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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What are you, some kind of communist? If we just got rid of Social Security, all of this would go away.
Here, look into the pod and everything will become clear.
;)
I'm still waiting for answers to a number of questions:
- How is that $9 trillion national debt ever going to get paid off? If it doubles during so-called 'good years' what's it going to do during this recession? Why should anybody lend money to the US if they'll never get their money back?
- How can increased exports due to inflation help the US much when imports are 14% of the economy and manufacturing is only 12%?
- When are we going to get serious about getting meaningful economic statistics? The statistics are obviously managed for political purposes, and those from the last seven years are increasingly less comparable to those of previous years because Dubya keeps changing the rules - a lot of them without external review or even proper notification.
- How does one sustain a consumer economy (70% of GDP) while stiffing workers (consumers)? Median pay is stagnant, the wives have been put to work, and borrowing limits have been reached. Where's the new spending money going to come from?
- What economic driver is going to lift the US economy out of recession this time? For the Great Depression there was WWII. For the 1990's there was information technology. Looking at the US economy these days there just don't seem to be any good candidates.
- How many trillions have the rich offshored in the last two years? They offshored $12 trillion between 2001 and 2005. If it's not invested in the US it's just a drain on the economy. Anybody feeling drained out there?
- What will be the effect of the shortages to the SS and Medicare systems, starting in 20 years or less? Old people dying in the streets?
- What will be the effect of losing the hot air in the financial system? The international financial derivatives market is over $500 trillion and counting. The entire annual economic product of the planet is only a tenth of that, so an amazing amount of inflation and asset devaluation is needed to bring derivative valuations in line with actual economic product. How many people will be going under when it happens?
- How much worse is the financial system than the Powers That Be are telling us? We know they're panicking - but they're not telling us why.
Things haven't even gotten ugly yet, but the lack of answers to these questions pretty much ensures that they have to.
After that it gets weird ugly, mostly because there doesn't seem to be anything to prevent it.
For ten percent of the US population it's already a depression, and for another forty percent or more it's already a recession.
So the question isn't whether we're in a recession, and it's not whether we're going into a depression, because at least half the country is already there.
The question is How much more of the country will be going into recession or depression? The other question is What's going to turn it around when few economic conditions encourage it and most economic conditions discourage it?
The best economic times this country has experience is when progressives were in charge.
Which should hardly come as any surprise to anybody, since they are, after all, progressives. Conservatives are only out to milk the system for everything they can get, even if they damage the system in the process.
The graph tells a story, and makes you wonder why we'd ever elect a Republican president:
http://www.rense.com/1.imagesH/CHARTA.gif
It gets worse the more you look at it:
The Cheap-Labor Conservatives' "dirty secret": they don't really Like prosperity
Maybe you don't believe that cheap-labor conservatives like unemployment, poverty and "cheap labor". Consider these facts.
- Unemployment was 23 percent when FDR took office in 1933. It dropped to 2.5 percent by time the next Republican was in the White House in 1953. It climbed back to 6.5 percent by the end of the Eisenhower administration. It dropped to 3.5 percent by the time LBJ left office. It climbed over 5 percent shortly after Nixon took office, and stayed there for 27 years, until Clinton brought it down to 4.5 percent early in his second term.
- That same period – especially from the late forties into the early seventies – was the "golden age" of the United States. We sent men to the moon. We built our Interstate Highway system. We ended segregation in the South and established Medicare. In those days, a single wage earner could support an entire family on his wages. No more.
Time to bring back the Democrats, the Party of Economic Prosperity.
Note to Donut 44 and anyone else who thinks withdrawing from Iraq will put an end to the war's drain on the economy: the highest spending year for WWII was .... 1993! Because that's the year a critical number of veterans claimed healthcare and other 'benefits'.
The current war is going to be even more expensive for even longer because:
1. soldiers don't die nearly as often as they used to, which, while sad, was cheap. These days they are much more likely to get injured, come home, go on disability and stay there for the rest of their lives. (NOTE: I totally support and am grateful to the soldiers who put their lives on the line and believe that their country have to make their welfare a first priority - however, it costs, big time.)
2. The amry's resources have been run down to such an extent that replacing the planes, cars, uniforms, weapons etc is going to take years to execute and cost billions more dollars that the US doesn't have, will have to borrow, and then pay even more interest on the loans.
3. Seeing as this whole war has been funded by loans anyway, which are not being paid off, the interest payments will go on for a VERY. LONG. TIME.
This whole foray of Dubya's is going to be paid for by our children and our children's children. Hope they appreciate it.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
