100 years of war + mortgaging our children's future by selling bonds to China + no one can afford health care and women can't kill babies anymore get real america.
let's nationalize oil
100 years of war + mortgaging our children's future by selling bonds to China + no one can afford health care and women can't kill babies anymore get real america.
let's nationalize oil
Barack will take America in a new and better direction. One McCain could only have nightmares about.
Yay for Barack. He'll probably get assassinated or something; imagine if JFK had stayed president. America would be different. But no, along comes LBJ and a bucket of napalm.
Unfortunately Obama will not fix a thing. If you remove debt from the US GDP the US has been contracting for about a decade. The basic problem the US (and Europe) has is that it cannot really finance it's vast debt apart from printing new money in various forms.
The US will turn to that old foreign policy tool for empires that feel the ground shift beneath it's feet. War. Both McCain and Obama will bring more war, and more war brings more debts that cannot be financed. And so it goes. Eventually the system will break, it is already very very close to breaking point if it hasn't already broken down with the Fannie & Freddie Mae takeover being the largest and latest sign.
50 % of the housing bond market is gone now compared to a year ago. At that rate there won't be much left soon. And we are only in the beginning stages of the recession still.
INFp
If your sea chart does not match reality, go with reality (Old mariner saying)
My my you know I heard another INFp talk about that exact same thing a few years ago. You might want to ask him about it because it seems the two of you would really hit it off. Good luck finding him though, because he's been missing now for like... 7 years? The last time anyone saw him, that I recall, was at Tora Bora....
Close in Enron loophole, and the economy will rebound.
DJ, your avatar is cracking me up....
IEI-Fe 4w3
no im agreeing with you. the fact that norway also has a tiny population that would be much, much easier to manage than one the size of the US or india is irrelevant.
(i was wrong about the taxes -- i shouldn't do math in the morning. However, Norway's tiny population does matter.)
does norway have a centrally planned economy?I find it interesting that when you talk about how communism don't work, you talk about how the Soviet model didn't work, but when some system does work, it's somehow not relevant...
Last edited by discojoe; 09-09-2008 at 02:09 PM.
It is funny, in the early nineties when Norway, Sweden and Finland had similar banking problems as the US has now, these supposedly socialist countries let banks in trouble fail and the investers lost all their money.
In contrast look at the US today. Socialism for the rich is the agenda with hundreds of billions of inflationary Fed created money pumped into the system to support bankrupt Wall Street banks and bankrupt entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae. The latter two were nationalized this weekend, leaving US taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars.
Mimosa makes a very interesting point in that most Americans seem oblivious to the economy crashing all around them. At least if you look at McCain and Obama they live in some kind of economic la la land. The US governemnt is on the brink of bankruptcy, every single system is deep in the red.
The only way for the US to recover is to get real money, not funny inflationary electronic money created by the Fed, back into the system. And that can only happen through higher interest rates, to attract real savings, and raised taxes. Until these two things happen the crash will continue and get worse as it goes.
INFp
If your sea chart does not match reality, go with reality (Old mariner saying)
US GDP is inaccurate. If US debt goes up so does the US GDP. What does that tell you? You do not grow richer as your debt grows do you?
INFp
If your sea chart does not match reality, go with reality (Old mariner saying)
Pardon my economic ignorance, but that is something that has always had me troubled: if free markets are ideal with the least amount of government interference, then wouldn't the market benefit in the long-run without the short-term government bailouts?
This is a rather Rawlsian view. John Rawls advocated a modified version of utilitarianism that did not argue for the greatest amount of utility, due to the Utilitarian Monster (see Robert Nozick), but that government has an obligation to its weakest members.
The current public opinion polls has McCain slightly ahead, but the US market is predicting Obama.
Johari Box"Alpha Quadra subforum. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." ~Obi-Wan Kenobi
I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with how the Federal Reserve prints out inflation money at its convenience, but as long as the debt can be turned over as the bonds mature, it isn't something to panic over.
No, we haven't having problems. We just having trouble seeing what argument you've made other than citing three facts about Norway, plus rhetoric about the European standard of living (speaking of which, check out this link)
Protecting the bond markets was one of the main reasons the US government had to step in and nationalize Fannie and Freddie Mae. If the Chinese and other creditors were burnt there the damage would certainly spread over to the Treasury bonds.
Ultimately the problem with the current system is that it is unsustainable. Even the US has limits to it's credit and we are on the verge of finding out exactly where those limits are.
INFp
If your sea chart does not match reality, go with reality (Old mariner saying)
tl;dr
Improving your happiness and changing your personality for the better
Jungian theory is not grounded in empirical data (pdf file)
The case against type dynamics (pdf file)
Cautionary comments regarding the MBTI (pdf file)
Reinterpreting the MBTI via the five-factor model (pdf file)
Do the Big Five personality traits interact to predict life outcomes? (pdf file)
The Big Five personality test outperformed the Jungian and Enneagram test in predicting life outcomes
Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of traits
By taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into "conservatorship," the Federal Government is basically stealing half of the mortgaged houses in the country and making the taxpayers pay for them, at anywhere from 800 billion to 10 trillion dollars via inflation tax.Pardon my economic ignorance, but that is something that has always had me troubled: if free markets are ideal with the least amount of government interference, then wouldn't the market benefit in the long-run without the short-term government bailouts?
Is there any reason for the similarity in the names Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or is this purely coincidence?
They're both government-sponsored companies, created by the government to sustain the mortgage market.
I think Fannie Mae was created first, as part of the New Deal, so sometime during the 30s, and Freddie Mac was created during the 70s to compete with Fannie Mae, who I guess had monopoly at the time.
Also, they are both privately owned and operated.
Johari Box"Alpha Quadra subforum. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." ~Obi-Wan Kenobi
I'm sure you've heard of the $739 Billion bailout the Bank of America asked Congress for in February, which is just crazy. Such arrangements say to me, "Hey, US government! We suck at business and at finding workable solutions for our publics. Would you mind giving us the public's money so we can continue to suck some more?"
Johari Box"Alpha Quadra subforum. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." ~Obi-Wan Kenobi