That star is on every dollar bill in this country…don’t bother.
masons use that star…my bad
“The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity” - Abraham Lincoln
DIAP
LMAO!!!
I love it!
Deus Ex, read more.
You can tell us until you’re blue in the face what appears where - without some sort of proof of neferious goings on, it’s moot - and the appropriate place for it is the CT folder. Go there now, start a new thread, and educate us all.
Cheers,
Aaron
Add a mark where we went off the gold standard and all becomes clear.
You missed my point (and the simple truth about the economy). Money is a zero sum game. If you spend it, it goes to somebody else. Your flat screen TV doesn’t have $500 locked up in it - the $500 went to the maker. The money spent on the vacation isn’t locked up in pictures or something - it went somewhere. The money that “undeserving” people who got a mortgage based on mortgage brokers cooking their application numbers so the broker could collect huge fees went somewhere.
My point stands. The money is sitting in the billionaires & millionaires bank accounts. All we need to do is loosen up all that dough via taxation. Maybe we can go back to America’s Golden Age, the 1950’s, when the top marginal tax rate was 91.7% Amazingly, even with those “terrible!” tax rates, there were still lots and lots and lots of millionaires around.
If it’s so “truthful” why do people have to lie about Jefferson saying it? LOL
[quote=ProudCorporateTool]You missed my point (and the simple truth about the economy). Money is a zero sum game. If you spend it, it goes to somebody else. Your flat screen TV doesn’t have $500 locked up in it - the $500 went to the maker. The money spent on the vacation isn’t locked up in pictures or something - it went somewhere. The money that “undeserving” people who got a mortgage based on mortgage brokers cooking their application numbers so the broker could collect huge fees went somewhere. My point stands. The money is sitting in the billionaires & millionaires bank accounts. All we need to do is loosen up all that dough via taxation. Maybe we can go back to America’s Golden Age, the 1950’s, when the top marginal tax rate was 91.7% Amazingly, even with those “terrible!” tax rates, there were still lots and lots and lots of millionaires around.[/quote]Jim Puplava has spoken about this point extensively. In the 1950’s, no one paid 91.7% of their income in taxes. Numerous tax breaks were available in that period of time so the effective tax rate was substantially lower.
Nate
Jim Puplava has spoken about this point extensively. In the 1950’s, no one paid 91.7% of their income in taxes. Numerous tax breaks were available in that period of time so the effective tax rate was substantially lower.
Nate
[/quote]
Unfortunately, the tax breaks still exist, but the brackets are much lower. Plus, the wealthy don’t make much in taxable income, it’s all capital gains.
Doug
[quote=ProudCorporateTool]You missed my point (and the simple truth about the economy). Money is a zero sum game. If you spend it, it goes to somebody else. Your flat screen TV doesn’t have $500 locked up in it - the $500 went to the maker. The money spent on the vacation isn’t locked up in pictures or something - it went somewhere. The money that “undeserving” people who got a mortgage based on mortgage brokers cooking their application numbers so the broker could collect huge fees went somewhere. My point stands. The money is sitting in the billionaires & millionaires bank accounts. All we need to do is loosen up all that dough via taxation. Maybe we can go back to America’s Golden Age, the 1950’s, when the top marginal tax rate was 91.7% Amazingly, even with those “terrible!” tax rates, there were still lots and lots and lots of millionaires around.[/quote]What about all the money the banks make by charging interest on loaning an asset they neither own nor hold?
I know quite a few millionaires who earned their wealth legitimately.
I also think it’s complete bullshit that the government feels that other people are entitled to what I earn.
I don’t see how the dollar could crash any further even with more printing because CREDIT will collapse faster. If the bond market crashes, interest rates will be too high to borrow and borrowers on VARIABLE rate interest will be destroyed. We cannot afford to have our creditors turn off the spigots. I see DEFAULT on the debt as our only option
Isn’t the internet wonderful? I can take issue with anyone and not have my lights punched out. I shall resist the temptation and take issue with the facts.Dogs said:
I know quite a few millionaires who earned their wealth legitimately. I also think it's complete bullshit that the government feels that other people are entitled to what I earn.The first statement has to be challenged. My boss is whinging like a stuck pig about how much money I extort from the company, got through hard negotiation by my Union. And the other debt slaves in this country would agree with him. So, If I am making a lot of money through hard work, long hours and a muscular Union; How long would a millionaire have to work to get a million at my (High) rate of pay? Answer : several lifetimes and then some with no misfortune along the way. So how did he get rich? He got rich by risking other peoples money. He has his hand in everyone elses pocket. He is skimming the system that is maintained and run by the peons. I can quote numerous examples of people who innovate and are a valuable asset to their civilization, but how hard would Billy Gates have to work in order to be able to look me in the eye and say " I worked hard for every penny I own. And by the way, your rate of pay is exorbitant." My ex-brother-in-in law was a self made man. He worked very hard. But did he work that hard? No I mean truely. No, he risked another man's money. (Who probably made it by risking another man's money, who got it by skimming the system etc.) I have in mind the starving children of the Irish Potato Famine. Call me a sentimental old fool if you will, but I just do not have the stomach for it. So I pay my taxes and support the system. And make preperations for me and mine to weather the storm.
Your graph on the total U.S. Credit Market Debt is impressive. However, I’m not sure that it is very informative. What is relevant is not the growth in the absolute debt, but rather how does this debt compare as a percent to GDP? During the period from 1970 to 2006, you show the total debt increasing 16X and during that time GDP increased ~13X. In other words, debt to income increased some, but not dramatically.
Your next graph is a bit more troubling. However, aggregating debt of various types does not necessarily give us a useful measure. In the case of government debt, in the U.S. it was higher as a percentage of GDP after WWII. But sustained inflation decreased it into insignificance by the early 1990’s. This was done without surplus budgets. Rather, it was done simply by keeping the deficit below inflation rate + GDP growth. The recent propensity of the Federal Reserve to purchase Treasuries is a game changer as well. If this is a long term change in monetary policy, it defangs much of the concern over Federal Debt.
Corporate debt, on the other hand, is not directly tied to GDP, but rather to retained equity and asset to debt ratios. Corporate America is now surprisingly liquid, with enormous coffers full of cash. They could pay off much, in some cases all, of the debt, but they won’t in these uncertain markets. I can’t blame them. They may need it in the future and its availability is uncertain.
Consumer debt was at a historically high level, but it is coming down. With increasing mortgage defaults, general bankrupcies and the dedication of many families to debt reducing austerity programs, the consumer debt market, by and large, is not looking good. But, in the long term, it is healing itself.
As I’m sure you know, in the U.S. the debt of financial institutions is rather fictitious. Because it is tied to equity through reserve requirements, the healthier the bank, the larger the debt. Large financial institution debt, due to the reserve requirement regulation, is actually a sign of a healthy debt market.
What your graph does demonstrate clearly is that the various nations are in significantly different places debt-wise. What will happen when debt can’t grow exponentially? Debt does and always will grow exponentially, because the GDP that drives it grows exponentially. It has been growing faster than GDP and, therefore, either GDP must grow faster or the growth in debt will need to take a breather as measured as a percent of growth in GDP. Actually, mostly, the former will happen.
In the final analysis, growth in GDP per employed person must match growth in GDP or one of two things must happen. If GDP per employed person is growing faster than GDP, then unemployment will increase. If GDP per employed person is growing slower than GDP, we will reach full employment and GDP growth will be labor constrained. What has been happening for quite some time is that GDP per employed person has been growing faster than GDP.
In fact, if we produced our 2010 real GDP with the 2001 real GDP per employed person rate, we would be employing every person who is currently officially unemployed, every person who is not officially unemployed but who could be convinced to work and we would still be shy about 12,000,000 workers. In other words, all unemployment, measured against 2001, is technological unemployment. Furthermore, real GDP per employed person, over the 2007 to 2010 time frame, grew at an annual rate of 3.6%. This is a very large part of the reason that the economy has recovered but the unemployment rate has not fallen. If we get back to full employment, our GDP would gain about 5.5%.
Lastly, if you talk to anyone in robotics, expert systems and artificial intelligence, they will tell you that there is an enormous backlog of unimplemented capability that will increase the real GDP per employee at an even faster rate in the near future.
What does this all mean? It means that any consideration of debt that assumes a long term GDP growth in the 2.5% to 3.0% (which is virtually everyone) is going to be very, very wrong. At an absolute minimum we should be expecting a couple of decades of 4.0%+ growth and probably significantly more. The issue dominating the public discourse will be substantial and accumulating technological unemployment. However, it is currently at 9.0% in the U.S. and it cannot get much higher before action will need to be taken. When it does, unless that action is to outlaw robotics and office automation, the GDP will skyrocket and the debt will become manageable. In reality, the likely action will be monetary in nature.
A very cursory treatment of a very complex analysis.
The US Government will not default. I have nothing to back up this statement other than my own human nature.
If I was deeply in debt and sinking into a hole of debt and could not get out, and I had a machine in my house to legally print money, I would slowly and quickly print my way out of debt to save myself.
I would asume our government would think the same way, unless there is a New World Order that needs to be established and has been planned and decreed, then a default would be a good and timely event., Then a new monetary exchange system could be put into place to alleviate the broken one. Until then I think the Feds will keep printing their way out of debt.
If you need to, go ahead and copy and paste this into the controversial topics forum.
Tom
[quote=ArthurRobey]So how did he get rich? He got rich by risking other peoples money. He has his hand in everyone elses pocket.
[/quote]
This is not the case for many small businesses. I worked my butt off for 10 years - like 80 hr. weeks and my partners and I paid our employees before we took anything, and often each month we got nothing. Many small business millionaires took large risks, and low pay for a very long time for a delayed return. Had I simply worked at a salaried job for those 10 years and saved a fair amount I would have ended up only slightly less well off, had a much easier life, and not near the stress or risk. Many small business owners do the same, some make it big, some loose it all. It’s quite easy for folks who have never run a small business to think it’s all easy and never realize the huge sacrifices and risk taken to hopefully come out better later.
[quote=Dogs_In_A_Pile]I also think it’s complete bullshit that the government feels that other people are entitled to what I earn.
[/quote]
I think that depends on how much you make (if you make less than say $60,000 I agree with you). I also think that this debate over who works harder – union workers versus business entrepreneurs – and therefore, who “deserves” the money more, depends on how the money is made, and that of course varies widely. Unfortunately I think there is a lot of ideological baggage left behind by the free market worship that has dominated recent capitalist theories (typified in the Austrian school), which purports that no matter how the money is made, as long as it is made in the free market, then it was made legitimately, because ultimately, the free market will sort it all out and things will even out to their maximum efficiency due to the wonderful supply / demand curve (and all of its inherent assumptions which turn out to be highly tenuous). Of course this Austrian approach is overly simplistic and does not in any way acccount for externalties or energy, or the workings of any other biophysical processes underlying how economies actually work, so it’s basically false. Therefore, there is indeed a difference between a banker making money by skimming and ripping unsuspecting people off, even if it is done so in the “free market”, versus a hypothetical entrepreneur who makes money (in the free market) by devising a new gadget that improves energy efficieny by 40% and therefore he reaps monetary rewards from this as everyone buys his product.
I think it is entirely reasonable (and necessary) to presume that someone who owns billions of dollars of assets should be paying very high taxes to the government so that others can be entitled to a large portion of that wealth. In this day and age there should be no billionaires. They should be taxed back down to reality, regardless how they made that money; otherwise we have the wealth concentration problem, which in the past was addressed by outlawing “usury” (the making of interest off money, which leads to wealth concentration because the more money you have the more money you make). Usury is still banned in Muslim cultures. Economists believe that they have now solved the wealth concentration problem so that the rich can get richer, but at the same time the poor can also get richer by participating in the creation of new wealth, and this new wealth comes from a growing economy. Of course, on a real inflation-adjusted basis, our economies aren’t growing, and it seems likely that they never will again ever, on a global scale. Therefore, the littlle guy can’t make new wealth from a growing economy, because it isn’t growing anymore, but the ultra rich billionaire is still reaping profits from wealth concentration due to the very low tax burdens they pay (thanks to Reagan). So we are back at the age-old problem of usury and wealth concentration, once again! I argue that many of our current problems are also due to this, as well as resource and energy scarcity, and debt buildup. These factors are all coming together at the same tiime.
Despite what most economists believe, that wealth which is held by the billionaire was not produced by him (or her, in the case of Blythe Masters); rather, it was taken from the planet. Yes, taken. Economies do not produce wealth. They actually DESTROY wealth to a significant degree, and then they take and transform the remaining wealth into goods that we find useful, and then we create an economy around these things. Since, as Chris is pointing out, we are nearing the crunch in terms of overall resource scarcity, then that billionaire’s wealth is by definition diminishing the wealth-reaping opportunities for the rest of the population, because there are now only so many resources available to go around (as opposed to say 100 years ago when they were basically limitless, when Austrian ideology was being formulated).
But just handing blank checks over to poor people, that money being derived from the wealth taken from taxes from the billionaires, isn’t very stimulative for efficient allocation of labour resources, is it? That’s verging on communism, and we all know how that works (or, how it doesn’t work – no one has any incentive to work). So then how do we deal with the unavoidable high unemployment resulting from a cessation of economic growth (it takes much less labour to just maintain an economy rather than grow it as well). Are we to have, say, only 30% of the workforce actually working, and then those workers pay taxes to support the rest of the 70% deadbeats because there isn’t enough work available? No way, that has NEVER worked in the past and it will never work now! The solution is to reduce the work week to 3 days and the work day to 6 hours. Therefore, the remaining wealth opportunities will still be available to 90% of the workforce, and they will still have an incentive to go work (because there will be no blank checks), and there would not be massive taxes on workers because everyone would be working; taxes would be about what they are now, even less, for the average working person. Couple this with much higher taxes for high earners (the billionaires and multi millionaires), and ban usury, such that wealth concentration doesn’t get out of hand, and also ban central banking and fractional reserve banking, and again empower the government to issue its own debt-free interest-free currency, and that’s the solution! Oh, and get off oil too.
Well Arthur, the operative word was ‘legitimately’. They wouldn’t be my friends otherwise. So your challenge just took a quixotic turn - but if it makes you fell any better, tilt away. Just remember the windmill wins everytime.
I also know quite a few millionaires who are rat bastards - they sound more like the types you cited and are associated with. They are not my friends.
Are you sure it’s not a whole lot of baggage left behind from the Progressive/Socialist schools that believes a persons labor is not his own? That the others have a right to steal via government?
In a truely free market, where people are free to choose what money they use and where sound money is available the big evil banker scenario is much less of a problem. Without free money being generated at the expense of those forced to use it, the unproductive “banker” types are unlikely to be a problem and certainly not as big a problem as they are today. With sound money those that don’t produce society valued services are unlikely to succeed in the long run.
This is the mentality that really worries me. Who gets to decide what is too much? It’s theft, pure and simple.
I agree many billionaires today did so by playing the system of fiat currency and government influence, but like most progressive, you want to fix the symptom instead of correcting the underlying causes of the problems. If you want the little guy to succeed allow sound money, less favouritism via regulation and government involvement.
Sorry, but this is the stupidest thing I’ve heard. We have too many unproductivity people so to solve the problem we should make those that produce less productive?. Why not just not work at all? This is the same logic as if you have too much debt to solve the problem you just add more debt.
Tell me, why is it that most progressives what to tell the world how they must live, instead of trying to make the world better by setting an example and encouraging needed change. I guess it’s just not as easy as stealing from others.
[quote=rhare][quote=ArthurRobey]
So how did he get rich? He got rich by risking other peoples money. He has his hand in everyone elses pocket.
[/quote]
This is not the case for many small businesses. I worked my butt off for 10 years - like 80 hr. weeks and my partners and I paid our employees before we took anything, and often each month we got nothing. Many small business millionaires took large risks, and low pay for a very long time for a delayed return. Had I simply worked at a salaried job for those 10 years and saved a fair amount I would have ended up only slightly less well off, had a much easier life, and not near the stress or risk. Many small business owners do the same, some make it big, some loose it all. It’s quite easy for folks who have never run a small business to think it’s all easy and never realize the huge sacrifices and risk taken to hopefully come out better later.[/quote]
So… WHY did you do it?
Amen. Unfortunately, those who’ve never done it will never get it.