With Netflix's price increase, there is definitely an increase with cancellation of subscriptions of their customers and if this price increases will continue, majority of their customers might cancel their subscriptions with Netflix and would definitely subscribe to other companies that offers the same services. With a 60 percent rate increase on the way at Netflix, it is believed that the leisure company will forfeit over two million customers. With the gaping sinkhole opened, there's a chance that businesses like Wal-Mart will jump in to fill the break. The giant company announced Tues that it is adding its recently acquired high-definition loading video service VUDU with WalMart.com. I found this here: Wal-Mart introduces streaming HD content via VUDU. They must have considered their consumers' views before they made this outrageous decision.

>> ^Ti_Moth:

I would say worse, he is using the excuse of a large budget defecit (caused by the financial crisis and the inability of the previous Labour government to save during the boom[Not that the tories would have done it differently had they been in power]) to make larger than nesecary cuts for public services like our beloved NHS and our vital benefits service instead of raising taxes (and collecting a fair ammount to begin with) from his mates the big businesses and bankers.


Not to mention raising VAT, brazenly asserting that it's a "fair tax" because it affects everyone equally, when it in fact affects the poor more than the rich since it amounts to a price increase on almost everything you buy. A cowardly move that does nothing except make it harder for those on lower incomes to get by, so that they can continue to subsidise the wealthy banks.

And let's not forget the wonder of the Big Society, a drive to get charities and community groups to take over the running of the public services that the ConDem government are cutting. For free. Dressing up the withdrawal of public funds as a drive to get communities running is a piece of doublethink so gobsmackingly insulting that I don't think people can even comprehend it. It's a classic Big Lie, straight from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

@Quill42. Word. I suppose I misspoke. Then since the '80s we've seen price increases?

>> ^blankfist:

Price increases started with government intervention that forced hospitals to treat everyone. Sure we want everyone to be taken care of, but if you come into the hospital with a hangnail or a runny nose, they MUST treat you.
And a lot of people don't pay their bill, and yet they're still allowed under penalty of law to return for service. Someone has to eat that cost, right? Well, welcome to the world of $7000 stitches.

Blankfist, you've got your facts confused. The law you're talking about, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) wasn't in effect until 1986, so it certainly couldn't have been the "start" of price increases which have skyrocketed since the 60's. Furthermore, it does NOT require treatment for something as minor as a hangnail or runny nose. Hospitals are only required to treat when there's a serious emergency and even then they only have to treat the patient enough to stabilize them.


That's not to say EMTALA isn't costing us though, because I'm sure it does. It creates a system where the poor aren't given easy access to cheap preventative medicine, yet are given unlimited expensive emergency care which just seems backwards.

>> ^blankfist:

Price increases started with government intervention that forced hospitals to treat everyone. Sure we want everyone to be taken care of, but if you come into the hospital with a hangnail or a runny nose, they MUST treat you.
And a lot of people don't pay their bill, and yet they're still allowed under penalty of law to return for service. Someone has to eat that cost, right? Well, welcome to the world of $7000 stitches.

I remember hearing a story from a guy I knew about the days before hospitals were required to treat you, a friend of his got in an auto accident but because he wasn't insured they just let him die. Seriously, I wonder how you can just stand by and watch someone die and still be called a doctor.

I imagine many people don't pay their bill, most uninsured people could never even afford a 7k medical bill anyhow, even if they wanted to pay. So they don't pay and the hospitals have to pass that on to the next guy who comes in, who can't pay either, pretty vicious cycle really.

There's no such thing as free healthcare, @gwiz665.

The reason US prices are so high is NOT because of privatization. Healthcare has always been privatized in the US, and in the 1960s someone's hospital bill would've been extremely reasonable. You have to ask yourself why the cost is so high now when it used to be so low.

Price increases started with government intervention that forced hospitals to treat everyone. Sure we want everyone to be taken care of, but if you come into the hospital with a hangnail or a runny nose, they MUST treat you.

And a lot of people don't pay their bill, and yet they're still allowed under penalty of law to return for service. Someone has to eat that cost, right? Well, welcome to the world of $7000 stitches.

i predict that a crappy economy, summer time price increases and a gulf full of oil will ruin my family trip to the beach and we'll have to settle for sleeping on uncle mike's floor and spending a day at seaworld. i predict my kids will once again be rather unimpressed by dancing water mammals and i will return with a serious sunburn, shot nerves and a sore left foot.

@bmacs27, I take it that you aren't proposing that making murder legal would reduce the number of murders, are you?

Let's take one step back. Let's say 1st degree murder stays like it is, but we legalize 2nd degree murder (i.e. paid assassins and hit men). Now we've brought the existing assassins into the light of day, and we can regulate and tax them -- make them take training classes, and give them literal licenses to kill. Maybe set up some rules about contracts (e.g. any assassin must honor their original contract, none of this "I'll pay you double what he's paying you" shit, or you lose your license), put together a regulatory enforcement agency, maybe a little interdisciplinary agreements between local law enforcement so hits can be done without harming innocent bystanders, let the CIA privatize some of their wetwork, etc. Oh, and we'll need to set up some laws that give hitmen contractor-assassin privilege so they can't be compelled to rat out their clients, otherwise they won't have a sustainable business model.

Now, if we did all that, would the total number of murders go down, because we legalized a type of murder, or would it go up because we massively increased the ease with which murder can be supplied?

Same with banning drugs. If you force providers to live outside the law, supply will shrink, even if demand stays the same. The shift in the supply curve means the price increases (especially if demand doesn't reduce!), and that means fewer people will actually make a purchase, and you end up with less drugs in the hands of people, and less drugs being used.

You still get all the other negative effects, such as lost tax revenue, no government regulatory oversight, a new contraband market for criminals to make a profit on (which leads to more people being drawn into the enterprise), and the secondary effect of more violent crime related to the production, transportation and sale of drugs.

Reducing the incidence of people smoking marijuana isn't even close to being worth all that. Reducing the incidence of murder is.

This site would be so much more pleasant if it wasn't completely overwhelmed by 16 year old liberal nutjobs like Nithern who haven't done enough research to realize that both Dems and Repubs have been complete fiscal retards for a really long time. Nithern, you bring up the old Clinton surplus myth. Read this:

http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16

If you can't understand it, let me break it down for you: there was never a surplus under Clinton. Ever. There are two parts of the national debt. Imagine you're a household and you have a mortgage and credit card debt. You take out a second mortage on your home and pay down some of your credit card debit. Home debt goes up, credit card debt goes down. Then you go all over the city and tell people you reduced your credit card debt! Whee! You don't tell them you went deeper into debt elsewhere in order to do it. Do you realize how ridiculous of an accomplishment this is?

Moreover, Social Security payments are adjusted for the CPI. The CPI is the government's way of calculating rises in the cost of living. In the 90s, the Boskin commission was formed to look for "bias" in the way the CPI was calculated. Let me translate that for you: hey guys, we need reduce Social Security obligations without anyone noticing by subjectively omitting certain price increases, thereby artificially lowering the CPI against which SS payments are adjusted.

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/2005/0624.html

Perhaps there is no accurate measure for the underemployed, but discouraged workers (jobless for over a year) are no longer counted when they used to be prior to the Clinton admin. It's a goofy new category created to intentionally make the number look more timid that historical numbers and nothing more. Both the CPI and the way unemployment are calculated changed during the Clinton administration as short term "fixes" of problems that need real solutions that no citizen is ever going to vote for. So if you think Clinton solved jack shit fiscally, I've got news for you: we're going to need something 100x more potent. And it won't happen, because people are retards like you. Think about it. You bitch about the Iraq war, and rightfully so, but before you were born the Democrats started a useless little war called "Vietnam" that led to Nixon severing our currency's last link to gold. Oh, and we lost about 50k soldiers. Which is sad, because you can always count on communism to fail by itself, which is exactly what happened after we pulled out.

You cry about the lack of Republican regulation. We need more regulation like we need a hole in the head. You don't even know what the word means, it's just some magical decree for officiating infractions in a game that can't exist without "subsidy fever". I mean, there's laws against stealing and killing and defrauding, and then there's handing out free money while impossibly trying to stop people from gambling with it. People's hope for gain is NORMALLY offset by their fear of loss. That goes out the window in an economy where anyone can borrow foreign money cheaply for a depreciating asset that they're convinced is an infinitely appreciating piggy bank. It goes out the window WITHIN the government, because politicians are by nature operating with money it appropriated rather than labored for. A "GSE" like Fannie and Freddie need way more regulation that any bankruptcy-fearing company.

Moreover, no one cares what bank they give their money because all bank deposits are insured by the FDIC. No investor gave a shit what loans Freddie and Fannie were spewing out because they were implicitly backed by the federal government. The home bubble got a huge boost from a 97 tax law excepting certain home sales from capital gains taxes. Because politicians like being the candyman. They don't think about the unintended consequences of creating artificial demand and employment in certain sectors with all their subsidy intervention bullshit. TO THIS DAY, FHA loans are being made requiring only 3% down. All the private subprime lenders? Couldn't have happened unless a politically motivated central bank exists to PRICE FIX the cost of borrowing in the market. Spike the punch, see mayhem that ensues, then resolve that the solution isn't to kill the spiker, but rather to hire more police officers to regulate the effects caused by the spiker. That's great logic. I hope you're regulating your regulators, too, because the SEC was told of Madoff's scheme 8 FUCKING TIMES and didn't do jack shit about it. I have more confidence in genuine personal risk of loss regulating behavior than some fucknut at the SEC. If only you would support an economy that wasn't so awash in fucking subsidies.

Social Security is another Democrat timebomb. Why not bring that shit up? It operates like a ponzi scheme and if you know how ponzi schemes work, you know that early investors win at the supreme expense of later investors. Guess who that later investor is? It's you!

"Real capital" can be the money itself, as is the idea of a legal tender. For something to be considered a good legal tender, it must meet many different standards, one of which is that it be a unit of value which keeps its value.

Price fluctuations that change with demand is not inflation, rather, it is finding a new market value based on demand. The fact is Chinese people can afford more with wages improving. When goods are more highly demanded then prices go up, this is not inflation but basic supply and demand. Inflation is when demand stays the same but prices increase.

By function well, you mean function in the way you would have it function. IE, that investment be easy and saving be harder. While no doubt large wealth building takes harvesting capital and investing it, there is no reason or proper justification that it should come at the expense of people who save. As inflation sits, those who safe are punished at the behest of those who invest. It doesn't have to be this way, but those who acquire large amounts of wealth are able to influence agendas and ideas to suppose that it is in the best interests of us all to want our buying power to be diminished.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker: You really and truly believe that humans are brainless puddings that can't move, think, or live unless some government plan is marching them around, don't you?

The gov really has nothing to do with how our food gets picked, except that they more or less stay out of the way. You are suggesting that they remove the only population willing to do the work at the wages offered by the market. Markets do right themselves, they do this only after the effects hit consumers. Products with long production cycles, such as agriculture, can fall to inaccessibility before the market corrects.

Strictly enforcing immigration laws in California, besides being infeasible, would bankrupt the ag industry, and force a giant federal bailout, massive price increases, and food shortages, that seems a lot more governmentally invasive than what I suggest doing, and leaving them the fuck alone, letting them work, and even collect on some of the services they are paying for.

If you can't afford that, then you qualify for Medicaid.

Oh, and that's okay? But having a similar system which covers everybody is not? Sorry you lost me there. If I am near the line, cycling in and out of Medicaid would put me in a preexisting condition death spiral pretty fast.

If you're SMART (like me) then you'll also have an HSA or cafeteria plan where you set aside a chunk of your income every paycheck for health expenses.

Ah, paycheck, I pay self employment tax, don't have the same options for write offs as you.

a little common sense and frugality.

Frugal? Really? please don't mess with me on frugal, I own my house, I have $0 in debt, I spent about $500 a month for living expenses for myself and my GF. Next.

Your example here falls flat, because auto insurance and life insurance companies do the exact same thing.

1) life insurance is a scam.
2) auto state min coverage is highly regulated in most states. If you bought up to cover your own car expect to be taken to the cleaners, my whole point is that only highly regulated insurance is worth buying.

Not sure why you keep implying that medical insurance companies don't actually cover anything. That's patently untrue.

They don't cover nothing, they do systematically not cover things which they claim to provide, and require arm twisting and lawyers to pay up. It's not that I am sure that they won't pay, that is not my contention, it's just that I'm not sure that they will, and that makes buying their policies seem like a pretty stupid move, even if it were economically feasible.

I'm happy to share risk, but I need to have some assurance that my risk will be mitigated as well, and the current system does not offer that to my satisfaction.

^ A currency's value is determined by what it can buy, not based on how much of it there is in existence.

The two are related of course, but the way you devalue the dollar is to see prices increase because there's enough "extra" money circulating in the economy to drive prices up.

Generally speaking when you have companies slacking off production, and laying off workers "extra money" won't increase prices, instead it's likely to drive demand back up, and get those idle resources to be employed again.

Eventually you will need to worry about the extra money causing inflation, but only once the economy has gotten into a solid recovery. At that stage you want to start contracting money supply again, and get things back into a general equilibrium.

Most modern economic theory is geared towards trying to find accurate tools for judging when and at what speed the Fed should do such a thing, and Bernanke is one of the top minds on that subject.

I suppose I should add the caveat that that's just what mainstream economists believe, Austrian economists like Schiff believe a different story. Mostly the theory is that what I said is quackery, and that any meddling by a central bank will cause more problems than it solves. Why? In my opinion, that's because Austrian economics is just libertarianism dressed up to look like an economic theory, and they don't like that both mainstream schools believe that central banks perform an important role in the economy.

>> ^NetRunner:
^ When is our hyperinflation coming? What's going to be the inflation rate that makes you call it "hyper"?
Just asking, so we can mark our calendars, check the inflation rate at that point, and then call you a quack for getting it wrong, or give you a medal for getting it right.


Within 5 years, if you don't see abnormally rising prices across the board on products, I'll virtually lick your boots. The amount of monetary expansion right now is insane, and NONE of it is going towards creating exportable production, it's all consumption. So you won't have to wait long before foreign creditors on which we've depended for years to reduce their buying of our bonds (debt), forcing the Fed to step in and buy them directly with pure inflation/counterfeit (quantitative easing). Deleveraging, liquidation sales, and kneejerk flooding into treasuries will eventually give way to massive price increases as a result of too many dollars chasing too few goods. I also predict price controls within 10 years, similar to what we had in the 70s.

Convincing people to purchase new alternate fuel automobiles (or horses) would take a lot of time.


No, if batteries are improved enough to make electric cars cheaper than gas cars the problem will be trying to build them fast enough.


But personal transport is not the biggest issue.


Transportation is nearly the only issue and without it our oil usage is barely a novelty. More over, ANYTHING powered by oil in a tank can be replaced with a battery, we just need to make them the cheaper alternative and we're getting close(and any oil price increases automatically bring us closer).



The investment in infrastructure related to oil goes beyond just pipelines from oil fields to refineries to automobiles. Think of where your bananas will come from? How do they get to you now?

On a diesel powered tanker that could save money running off of batteries if they worked well enough for electric cars.


How many miles do the cheap products on Walmart shelfs travel once they leave the sweat shop? Most of the products we use and eat every day depend on that oil-powered infrastructure.

And that oil power is ONLY used because it is cheaper than using batteries. The same reason cars run off gas because it is cheaper. Build a battery that makes cars cheaper, and everything bigger than cars is cheaper to run off them as well.


Even the highways those products go by to reach you, once they are taken off ship, are made from oil. How will these roads be maintained and repaved when the main component has become scarce?

If we aren't burning oil for fuel we have tens of thousands of years worth of oil for small purposes like paving highways.


It means a massive social and political changes which will take a generation to even begin to implement.


It absolutely does not. There is no social(nor political) attachment to oil at all, only to personal automobiles(and oil revenues for oil producing nations). People don't care much what powers them as long as they work. We are just a better battery away from electric cars being superior to gas driven ones in every way.

>> ^jwray:
The United States federal government is not paying for its deficit spending by printing excessive amounts of money. It is borrowing instead. Inflation is at 3.66% and falling. It peaked at 5.6% in July, before the economic upheaval.


Oh really, is that why it takes 3x as many dollars to buy an ounce of gold today than it did ten years ago? Of course the government is printing obscene amounts of money. Stop picking and choosing little short term windows of time where the trend is not apparent, nothing goes in a straight line. Do you even know what monetization of debt means? If foreigners are no longer interested in buying our government debt (bonds) that the treasury issues every year, the Fed has to raise interest rates to lure them in, because that's the yield on their loan to us. But they're LOWERING THEM. Yields are NEGATIVE. You loan money to us, you will be paid back in depreciated dollars that buy less than what you had before you loaned. So now that foreigners aren't doing that, guess who has to step in and buy those bonds? The Federal Reserve. Except that money isn't someone's savings, it isn't backed by a product in the world. It's pure inflation, pure funny money. That's what's coming, their balance sheet is going into the TRILLIONS.

This is the symbiosis that enabled government excess. A tax is an honest appropriation, people see it and are far more likely to resist it. Inflation is arbitrary money creation in a back room that siphons value from existing dollars. You can pull a curtain over that, lie about how much you're doing it, and watch as people see prices go up 10% in health care, food, per annum with absolutely no idea what hit them. After all, the government weatherman says that prices only went up 3%.

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/2005/0624.html

The calculations are a joke, after we left the gold standard in the 70s, they kept changing them to understate real inflation and welfare obligations so they could spend more and more without it being easily noticed. They no longer include homes, energy, or food. Also, they introduced a subjective concept called hedonics adjustment, which negates price increases as inflation by discounting an assumed increase in quality.

The most galling result of this Keynesian nonsense is it blinds people to where inflation is going. Keynesian economics is the equivalent of teaching astrology instead of astronomy. First, they change the definition of inflation to mean prices instead of money supply. The correct definition of inflation is an increase of the money supply with the common RESULT being higher prices. After doing this, they then categorize inflation (to them: prices) into "asset-based" and "goods-based," and tell us that they don't fight asset-based. But asset-based inflation is what causes bubbles in assets like homes and stocks. We want things we own to go up and things we consume to go down, of course, but we don't want our assets to go up from artificial demand created by inflation. That's an illusion. So when inflation goes into tech stocks or homes, nobody sees it as inflation. Not the Keynesian Fed Chairmen, not the Keynesian financial managers, almost anyone with a degree in economics was less reliable than A COIN FLIP. That's when you know when your "science" has a problem. And then boom, when it starts going into commodities futures after the implosion, it exposes the inflation at all once that people were previously blind to.

And then here's a guy like Schiff, Ron Paul's economic advisor and Austrian economist, who was warning the whole god damned time since 2000, telling people to get into gold when it was $275 and getting laughed at by every confused Keynesian educated retard on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucDkoqwflF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

>> ^dtmike07:
Austrian economics has about as much credibility as scientology. They don't even believe in empirical evidence, for crissakes. Mainstream economics does't have a much better theory - essentially its an extended and mathematized version of Austrian economics. But at least mainstream economists know what the data says and use statistical techniques to analyze it. You know, like real scientists. And regarding the Austrian "theory" of the Great Depression - they pretty much pulled it out of their asses. Its just an attempt to blame the whole thing on the government, and exempt the free market. Austrian economics is a religion - the free market is God and government is the Devil.

You are 100% dead wrong on this. Keynesian "empirical data" is bogus, I've only scratched the surface on how they try to complicate simple concepts into a symbiotic swindle by redefining inflation, making up new terms, and it keeps blowing up in their face no matter who's in charge because that's the whole point. For you or Stukafox to even compare this problem to the firecrackers of banking panics (from fractional reserve lending, a legalized form of fraud that persists to this day with government backstops, an entirely different debate) is unbelievable, there's no proportion to a decade long depression and a bunch of shitty banks going under to remind people not to carelessly deposit all their money in banks.

Second of all, economics is a study of human behavior. Keynes was an idiot whose theories arose from a complete misunderstanding of what caused the great depression. He basically threw classical knowledge out the window and decided that economies needed central direction and stimulation by government. See, like the dumbfucks in this video, most people thought letting the banks fail was what caused the depression. It wasn't. It was what came before and after it. The inflation of the 20s was what caused the crash in the first place, you don't have a crash without a Fed-created bubble. You don't have withdrawal without being high on drugs.

But while withdrawal symptoms suck, they're actually the solution to the disease of the high. Hoover and Roosevelt saw the hangover as the disease, and began administering shock therapy. Over the course of many years, they raised tariffs, raised taxrates, and nationalized industry. The economy would have recovered, capital and jobs would have reallocated on its own. Instead, anyone who had any money after that crash had no incentive to invest or employ anyone, because now government was promising to take 90% of your profits if you made any. So unemployment got worse. The tax revenue the government did manage to appropriate, it used to pay for new government jobs that were extremely inefficient (being immune to bankruptcy, financed by theft, and having no competition tends to be an unproductive business model, ask the soviets). FDR also ordered livestock slaughtered and fields plowed under because he believed falling food prices were bad for farmers. No, I'm not making this up. Deflation being bad is another Keynesian myth, they think more efficient production lowering prices makes people sit on their money rather than invest it. Which is totally untrue if you look at the computer sector where prices fall IN SPITE of inflation and have never had problems raising capital or selling well despite falling prices and obsolescence. FDR is the same asshole who allowed Pearl Harbor to be a massacre and issued unconstitutional orders to confiscate gold from the poor, hungry citizens who had just seen the banks absolved for destroying their savings. The man was a fucking monster, it took four terms to get rid of him.

What got us out of the depression was a just war and FDR's death. WWII had the entire country up in arms because we were attacked by another country. People were willing to sacrifice their wants and contribute to the war effort, this was no pushover on a third world country, it took everything we had. People were buying warbonds based on patriotic fervor alone. Massive amounts of infrastructure was built to produce wartime materials. That manufacturing base remained after the war for private industry, taxes came down, trade resumed, and we emerged as a leading producer of wealth in the world. By default. Because the rest of world was in shambles, only the Soviets were left to compete and their socialist economy eventually crumbled. We didn't plan it that way, it just happened. We were also still on a semi-gold standard, we still had a savings rate, and we became the largest creditor nation. We've lost ALL OF THAT. It's all gone, we're the direct opposite now. No gold standard, negative savings rate, largest debtor nation in the WORLD.

Keynes main problem is, politicians have no precise idea what all needs to be produced and created to please everyone in a PEACETIME economy, it's impossible. The free market is millions of individuals with diverse wants and needs, there's no way in hell you can centrally manage that. But they think they can and want to spend, that's why they picked Keynes as a replacement for old models, because his theories completely justified what socialist academics had been wanting to do all along. They honestly believed they could spend money more efficiently than its earner. That's impossible, the earner has a stake in the money. If he throws it away, he loses the labor he spent to obtain it, so he has a natural incentive to be thrifty. A politician spending it loses nothing, they have no incentive to be thrifty. They're people motivated by self-interest, just like you and me, their only legitimate job in the economy was to make sure force and deception is not used when we are out here transacting with one another. That's what graphs and "empirical data" doesn't explain, and it's why history will show Keynes to be a failure.

Far from our free market roots, we centrally fix interest rates, we declare lending standards discriminatory with goofy programs like the community reinvestment act, we redistribute capital from good businesses to failed ones, savers to speculators, and pass all kinds of anti-competitive laws. That's what Ron Paul understood and was going to put a stop to. He was going to end the monopoly on currency that forced us all into accepting the bill for government excess. He was going to end the useless military expenditures overseas. He was going to eliminate the income tax and cripple the ability of politicians to engage in collusive campaign dealings, or "engineer" society by issuing special credits to certain types of marriages, incomes, families, or investments. He knew the enablements, he understood how seemingly innocuous program could change human behavior. Politicians are just lawyers spending and accepting millions of dollars to get a low-paying position of controlling other people's money. That's it. And if you think they should be controlling 50% of our money in life, you deserve everything that's coming to you. Your employers are all going to close up shop to avoid the tax, your education is going to suck, your welfare dollars' value is going to be pissed away on foreign entanglements and overpaid execs, your gold is going to get confiscated (again). It's all coming, comrades.