(02-19-2011 10:19 AM)animus Wrote:  Honestly, I think the Gov of Wisconsin is doing the right. Government jobs shouldn't have been allowed to unionized in the first place. I'm paying taxes so kids can get their education. On another issue, people need to understand that states are flat broke and cuts are going to have to be made. Its going to be tough as cuts are going to be made to something that even I might like.

Allowed to or not allowed to unionize aside. The truth is Wisconsin had a $120 million budget surplus for this year although they had projected small deficits over the next two years. Then they passed a massive expansion of health savings accounts along with two very questionable business tax cuts to create a deficit about the same size as the previous surplus for this year. Now I understand in many places times are tough and we need to get our fiscal houses in order, but on the backs of the middle class isn't how one does it. Some folks complain about unions being more political organs than anything today and that's true but with the way campaigns are currently financed they are the only entities that have the spending capability to compete with the corporate interest groups and thus provide some kind of balancing impact to the agenda.

Bit, as for moving to "fiat currency" that in and of itself has little to do with inflation. Its the fact that we've handed out all sorts of welfare to the well to do and large corporations and been in 3 different bad wars where we not only blew tons of money but lost thousands of American lives in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. (The first Gulf War was a perfectly reasonable conflict to have taken the lead in.) What's caused prices to go up on a fiat currency is the fact that all the commodities a nation produces/acquires (including gold and silver) have to equal out to the amount of money in the fullest measure of the money supply. So if we go off printing an ass ton of money for the last 43 years and counting as we've done commodity prices will go up to match the money supply. I'm not sure returning to a gold or gold & silver backed currency is the answer because guess what you can still print as much as you want and the same thing happens to the precious metal(s) as well. Of course in theory this could limit the contagion of such a thing to economy who's money supply is being overgrown but it causes a tougher more serious problem to deal with. The fixes to end the inflation are much easier proper taxation and some fiscal restraint so as to prevent too fast of M growth. Some money supply growth is natural and needed.