand history and know that the U.S. government is nothing special when it comes to the potential abuse of power.
Excellent point. One that I've been attempting to make repeatedly with my unresponsive elected asshatz and anyone else who will listen. Emotional anecdotes are a ridiculous basis for public policy. If some serial child rapist escapes justice because the police obtained evidence with an illegal search, that doesn't mean that we need to undermine the 4th Amendment so that no child rapist ever escapes justice.
Yes, the murders and attempted murders in Boston clearly demonstrate that a person intent on violence and mass murder will find a way to do it, with or without firearms. In a free society, people can and will abuse their freedoms. Unfortunately, there are many people who would obviously prefer the "safety" of a total police state as opposed to endure the entirely minuscule risks associated with freedom.
From your first paragraph, maybe the problem is the public schools not teaching people about the concept of probability or statistical likelihood?
"in a semi-depressed economy, any kind of spending by the government, even on inane things, will turn out to help recovery,"
NO! That's absolute nonsense! Government borrowing to make "investments" isn't magic. It's EXACTLY like borrowing and investing in the private sector. Your investment either generates positive returns or it's money wasted.
Given the average tax rate of 20%, a government project must produce at least $5 of new GDP growth for every dollar spent. Do you honestly think that the $1.2T they are borrowing and spending this year is going to produce $6T in GDP growth? Is the $5T they've borrowed and spent in the last 4 years going to produce $25T in GDP growth? Obviously NOT.
You borrow money to give someone $1 in unemployment benefits. Assume they pay 20 cents back in taxes. They spend 80 cents at Wal Mart. Wal Mart or the shareholders then pay 16 cents in taxes. Then, they buy 44 cents worth of stuff Made in China and pay workers, truck drivers, etc. 20 cents. The workers then pay 4 cents in taxes.
Congrats! You've just "invested" $1 and gotten back 40 cents. Where do you get the other 60 cents to pay back the loan Mr. Keynes?
"Rich economies are rich. One of the side effect of being rich is that you can pile on proportionately more debt. Which is completely fine"
There's the fatal flaw in your reasoning "more debt" is NOT "completely fine". More debt == more risk that you won't pay back your creditors, which means they demand higher interest rates on any new credit. More interest expense means LESS revenue being spent on government services. It's a destructive cycle and the longer you continue, the worse the inevitable pain will be. The European countries hit their credit limits and had to stop the deficit spending game..
In places like the USA, the exact same dynamic is in effect, but the government can keep the game going by expanding the money supply. Have you heard of "Quantitative Easing"? Basically, the Federal Reserve is artificially expanding the money supply (by $TRILLIONS) to finance the government deficits. That artificial demand is the ONLY thing keeping yields on U.S. debt at such ridiculously low levels. This monetary game can keep the deficit party going, but the outcome is certain. It ends with government balancing budgets(austerity), defaulting on debt or a catastrophic currency collapse. With these cowards controlling the USA government, option #3 is likely.
"Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research..."
Socialist nonsense.
In almost all of these countries, we're talking about "austerity" that is necessary to balance budgets. i.e. forcing government to spend only what it takes in via tax revenue. Oh, how terrible this is!
A government cannot keep borrowing and accumulating debt forever. At some point, it is a mathematical certainty that the interest burden on that debt will exceed 100% of government revenue and eventually 100% of GDP. Of course it never reaches that point because people start demanding double-digit interest rates or stop lending you money long before that.
Before all the bailouts and ECB interventions, the PIIGS were looking at rapidly rising interest rates. They called it FORCED austerity because they had no choice. more borrowing would create an even bigger interest expense burden, leaving less revenue for your precious socialist programs.
You can't use more debt to cure a debt problem. Austerity sucks in the short term, but the sooner these countries get their budgets balanced, the sooner growth can occur.
The problem is that governments never, ever engage in the "saving" part.
The idea that government should BORROW and spend in bad times is idiotic. There is nothing special about government when it comes to borrowing and spending except the interest rate. If their "capital project" doesn't produce positive ROI, it hurts the economy in the long run. Assuming a tax rate of 20%, a "capital project" would need to generate 5X what it cost in NEW economic activity. Those investments are few and far between, and there is NO WAY that the $5T that the government has borrowed and spent in the last 5 years will produce $25T in GDP growth.
"So far, "austerity" isn't working..."
GDP = C + I + G + (x-i)
Cutting 'G' reduces GDP in the short term. It definitely hurts, but more borrowing is not the answer. Give them 6 years of balanced budgets and we'll see what "works".
The USA government has been borrowing and spending like mad for the last 4 years, accumulating over $5T in new debt. The deficit is around 7-8% of GDP and the USA is seeing less than 3% GDP growth? See the above equation. Obviously massive deficits are not "working".
Government debt addiction is like a personal heroin addiction. Another shot right now wards off the pain of withdrawal symptoms in the immediate term but eventually kills the subject. Austerity is "getting clean". Miserable, but essential for long term health.
The source of most of the federal government debt is renegade government spending. Federal outlays have more than doubled since 2000. They increased spending by 18% in 2009 alone! If these A$$#0lZ in Washington D.C. had kept their insane spending in line with private sector GDP growth, they would now have a balanced budget.
I would hypothesize that the trend and YOY changes are a lot more important than the debt to GDP ratio. After WW2, the USA had a huge debt to GDP ratio. However, the government cut spending by 60% over the course of 2 years and successfully set themselves on a course to pay down the debt. This helped usher in a new era of economic prosperity. Currently, the USA debt to GDP ratio is ~1 and the CBO projections indicate perpetual deficits over at least the next decade. The economic prospects of a nation that is in debt which they are steadily reducing and a nation that is in debt while steadily accumulating more are very different.
Agree with most of what you said, but gone are the days when you see a massive spike in PC sales due to the newest release of Windows or customers rushing out to buy the upgrade for their current OS.
"No other OS offers what windows can at that price-point."
Yes, but what does Windows 8 give you that you couldn't do with Windows 7 or even Windows XP? Windows isn't going away, but I doubt that many PC users, even businesses, are shelling out $$$ to upgrade their OEM versions of Windows. They'll just wait until they have to replace the hardware. Thus, the fate of Windows is tied to the fortunes of the devices which run it. As PC sales shrink, so too will sales of Windows licenses. It's not "going away" but it's going to be nothing like the old days.
STFU you schmuck. Nobody is claiming firearms are a panacea for safety. If anything, this incident should prove that people intent on terror and mass murder will commit their crimes regardless of what anti-gun laws the government forces on us.
Can't explain birthdays and oil spills. However, Tim McVeigh definitely planned the OK City bombing as a response to the Waco massacre. Erik Harris had delusions of "out-doing" McVeigh (Thank $deity his bombs malfunctioned or he might have succeeded) and also timed his attack to coincide.
In this day and age when the government will "never let a crisis go to waste", is it any surprise that people would quickly start thinking along those lines?
The 9-11 attacks have been used as an excuse for two full scale wars, a huge amount of authoritarian legislation and abuses like indefinite detention and arbitrary assassinations of U.S. citizens.
The Newtown CT murders are being used an excuse to further a pernicious anti-gun agenda.
It's obvious to assume that these bombings in Boston will be used as an excuse for even more government surveillance and other restrictive measures to make us "safe".
It doesn't really matter if it was some dickhead with a grudge or a foreign terrorist. Government has demonstrated that they will use these incidents to accumulate power. I feel terrible for the victims, but I feel dread about what new police state measures the government will impose on the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not talking about one-off anecdotal stories - I'm talking about long term trends."
Bitcoin does not HAVE a "long term trend", so by your own admission, we don't have the data to make a valid comparison to "standard" currencies.
"checks and balances in our system would make it virtually impossible for his administration to ruin the currency."
It wouldn't be the President's fault entirely. However, the government is running $1T+ deficits and there is no solid plan to balance the budget anytime soon. You also have the Federal Reserve's "Quantitative Easing" policy where they artificially inflate the money supply to purchase treasury securities that enable those deficits.
The fact that QE is necessary clearly indicates that demand for U.S. Treasury debt (at these low interest rates) has weakened significantly. How long can the artificial expansion of the money supply continue before people start to lose faith in the currency?
I'm not predicting imminent collapse, but I think that shorting the U.S. dollar is a pretty good investment, and there's no way in hell I would make a 10 year loan to the federal government at a yield of 1.71%.
Look up "Quantitative Easing"
The only reason the federal government can borrow at such absurdly low rates is because the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air to buy up treasury securities.
If the federal government had to sell over $1T worth of debt on the open market every year, yields would be considerably higher.
The very existence of the 'QE' program is a signal that demand for U.S. debt at these rates is drying up.
"...gold's value is inflated by speculators and wealth storage..."
Gold's usefulness as a medium of wealth storage is definitely a huge portion of the value. Ten years from now (barring some unprecedented discovery or new matter transmutation technique) it will STILL be a huge portion of the value. Wouldn't that qualify as "intrinsic" value?
Can we at least conclude that they were not TEA-party sympathizers who were pissed off about tax day and gun control ... and then decided to murder innocent people to somehow vent their frustrations?
We had almost zero information earlier in the week, but that didn't stop people from making wild guesses suggesting that it was anti-government, christian, tax protestor, NRA members, now did it?
If government could be trusted to serve the people and to be genuinely transparent in its activities AND if we had a MSM which still acted as the "fourth estate" rather than serving as the propaganda wing of the establishment, there wouldn't BE an 'infowars.com'
When they act in their own self interest and exploit sensational incidents like 9-11 and falsify intelligence data to pursue a pre-planned political agenda (Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, Iraq War, etc.) it raises natural doubts as to the truth of any narrative they try to sell. The media is largely complicit, for instance in selling the 'WMD' story.
Sadly, I think the sociopaths who control our government would be more than willing to hurt innocent Americans to further their objectives. The coincidence of this attack with tax day and the active gun control debate definitely had me concerned about the possibility.
Wish I had some mod points. The coincidence with tax day has had the political left excited all week with the hopes that this was someone with anti-government views. Now you're getting modded troll/flamebait for rubbing their faces in it.
Unfortunately, the bill got 288 votes with 10 abstentions. They would only need 290 to get the 2/3 majority required to override a veto. I think We, The People have lost another round to the feds.
If we had only 50K people in a district, there would be over 6000 people in the House of Reps.
What we need is a small federal government that exercises only its specifically delegated powers, with ALL other powers being reserved to the states or to the people. You could keep districts small for the state legislatures. I wouldn't want any more A$$#0!Z in DC than we already have.
"They can of course print the extra money"
If you dilute the money supply by printing, you simply de-value every existing unit of currency. This is inflation by the most basic definition. More money chasing a fixed supply of goods.
"governments are forever ... They have forever to pay back."
I'll accept this premise for the sake of argument. They may have "forever" to pay back, but there is a limit on the amount of debt they can carry. When interest expense overwhelms their capacity to generate revenue, they simply cannot keep borrowing more.
"in fact, by spending, they can even make [economic recovery] happen sooner :)"
Utterly naive. If it was THAT simple, why wouldn't every government in the world just keep borrowing and printing until they attained prosperity? Why wouldn't government print money and give everyone a government job which pays $100K per year? Wouldn't we all be prosperous then?
GDP = C + I + G + (x-i)
Debt can give you a short term increase in GDP, but you absolutely cannot keep borrowing to prop up GDP on an ongoing basis.
"in the long run the economy always grows..."
There has been ZERO material growth in the U.S. economy in the last 30 years. There has not been a single year in which GDP growth exceeded growth in the total amount of debt in the economy.
2008 should have clued people in to the fact that you cannot build a sustainable economy based on debt-financed consumption. No matter how much the government borrows and spends, there is no chance that this spending will re-start the 30 year borrowing binge. The consumer is tapped out. That's why $5T in deficit spending over the past 4 years has done nothing to fix the economy.
I stopped paying for television service about 10 years ago.
The OP is claiming that government deficit spending is necessary to fund research, make investments and create opportunities. THAT is the "socialist nonsense" to which I was referring.
Austerity means cutting government spending so that expenditures are = tax revenues. Something that should be a total no-brainer. Only fools think that deficit spending is a solution to a debt problem.
I think that's exactly what the OP (Industrial Complex) was pointing out. We have a "left" and a "right" but they all committed to big government and authoritarianism.
The president threatened to veto the 2012 NDAA as well. Then, they amended the bill to grant government the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without charge trial or access to legal counsel and he signed.
Guess he's holding out for the "Internet kill switch" provision he's been wanting for years.
"we're proposing a ban on the ultimate object that makes pulling a trigger the difference between life and death."
No, you're not. You're only proposing to take those objects away from law abiding citizens. Criminals who prey upon law abiding citizens will not comply with your ban. AFAIK, you're not planning to disarm government employees either.
The frustration of this whole gun debate is talking with people who refuse to acknowledge the pointlessness of making new laws based on the assumption that criminals will obey them and being labeled "paranoid" because you understand history and know that the U.S. government is nothing special when it comes to the potential abuse of power.
Excellent point. One that I've been attempting to make repeatedly with my unresponsive elected asshatz and anyone else who will listen. Emotional anecdotes are a ridiculous basis for public policy. If some serial child rapist escapes justice because the police obtained evidence with an illegal search, that doesn't mean that we need to undermine the 4th Amendment so that no child rapist ever escapes justice.
Yes, the murders and attempted murders in Boston clearly demonstrate that a person intent on violence and mass murder will find a way to do it, with or without firearms. In a free society, people can and will abuse their freedoms. Unfortunately, there are many people who would obviously prefer the "safety" of a total police state as opposed to endure the entirely minuscule risks associated with freedom.
From your first paragraph, maybe the problem is the public schools not teaching people about the concept of probability or statistical likelihood?
"in a semi-depressed economy, any kind of spending by the government, even on inane things, will turn out to help recovery,"
NO! That's absolute nonsense! Government borrowing to make "investments" isn't magic. It's EXACTLY like borrowing and investing in the private sector. Your investment either generates positive returns or it's money wasted.
Given the average tax rate of 20%, a government project must produce at least $5 of new GDP growth for every dollar spent. Do you honestly think that the $1.2T they are borrowing and spending this year is going to produce $6T in GDP growth? Is the $5T they've borrowed and spent in the last 4 years going to produce $25T in GDP growth? Obviously NOT.
You borrow money to give someone $1 in unemployment benefits. Assume they pay 20 cents back in taxes. They spend 80 cents at Wal Mart. Wal Mart or the shareholders then pay 16 cents in taxes. Then, they buy 44 cents worth of stuff Made in China and pay workers, truck drivers, etc. 20 cents. The workers then pay 4 cents in taxes.
Congrats! You've just "invested" $1 and gotten back 40 cents. Where do you get the other 60 cents to pay back the loan Mr. Keynes?
"Rich economies are rich. One of the side effect of being rich is that you can pile on proportionately more debt. Which is completely fine"
There's the fatal flaw in your reasoning "more debt" is NOT "completely fine". More debt == more risk that you won't pay back your creditors, which means they demand higher interest rates on any new credit. More interest expense means LESS revenue being spent on government services. It's a destructive cycle and the longer you continue, the worse the inevitable pain will be. The European countries hit their credit limits and had to stop the deficit spending game..
In places like the USA, the exact same dynamic is in effect, but the government can keep the game going by expanding the money supply. Have you heard of "Quantitative Easing"? Basically, the Federal Reserve is artificially expanding the money supply (by $TRILLIONS) to finance the government deficits. That artificial demand is the ONLY thing keeping yields on U.S. debt at such ridiculously low levels. This monetary game can keep the deficit party going, but the outcome is certain. It ends with government balancing budgets(austerity), defaulting on debt or a catastrophic currency collapse. With these cowards controlling the USA government, option #3 is likely.
"Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research ..."
Socialist nonsense.
In almost all of these countries, we're talking about "austerity" that is necessary to balance budgets. i.e. forcing government to spend only what it takes in via tax revenue. Oh, how terrible this is!
A government cannot keep borrowing and accumulating debt forever. At some point, it is a mathematical certainty that the interest burden on that debt will exceed 100% of government revenue and eventually 100% of GDP. Of course it never reaches that point because people start demanding double-digit interest rates or stop lending you money long before that.
Before all the bailouts and ECB interventions, the PIIGS were looking at rapidly rising interest rates. They called it FORCED austerity because they had no choice. more borrowing would create an even bigger interest expense burden, leaving less revenue for your precious socialist programs.
You can't use more debt to cure a debt problem. Austerity sucks in the short term, but the sooner these countries get their budgets balanced, the sooner growth can occur.
The problem is that governments never, ever engage in the "saving" part.
The idea that government should BORROW and spend in bad times is idiotic. There is nothing special about government when it comes to borrowing and spending except the interest rate. If their "capital project" doesn't produce positive ROI, it hurts the economy in the long run. Assuming a tax rate of 20%, a "capital project" would need to generate 5X what it cost in NEW economic activity. Those investments are few and far between, and there is NO WAY that the $5T that the government has borrowed and spent in the last 5 years will produce $25T in GDP growth.
"So far, "austerity" isn't working..."
GDP = C + I + G + (x-i)
Cutting 'G' reduces GDP in the short term. It definitely hurts, but more borrowing is not the answer. Give them 6 years of balanced budgets and we'll see what "works".
The USA government has been borrowing and spending like mad for the last 4 years, accumulating over $5T in new debt. The deficit is around 7-8% of GDP and the USA is seeing less than 3% GDP growth? See the above equation. Obviously massive deficits are not "working".
Government debt addiction is like a personal heroin addiction. Another shot right now wards off the pain of withdrawal symptoms in the immediate term but eventually kills the subject. Austerity is "getting clean". Miserable, but essential for long term health.
The source of most of the federal government debt is renegade government spending. Federal outlays have more than doubled since 2000. They increased spending by 18% in 2009 alone!
If these A$$#0lZ in Washington D.C. had kept their insane spending in line with private sector GDP growth, they would now have a balanced budget.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
(in XLS format)
I would hypothesize that the trend and YOY changes are a lot more important than the debt to GDP ratio. After WW2, the USA had a huge debt to GDP ratio. However, the government cut spending by 60% over the course of 2 years and successfully set themselves on a course to pay down the debt. This helped usher in a new era of economic prosperity.
Currently, the USA debt to GDP ratio is ~1 and the CBO projections indicate perpetual deficits over at least the next decade.
The economic prospects of a nation that is in debt which they are steadily reducing and a nation that is in debt while steadily accumulating more are very different.
Agree with most of what you said, but gone are the days when you see a massive spike in PC sales due to the newest release of Windows or customers rushing out to buy the upgrade for their current OS.
"No other OS offers what windows can at that price-point."
Yes, but what does Windows 8 give you that you couldn't do with Windows 7 or even Windows XP? Windows isn't going away, but I doubt that many PC users, even businesses, are shelling out $$$ to upgrade their OEM versions of Windows. They'll just wait until they have to replace the hardware. Thus, the fate of Windows is tied to the fortunes of the devices which run it. As PC sales shrink, so too will sales of Windows licenses. It's not "going away" but it's going to be nothing like the old days.
STFU you schmuck. Nobody is claiming firearms are a panacea for safety. If anything, this incident should prove that people intent on terror and mass murder will commit their crimes regardless of what anti-gun laws the government forces on us.
Can't explain birthdays and oil spills. However, Tim McVeigh definitely planned the OK City bombing as a response to the Waco massacre. Erik Harris had delusions of "out-doing" McVeigh (Thank $deity his bombs malfunctioned or he might have succeeded) and also timed his attack to coincide.
You also forgot tax day in your list.
In this day and age when the government will "never let a crisis go to waste", is it any surprise that people would quickly start thinking along those lines?
The 9-11 attacks have been used as an excuse for two full scale wars, a huge amount of authoritarian legislation and abuses like indefinite detention and arbitrary assassinations of U.S. citizens.
The Newtown CT murders are being used an excuse to further a pernicious anti-gun agenda.
It's obvious to assume that these bombings in Boston will be used as an excuse for even more government surveillance and other restrictive measures to make us "safe".
It doesn't really matter if it was some dickhead with a grudge or a foreign terrorist. Government has demonstrated that they will use these incidents to accumulate power. I feel terrible for the victims, but I feel dread about what new police state measures the government will impose on the rest of us.