(10-03-2013 06:33 PM)eastisbest Wrote: (10-03-2013 06:05 PM)RangerRocket Wrote: (10-03-2013 03:25 PM)NewMex RocketFan Wrote: (10-03-2013 09:33 AM)RangerRocket Wrote: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money [to spend]."
- Margaret Thatcher
Which type of socialism is the question.
The socialism that involves people who get up every day, bust their asses at work, and see all of their taxes go to entitlements for people who don't of course...
I may seem to be playing both sides of the road but around here, I see a lot of working poor. People working several jobs they have to choose over actually spending time raising their kids. Until the consumer can get their act together and enforce a bit of income redistribution, I may be all for government doing it. Not the way I'd like to see things done but I'm not all against "entitlements" for lower economic working people, whether they be "skilled" or non-skilled.
RANT ALERT----if you are not interested in political rants, please read my post no further---you have been warned.
Anybody who expects the government to get it right is totally delusional. Government programs helped run manufacturing jobs out of this country with over regulation and taxation, while other Government programs helped cause medical costs to skyrocket, a trend that IMO Obama Care will accelerate to the point where we reach a price spiral that will lead to shortages and rationing of health care as well as an overall general decline in the quality of most health care.
It was the Government's desire for every American to be a home owner which led to the bad loans made by Fannie May and Freddie Mac that also enticed in legitimate banks which led to generation of the toxic derivatives and eventually the housing bubble in which ordinary citizens lost their houses while the major banks who could afford the lobbyists got the large government bail outs which are now also a taxpayer responsibility while Goldman-Sachs et al paid out hundreds of million dollar holiday bonuses. The general public was tricked to gamble on "investing" in more house than they could afford but when they lost their bets and they also lost their houses and all the money they had invested in them whereas Wall Street also gambled and lost but got to keep their winnings while having their losses (bad debts) covered by those same schmucks that lost their houses thanks to government and federal reserve policy. It was also an increase federal involvement in higher education w/r to regulation and the lure of federal grants that in part led universities to become staff heavy bureaucracies over the past several decades with no sense of cost consciousness. This escalation could initially be maintained, at least for a few decades, only because the government also established the student loan program that that opened a very large source of previously unavailable money that enabled university costs to escalate (just like health care) much faster that normal inflation but ultimately left an entire generation of students holding the bag with ridiculously large student loans.
It was likewise the foreign policy of particularly the last two presidents, Bush & Obama, that have closely followed the insane neo-conservative doctrine called "The Project for the New American Century" that calls for a world wide American empire whose pursuit to date has squandered trillions of dollars and ten thousand or so American lives on unnecessary and counterproductive military adventures that have brought the country to the brink of economic collapse. And while the majority of Congress on both side of the aisle are claiming there are no more budget cuts that can be made, at the same time they are forcing the army to buy tanks they do not want and arming local police forces with all sorts of military gear from armored personnel carriers on down------this is possible because most members of Congress place campaign contributions from special interests (General Dynamics, for example in the case of the tanks) above the public good because re-election is their holy grail and single minded objective as well as the key to their own personal fortunes.
It is the Federal Reserve that has enabled this insane and unsustainable exponential growth in congressional spending over the past 15 years that has fiscally and morally bankrupted this once great nation with its insane production of fiat currency which then requires insanely low interest rates in order to maintain interest payments on the exploding nation debt. Low interest rates in turn has led to large scale bad investments. Because the federal reserve's interest rate policy has left no safe alternative for reasonable returns incentives are skewed such that rather than rather choose the safety of saving accounts and CDs that pay essentially nothing people are forced seek investment alternatives that are more risky such as stocks, real estate. This forced excess investment a stagnant economy (for the wrong reasons) is not used for productive investment to develop and grow companies (as occurs during good economies) rather it leads to overpriced stocks and changes the stock market into a casino where speculation take over which leads to the formation of these financial bubbles that have burst over the past decade. This is really speculation if not outright gambling, rather than prudent investing and over the past 12 years as these bubbles have burst many peoples' retirement accounts have been devastated-----all because of faulty government monetary policy!
Another reason that more people are becoming poorer is that because the depressed economy has slowed job creation and has caused wages not to rise as fast as the dollar is loosing it value due to overproduction by the federal reserve. Again your friendly government has cleverly changed the way it calculates the CPI (a number of time over the past decade or so) to give the impression that inflation is very low and therefore any built in Cost-of-Living triggers in Social Security are not activated and, even more importantly, interest payments on the national debt can remain low. Anyone who has kept tract of the price of gasoline or groceries over the past decade or has paid university tuition and fees or medical insurance has a pretty good idea that costs are rising a lot fast than ever changing government metric for inflation tells us it is.
Make no mistake, government policy is pretty much determined by the special interests, large corporations and banks, who invest significantly in reelection campaigns and thus control politicians who create government policy. The pharmaceutical companies pretty much wrote the Bush drug plan and the insurance companies were major contributors writing to Obama Care-----most members of congress have still never read it and in fact rarely read the bills that they routinely vote into law based on lobbyists briefings and little input from a brain dead public that is comatose from too much main stream media entertainment (including their "news" (sic) broadcasts). Couple the special interests ownership of the politicians along with the with fact that the major mainstream media companies are essentially controlled by only 6 major corporations and the corporate control over government policy and public opinion is remarkably complete. Of course maintaining the illusion of a real two party system is in the interests of the special interests and the politicians so it maintained by the media or otherwise we would be recognized as really a politically philosophical one party state like we use to ridicule the Soviet Union for being back in the 1950 & 1960's. But if you look at the Democrats and the Republicans there are no significant interests in the issues that are REALLY important---1) both support growing a bigger federal government 2) are amendable to increasing the national debt by spending more money than the government take in (although they favor spending on different things, and compromise by agreeing to let both sides spend on what each want) 2) both support curtailing personal liberties and freedoms in favor of "greater security" with progressively more authority residing in the federal government----and in the process are driving us dangerously close to an authoritative police state environment 3) both support a foreign policy of empire building and a perpetual state of warfare fighting wars that are not essential to our national security and are protracted to the point that they are never won----and only achieve creating a negative image of America in much of the world.
My apologies for a long, libertarian rant on a sports board, but as long as people look to government for solutions to their problems rather than recognizing that a large growing federal government is the source of most of our economic problems, I don't think the ship will ever be righted.
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Government shutdown and affect on Navy football games
that's the stupidest thing written yet.
