Robert Fisk is a very political creature, and has been very outspoken in opposing the US before. His article should at the very least be read in that light, Mach.

(10-08-2009 12:03 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  here's something from 1997.

However, in the past 7 years, the US dollar has lost 67% of its value to the Euro. In the past month, the US dollar is worth less than the Canadian dollar. All the while, Condoleezza Rice stated that the US dollars needs to loose another third of its value. The US dollar is being devalued by design.


So everybody who holds our dollars was taxed 67% from 2000-2007.

and as long as we have inflation we have a tax on the world. They are holding an uncashed check while the value of that check decreases.

OK, I understand what you're talking about now. I thought you meant an actual tax. Your initial comments made it sound like we benefit somehow. We don't, unless we hold Euros or other currencies that are appreciating versus the dollar. The people who benefit are those who hold other currencies against the dollar.

Like George Soros, for example. Who just happens to be Obama's biggest supporter. Can you connect any dots there?

We benefit from that scenario............. as far as Soros goes Buffet did the same thing. We have to balance the budget. It's that simple.... yet so very very hard. Tough choices need to be made. We all understand that. That *** **** Bush tax cut still pisses me off. We were on our way of paying off the debt.

Explain how we benefit.

Does it bother you that Soros and Buffett, both well-known Obama supporters, are betting against the dollar?

(10-08-2009 07:36 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Everyone who is holding our dollars is paying us a tax? Explanation?

I do agree that some sort of carbon tax would be good. But it has to be offset with tax relief elsewhere or the effect on the economy would be harmful and could be disastrous.

I'm over-simplifying... but the result of a carbon tax is an excaserbation of what we already have... an exportation of jobs and perhaps even people to places beyond our ability to tax...

unless you're suggesting what amounts to an import tax

We benefit mainly from people holding our capital in their national reserve. Whatever inflation is that year we gain and continue to gain and gain and gain. Now if people start buying oil in say Euro's people will dump the dollar and we lose.

POSSIBLY true, Mach... but they really hold our debt which is denominated in dollars no matter what. Sure, they can sell dollars which pushes our dollar weaker, but that just makes THEIR good more expensive for us to purchase... which benefits us in many ways.

I made the comment 2 years ago... we're in for a LONG TERM decline in US "wealth" as compared to other countries. When people can live in China on $4/day or whatever it is... and people from El Salvador can come here... work for $8/hr and not only pay for themselves to live here, but to send enough money back to take care of their parents, wife and three children for the next 20 years, while our teenagers can't keep gas in their cars for $8/hr... our standard of living needs to fall a ton, or our currency needs to decline by a ton. That will make travel hard and certain goods impossioble to buy, but it makes our domestic goods more attractive to them AND us.

(10-08-2009 12:03 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  The US dollar is being devalued by design.

I'm sure the Chinese, who hold billions of our dollars, are thrilled.

(10-08-2009 05:15 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 07:36 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Everyone who is holding our dollars is paying us a tax? Explanation?
I do agree that some sort of carbon tax would be good. But it has to be offset with tax relief elsewhere or the effect on the economy would be harmful and could be disastrous.

I'm over-simplifying... but the result of a carbon tax is an excaserbation of what we already have... an exportation of jobs and perhaps even people to places beyond our ability to tax...
unless you're suggesting what amounts to an import tax

My point is that we have to stop importing 13 million barrels of oil a day. A carbon tax would be one way to bring that number down. As Ronald Reagan said, if you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.

If it is simply added to the existing tax structure, it will cause significant and irreparable damage to the economy. If it is offset by tax reductions elsewhere, so that the net effect is that someone who reduces energy usage saves more that he/she pays, and a person who does not pays more, then it can be put in place with much less economic disruption.

Europe runs an economy comparable to ours, at least in the top countries. They do it using about half as much oil as we do. They pay anywhere from $7 to $10 per gallon of gasoline. It hasn't killed their economies. If we got our usage down to Europe's level, we would import about 3-4 million barrels a day instead of 13 million. That would have significant positive impact on our economy. We probably can't get all the way down to Europe's level. But if we were paying $4-$5 a gallon, I'm guessing we'd end up using a lot less.

(10-08-2009 10:03 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 12:03 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  The US dollar is being devalued by design.

I'm sure the Chinese, who hold billions of our dollars, are thrilled.

I'd like to know who was responsible for the concerted effort to throttle the dollar earlier in the week.

It wasn't some rogue currency trader in Hong Kong. This looked like a "dry run" for something more sinister.

(10-08-2009 09:34 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  POSSIBLY true, Mach... but they really hold our debt which is denominated in dollars no matter what. Sure, they can sell dollars which pushes our dollar weaker, but that just makes THEIR good more expensive for us to purchase... which benefits us in many ways.

I made the comment 2 years ago... we're in for a LONG TERM decline in US "wealth" as compared to other countries. When people can live in China on $4/day or whatever it is... and people from El Salvador can come here... work for $8/hr and not only pay for themselves to live here, but to send enough money back to take care of their parents, wife and three children for the next 20 years, while our teenagers can't keep gas in their cars for $8/hr... our standard of living needs to fall a ton, or our currency needs to decline by a ton. That will make travel hard and certain goods impossioble to buy, but it makes our domestic goods more attractive to them AND us.

While I used to think this was true, I don't believe it fully anymore.

What we need are productive people making $8/hr. We need to get people out of universities when all their coursework is for a degree in Womyn's Studies or Leisure Studies. In fact we need to dismantle those departments (at public schools anyway) and insist that those professors find productive jobs too.

We need to get rid of gov't bureaucrats whose main job is to create regulations which in turn, provides paperwork for them to review and file.

What's killing the US is not $8/hr jobs...it's $8/hr jobs that don't do anything. It's white collar salaries that are just about shuffling papers and holding meetings on new innovations for shuffling papers.

It's those paychecks that have caused inflation, and in turn, helped to overprice our manufacturing base.

(10-09-2009 07:18 AM)DrTorch Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 09:34 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  POSSIBLY true, Mach... but they really hold our debt which is denominated in dollars no matter what. Sure, they can sell dollars which pushes our dollar weaker, but that just makes THEIR good more expensive for us to purchase... which benefits us in many ways.
I made the comment 2 years ago... we're in for a LONG TERM decline in US "wealth" as compared to other countries. When people can live in China on $4/day or whatever it is... and people from El Salvador can come here... work for $8/hr and not only pay for themselves to live here, but to send enough money back to take care of their parents, wife and three children for the next 20 years, while our teenagers can't keep gas in their cars for $8/hr... our standard of living needs to fall a ton, or our currency needs to decline by a ton. That will make travel hard and certain goods impossioble to buy, but it makes our domestic goods more attractive to them AND us.

While I used to think this was true, I don't believe it fully anymore.
What we need are productive people making $8/hr. We need to get people out of universities when all their coursework is for a degree in Womyn's Studies or Leisure Studies. In fact we need to dismantle those departments (at public schools anyway) and insist that those professors find productive jobs too.
We need to get rid of gov't bureaucrats whose main job is to create regulations which in turn, provides paperwork for them to review and file.
What's killing the US is not $8/hr jobs...it's $8/hr jobs that don't do anything. It's white collar salaries that are just about shuffling papers and holding meetings on new innovations for shuffling papers.
It's those paychecks that have caused inflation, and in turn, helped to overprice our manufacturing base.

I think you are ddescribing a symptom, not a cause.

We have shipped the productive jobs overseas, so these are the ONLY jobs we have left here. We can't have jobs actually doing anything, because we don't actually DO anything here. Obviously, that overstates the current situation a bit, but that is the direction we are headed.

We have got to return to productive, value-added activity in this country, or we are just going to get bled to death.

To get our economy back on the right track, I see three things we need to do:
1. Balance the federal budget
2. Reduce, and eventually eliminate, imports of oil and other forms of energy
3. Restore the productive, value-added segment of our economy

Obama's current policies will go 0 for 3 in addressing those needs.
Shrub went 0 for 3.
Clinton went 1 for 3 (balanced budget).
Bush went 0 for 3.
Reagan went 0 for 3.
Carter went 0 for 3.
Ford went 0 for 3.
Nixon went 0 for 3.
Johnson went 0 for 3.
JFK went 1 for 3 (his tax cuts helped with #3).

The last president to have a balanced budget in his last year in office was Clinton, before him Eisenhower.
The last president to have fewer barrels of imported oil in his last year in office than in his first was Hoover (and that was obviously due more to economic slowdown than to anything positive).
The last president to have manufacturing employment (as a percent of population) not shrink during his term was JFK.

This is not a short-term phenomenon. It is not going to be solved by short-term measures. It is going to be made worse by Obama's approach.

The problem that I see with a carbon tax as foreign policy tool is that (I think) it is more of a coal tax than an oil tax. If foreign policy goals are the objective of this tax, why not just use a plain old tariff or, if that doesn't pass international trade muster, a blanket gasoline tax?

I wholeheartedly agree with Owl 69 here. We need short term pain for long term gain. Good luck trying to get elected that way btw! What I don't understand is how the rest of the board doesn't grasp this. Can everyone imagine for a moment what would happen to our country if we found an alternative for our population to go from point A to point B. I've said this FOR YEARS!!! We need a moon shot effort in this dept. A longitude prize in this effort. The free market won't work here because oil comes in cheaper to the US's detriment. Let's put the cost of our military into a gallon of gasoline. For the life of me I don't get how people can't see this!!!!

(10-09-2009 10:56 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-09-2009 07:18 AM)DrTorch Wrote:  

(10-08-2009 09:34 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  POSSIBLY true, Mach... but they really hold our debt which is denominated in dollars no matter what. Sure, they can sell dollars which pushes our dollar weaker, but that just makes THEIR good more expensive for us to purchase... which benefits us in many ways.
I made the comment 2 years ago... we're in for a LONG TERM decline in US "wealth" as compared to other countries. When people can live in China on $4/day or whatever it is... and people from El Salvador can come here... work for $8/hr and not only pay for themselves to live here, but to send enough money back to take care of their parents, wife and three children for the next 20 years, while our teenagers can't keep gas in their cars for $8/hr... our standard of living needs to fall a ton, or our currency needs to decline by a ton. That will make travel hard and certain goods impossioble to buy, but it makes our domestic goods more attractive to them AND us.

While I used to think this was true, I don't believe it fully anymore.
What we need are productive people making $8/hr. We need to get people out of universities when all their coursework is for a degree in Womyn's Studies or Leisure Studies. In fact we need to dismantle those departments (at public schools anyway) and insist that those professors find productive jobs too.
We need to get rid of gov't bureaucrats whose main job is to create regulations which in turn, provides paperwork for them to review and file.
What's killing the US is not $8/hr jobs...it's $8/hr jobs that don't do anything. It's white collar salaries that are just about shuffling papers and holding meetings on new innovations for shuffling papers.
It's those paychecks that have caused inflation, and in turn, helped to overprice our manufacturing base.

I think you are ddescribing a symptom, not a cause.

We have shipped the productive jobs overseas, so these are the ONLY jobs we have left here.

Given the order of things in history, I think what I described was the cause, not the symptom.

We had a push away from training people to participate in manufacturing and into "management" or numerous other "white collar jobs".

Going to college raises expectations of salaries, because you defer earnings and you pay for the tuition. Everyone was told there'd be an ROI for all of that...so salaries went up.

Meanwhile, all that demand raised college prices. The limited supply of workers interested in manufacturing, as well as higher taxes and oppressive regulations, raised costs there too.

But in the end, there isn't that much demand for social workers, sociology, etc, because they don't do anything. So those people are looking for jobs. And they want "good payin'" jobs b/c they have student loans to pay.

We priced ourselves out of the market, largely b/c people pursued a course of not doing anything, and expecting that they could get paid for it.

(10-09-2009 11:30 AM)Machiavelli Wrote:  I wholeheartedly agree with Owl 69 here. We need short term pain for long term gain. Good luck trying to get elected that way btw! What I don't understand is how the rest of the board doesn't grasp this. Can everyone imagine for a moment what would happen to our country if we found an alternative for our population to go from point A to point B. I've said this FOR YEARS!!! We need a moon shot effort in this dept. A longitude prize in this effort. The free market won't work here because oil comes in cheaper to the US's detriment. Let's put the cost of our military into a gallon of gasoline. For the life of me I don't get how people can't see this!!!!

Paris Hilton has a better energy plan than either major party.

Drill here, drill now; tax it; and use the taxes to develop conservation and/or alternatives.

Europe pays $7-$10/gallon for gasoline and they use just over half the oil we do, and their economy works. They found those different ways to get from A to B and they use them. They have to.

We actually don't need a moon shot effort. The ways exist, if we put the right pricing signals in place. And it's not the oil companies that are stopping it. They make most of their money in the rest of the world, which plays by different rules, and they know how to win by those rules; they would be fine if we changed our rules, and they know it. Do like Brasil did with Petrobras, and make them major players in the alternatives game, and they'd be fine with that. Plus we'd actually get it done, instead of just talking about it.

It's other special interests that keep us from changing the rules. Things like states that still regulate utility rates have a hard time adopting wind or solar energy because the economics don't fit legal and regulatory models very well; that's why most of the progress in alternatives is in states like Texas that have deregulated. Or the influence of the Teamsters keeps us from going to more energy-efficient means of moving freight. Midwest farm interests and large agribusinesses fight for subsidies for corn ethanol that keep us from going to much more efficient sugar cane ethanol. Seeing gas for $4/gallon last summer in Hawaii, when there are acres of abandoned sugar cane fields immediately behind the gas station, makes it obvious just how stupid we are on this.

We import 13 million barrels a day. That number needs to go to zero, or as close as we can get it. There is nothing that will replace 13 million barrels--not drill here, drill now, not nuclear, not solar, not wind, not conservation, nothing. But suppose we split it up and looked for 4 million from increased production of conventional energy, 4 million from alternatives, and 4 million from conservation. Break the problem into doable pieces.

Drill here, drill now gets us 2 million. New nuke plants and improved power grid will enable us to put enough electric cars and trains on the road/tracks to get the other 2 million. That's 4 million from conventional.

Sugar cane ethanol from Latin America (including Cuba) gets us 3 million (yeah, we're still importing, but there are other disadvantages, not the least being that we put the infrastructure in place that we can use when something like cellulosic ethanol becomes practical). Lay on enough solar and wind, coupled with grid improvements and use of electric cars and trains, to get another 1 million. That's 4 million from alternatives.

Getting 4 million from conservation takes time. That's basically a 20% reduction, and Europe runs a comparable economy on 40% less than we use, so there ought to be a way to get there over time. Some form of carbon tax to reduce demand helps us get there. Dedicate the net revenues from that tax to infrastructure development to foster this, and we can get there quicker.

Like I said, Paris (or her writer) has a better plan than either party.

(10-09-2009 12:06 PM)DrTorch Wrote:  

(10-09-2009 10:56 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I think you are ddescribing a symptom, not a cause.
We have shipped the productive jobs overseas, so these are the ONLY jobs we have left here.

Given the order of things in history, I think what I described was the cause, not the symptom.
We had a push away from training people to participate in manufacturing and into "management" or numerous other "white collar jobs".
Going to college raises expectations of salaries, because you defer earnings and you pay for the tuition. Everyone was told there'd be an ROI for all of that...so salaries went up.
Meanwhile, all that demand raised college prices. The limited supply of workers interested in manufacturing, as well as higher taxes and oppressive regulations, raised costs there too.
But in the end, there isn't that much demand for social workers, sociology, etc, because they don't do anything. So those people are looking for jobs. And they want "good payin'" jobs b/c they have student loans to pay.
We priced ourselves out of the market, largely b/c people pursued a course of not doing anything, and expecting that they could get paid for it.

Probably a chicken and egg situation. Whichever got the ball rolling, the other kept it rolling.

In any event, what Obama's proposing will make it worse, not better.

I'm reminded of an old Warren Buffett quote, can't remember it exactly, but it's something like this, "If you and I and 100 other people were stranded on a desert island as a result of an airplane crash, would you want the brightest and best figuring out how to sue the airline or figuring out how to build a boat?"

Scalia's solution for more productivity: fewer lawyers.

Quote:I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/10/01/scal...lawyering/

(10-09-2009 03:02 PM)At Ease Wrote:  Scalia's solution for more productivity: fewer lawyers.

Quote:I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?
I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/10/01/scal...lawyering/

As a lawyer myself, I'm in complete agreement.

(10-09-2009 11:30 AM)Machiavelli Wrote:  I wholeheartedly agree with Owl 69 here. We need short term pain for long term gain. Good luck trying to get elected that way btw! What I don't understand is how the rest of the board doesn't grasp this. Can everyone imagine for a moment what would happen to our country if we found an alternative for our population to go from point A to point B. I've said this FOR YEARS!!! We need a moon shot effort in this dept. A longitude prize in this effort. The free market won't work here because oil comes in cheaper to the US's detriment. Let's put the cost of our military into a gallon of gasoline. For the life of me I don't get how people can't see this!!!!

I agree with 90% of what you say here... but its not the American consumer's fault that they choose the cheaper of the available options, expecially when most of the other options require personal investments that they cannot afford (like in a 40,000+ hybrid)... and/or compromises in safety... I saw a large GMCcrossover SUV that gets 32mpg while the smart car gets 41?? Is it really worth 9mpg to decrease your volume from 100sq ft to 4??

Ethanol and Nat Gas as fuel are EASY substitutes for imported oil... even if we have to import the ethanol, it is from far more stable places than the middle east... Drill here, drill now... Convert fleet, rental and government vehicles (who normally have central fueling stations anyway) to nat gas

I wonder how much better off we'd be if we'd invested the money we invest in inefficient corn ethanol subsidies and cash for clunkers into converting public vehicles to USE ethanol. How much less aid would we have to send to places like Haiti/DR and even SA where we spend billions trying to stop drugs if they had an alternative cash crop.