By "tough on savers", what you mean is traders at the expense of savers. Traders are still free to trade in a hard currency system, they just can't wildly speculate...which has been a major problem anyway in terms of recessions and panics. How many times have savers caused an economic downturn vs how many massive speculations, panics, contagions sown by freeish money made available through government fiscal policy and lose central banking.

You are right though, there is an incentive to destroy the environment for hard currency when that currency is gold. Look at Zimbabwe, they are destroying their rivers and other live giving infrastructure. You could use something other than metals, but really, metals aren't going anywhere, the are going to be mined milled and used in other areas. Not having them as a basis of currency isn't going to stop people from wanting gold, silver, oil or whatever we wanted to choose. In fact, it is BECAUSE they are valued and hard to obtain that we wanted to select it as a currency denomination.

As I see it, when you favor Fiat currency, the evils you make are inflation (which can be rightfully called a tax), larger business cycles, and the debt monster which will one day eat your currency alive when exponential growth is no longer possible.

SS is no answer to this at all, our current SS policy is a ponzi scheme. It requires more investors to pay out dividends to the old ones. At some point, that will bust, and to the detriment of everyone alive at the time to watch it.

In short, I think central bankers morgage the future for current gains. This is at the direct cost of the savers, they are being exploited the whole while. The recent bank bust is just more case to this. The savers forced to bail out the massive speculators. Not only does their money get debased, but they have to bail them out when massive speculation made possible by freeish money finally comes crashing down.

Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Third in a Series (Commemorative Plates On Sale Now!)
Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 02, 2009


(9) If you like Medicare, you'll love national health care, which will just extend Medicare's benefits to everyone.

Hey -- I have an idea: How about we make everyone in America a multimillionaire by pulling Bernie Madoff out of prison and asking him to invest all our money! Both Medicare and Bernie Madoff's investment portfolio are bankrupt because they operate on a similar financial model known as a "Ponzi scheme." These always seem to run fabulously well -- until the money runs out.

Not only is Medicare bankrupt, but it is extremely limited in whom and what it covers. If Medicare were a private insurer, it would be illegal in many states for failing to cover hearing aids, podiatry, acupuncture, chiropractic care, marriage counseling, aromatherapy and gender reassignment surgery.

Moreover, Medicare payments aren't enough to pay the true cost of those medical services it does cover. With Medicare undercutting payments to hospitals and doctors for patients 65 and older, what keeps the American medical system afloat are private individuals who are not covered by Medicare paying full freight (and then some). That's why you end up with a $10 aspirin on your hospital bill.

National health care will eliminate everything outside of Medicare, which is the only thing that allows Medicare to exist.

Obviously, therefore, it's preposterous for Democrats to say national health care will merely extend Medicare to the entire population. This would be like claiming you're designing an apartment building in which every apartment will be a penthouse. Everyone likes the penthouses, so why not have a building in which every apartment is a penthouse?

It doesn't work: What makes the penthouse the penthouse is all the other floors below. An "all-penthouse" building is a blueprint that could make sense only to someone who has never run a business and has zero common sense, i.e., a Democrat.

(10) National health care won't cover illegal aliens -- as the president has twice claimed in recent radio appearances.

Technically, what Obama said is that the bill isn't "designed" to give health insurance to illegal aliens. (That bill, the "Health Insurance for Illegal Aliens Act of 2009," was still being drafted by Ted Kennedy at the time of his death, may he rest in peace.)

But unless the various government bureaucracies dispensing health care are specifically required by law to ask about citizenship status, illegals will be covered. We can't even get employers and police to inquire about citizenship status, but liberals assure us that doctors will?

And by the way -- as with the abortion exclusion -- the Democrats expressly rejected amendments that would have required proof of residency status to receive national health care.

Still not convinced? Day after day, The New York Times has been neurotically asserting that national health care won't cover illegal aliens (without ever explaining how precisely it will exclude illegal aliens).

So far, just this week, these Kim Jong Il-style pronouncements have appeared in the Treason Times:

-- "Illegal immigrants will be covered. (Myth)" -- Katharine Q. Seelye, "Myth vs. Fact vs. Other," The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2009

-- "(Sen. Jim DeMint) fueled speculation that a health care overhaul would cover illegal immigrants, although specific language says it would not." -- Katharine Q. Seelye, "Fighting Health Care Overhaul, and Proud of It," The New York Times, Aug. 31, 2009

-- "'Page 50: All non-U.S. citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services.' ... The falsehoods include (that italic statement)." -- Michael Mason, "Vetting Claims in a Memo," The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009

-- "But that would not help illegal immigrants. Contrary to some reports, they would not be eligible for any new health coverage under any of the health overhaul plans circulating in Congress." -- Duff Wilson, "Race, Ethnicity and Care," The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009

The last time the Times engaged in such frantic perseveration about a subject was when the paper was repeatedly insisting that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong had a solid case against the Duke lacrosse players.

By August 2006, every single person in the United States, including the stripper, knew the stripper's claim of "gang rape" was a lie. That was when Duff Wilson -- quoted above -- co-wrote the Times' infamous cover story on the Duke case, titled: "Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers." No answers!

(11) Obama has dropped his demand for the ironically titled "public option" (i.e., government-run health care), which taxpayers will not have an "option" to pay for or not.

Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. "Abortion" becomes "choice," "communist" becomes "progressive," "communist dictatorship" becomes "people's democratic republic" and "Nikita Khrushchev" becomes "Barack Obama."

It doesn't matter if liberals start calling national health care a "chocolate chip puppy" or "ice cream sunset" -- if the government is subsidizing it, then the government calls the shots. And the moment the government gets its hands on the controls, it will be establishing death panels, forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions and illegal aliens, rationing care and then demanding yet more government control when partial government control creates a mess.

Which happens to be exactly what liberals are doing right now.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

I don't want Obama to die--even of natural causes--while in office. If he croaks then all the statist tyranny he's pushing on the once-free USA will pass out of sympathy.

Why the rush for DMV quality health care when the US can't pay for the socialist Ponzi schemes it's running now? Social Security, Medicare and 'caid are all insolvent.

Obama's lackluster performance has the potential to sink the taxocrat party once and for all. Really, the Communist Party of America or the Greens should take over the slot. No one would even notice.

Let me clarify what I meant by "Great Depression style." I was mostly meaning a general recession that coincides with a series of bank runs, along with liquidity issues.

I'd be interested to see some hard economic data that went back to the 1600's. Personally, I think pre-industrial revolution economic data is not terribly relevant to the modern economy, but certainly economic crises did happen before there was a United States too (tulipmania being a favorite example).

I'm not sure what baseline you would use to call the growth of the economy between the 1940's and 1970's bad, certainly in the US it was a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity, and we didn't have a destroyed industrial base to rebuild.

After the 1970's, and in particular, post-Carter, America took a huge right turn on its policies across the board. Lots of things changed about the economy, and the philosophy driving economic policy. I'd argue that in essence, it was a massive push to return things to the way they were before the Great Depression and all the economic and political reform that it had spurred.

What did we get as a result? A new Gilded Age, and a new Great Depression.

But that's almost a tangent. If you're going to declare that the housing bubble is in some way primarily caused by (or made dangerous by) the Fed's expansionary monetary policy in the early 2000's, what is it that Greenspan should have done differently? Contract the money supply before a recovery began? Never cut rates in response to the crisis? It seems to me that monetary policy is the wrong tool for the job if what you really want is for people to properly price risk.

Maybe making money tight would indeed have slowed both bubbles, but it's a bit like chemotherapy; you're fighting the cancer by killing off all your body's fast-growing cells. It helps with the cancer, but it does lots of collateral damage in healthy areas too. Without more targeted treatment, it can be a bad idea.

In my view, the more targeted treatment would have been regulation. The market managed to make a system of trusts and obligations so complex that no one was able to accurately judge risk, and built itself a naturally-occurring ponzi scheme. Government could have kept things more transparent by regulating CDOs and CDSs, but it didn't because the people whose job it was to regulate the industry were all people who'd been chosen specifically for their disdain of regulating anything.

To me the instability we're seeing in recent decades has more to do with deregulation, and a cultural predisposition for searching for fast, easy money instead of trying to really create value, not some sort of issue with monetary policy.

>> ^potchi79:
>> ^entr0py:
I can't help but be reminded of the recent Supreme Court ruling that convicts do not have the constitutional right to request DNA tests on preserved biological evidence. It seems that protecting judges and prosecutors from embarrassment is more impotent then sorting out the innocent from the guilty.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE55H4BD20090618

What the.. unfucking believable. This is sad.


What's sad is that we borrow and spend so much god damned money on unconstitutional shit that they can use the excuse "it will cost too much" and not get completely laughed out of town. A solid justice system is one of the few, undeniable, constitutional activities for which the Federal government needs funding, and we've pissed it all away on useless wars, bureaucracies, and welfare ponzi schemes.

>> ^dag:
^with these kinds of comments I fear the US will once again get the healthcare it deserves. Now is not the time for quoting Locke. And if you disparage the elderly getting quality healthcare- I'd say your heart is two sizes too small. There should be a "common good" and care for the elderly falls into it.


I'm not disparaging the elderly, I'm telling you straight up that there is a larger dynamic here than what you are suggesting. If given the choice between no SS/Medicare taxes throughout life or a million dollars worth of procedures when I'm 85, brother, I'm choosing the less taxes. That's an even easier choice for my generation than ones before it since SS/Medicare will implode long before we retire. But even if those were sustainable systems, the point is that some people would rather live a better life than a longer life. In the old days, people made these kinds of decisions and accepted the tradeoff. Now we run a giant ponzi scheme called Social Security (of which Medicare is a part) where the choice is made for us to live a longer life at the expense of a better one. Even that is debatable since a prudent investor would be able to get both. SS/Medicare intake isn't invested at all, just transferred from one generation to another, with a "trust fund" spent by congress decades ago and replaced with IOU bonds.

We don't have a 100% private system, far from it. The high prices are because of government involvement interfering with the market's pricing mechanism. What I fear most is idealist people like you who have zero understanding of what costs are incurred by such systems despite the fixed prices. The costs in the quality of life, the costs on your currency's value, the cost in being unable to compete with foreign production whose employers aren't strapped with paying for the abuse and fraud borne by a system in which people are spending other people's money on services. Like I said before, our economic wellbeing has changed dramatically since leaving the gold standard and borrowing at interest well in excess of our productive capacity. People like you don't understand how ugly our bond market looks, how it went from a normal mortgage to an ARM equivalent. You can't even figure out how to fix Medicare without cutting into some other socialist program you want, and you want more? Figure out how to pay for all the imports, interest obligations, military empire, and socialist services you currently have before dreaming up new ones and adding to the deficit. You think you can add to it in perpetuity, but one day foreigners really will scoff at the notion of buying our debt and we'll be SOL.

Would you trade your current public health care for the American one?

This is exactly the mentality I am talking about. You act as though health care systems exist in a vacuum. In reality, every country that has socialized medicine has to try and budget it AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHER THINGS. And each country has different OTHER THINGS. We have a shitload of OTHER THINGS we already have to borrow trillions year over year for. I blame our socialist education system if people spent all those years in school and can't figure out basic economics. Sure, Cuba spends a shitload on socialized medicine and manages to achieve a lower infant mortality rate, BUT AT WHAT COST ELSEWHERE? Cuba has little else to spend on other things and has a relatively poor standard of living compared to America. That's why people die on banana boats trying to get here, not the other way around. They don't have the privilege of being the reserve currency of the world where central banks will buy their debt in the most absurd circumstances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

We've had a form of economic fascism for a long time. Militarized, favoring the creation of a strong centralized state with a corporatist, government directed economic policy. Unfortunately, this guy is just an attention whore who is throwing words around without knowing what they mean. It's perfect fodder for the Obamanites to make themselves feel better, who have turned a blind eye to bailouts, the monopolization of money, debt-based money, the future effects of today's unprecedented reinflation, price fixed interest rates, welfare ponzi schemes that are going to explode, deficit spending on consumption twice as much as Bush... but hey, he changed the tax code a little bit.

Ultimately, Winstonfield, marriage is just a word and the meaning of a word can change to mean something different to different people. I suspect the word marriage will be adopted by gay couples to describe their relationship and be fully understood by the person to whom they are speaking. And there's nothing you or the church can do about that.

As for your point about the religious construct, I think you're being paranoid. A religious group is a social construct with built-in prejudices unassociated with the government (although they do get tax exemptions, which is wrong). A gay person suing the Catholic church is akin to a black person suing the KKK for denying them membership. It's an absurd prospect.

Government recognition of marriage for certain goodies is the problem. The SSA is a $50 trillion ponzi scheme that needs to be phased out immediately, it's Medicare promises have extended far, far beyond our future capacity to meet them. The IRS needs to be replaced with a VAT or nothing. That would make this and many other social inequities disappear overnight. Groups should not be able to vote themselves things from other groups. It is a prime failure of democracy that should have been permanently addressed a long time ago in our constitution.

>> ^rougy:
>> ^BansheeX:
My, aren't we young and gullible.

You just made the ignore list, fuckwad.
Say hello to Quantumushroom. I'm sure you'll find you have a lot in common.
And keep pretending that you're the only person in the world who pays taxes, or that all of your taxes are wasted on "entitlements" and foolish research.
It's really the only leg you have to stand on.


Quantumushroom is an inflammatory neo-con who parrots hypocritical fiscal criticisms and pro-interventionist nonsense. What has he criticized Democrats on that Bush didn't DO when he was in office? Other than a few social issues, nothing, yet he defends the (socialist) neo-conservative party to the last.

Question is, why do you want to force others to finance things they believe are inefficient and don't want to participate in? Public schools and retirement schemes would theoretically be very easy things have opt-outs for. It's not illegal to sell education services apart from the government, or manage your own earnings for retirement. I'd prefer not to waste my time trying to convince you how Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable ponzi schemes, you've already convinced yourself of the impossible. Yet you are adamant at forcing me to participate in them with you despite my preference (after an enormous amount of research) not to devote part of my earnings there. All YOU should be concerned about, is you and those like you who believe it will work between you. Whether I believe I can save and invest my money more efficiently than the social security system shouldn't make any difference to its proponents. And the same logic goes for this fucking sea slug. A politician could come to your door with any damn reason to want money, and you'd give it to them, we already know that. But you don't own what others have or earn, so stop trying to vote in a learned minority who has doubts.

Have you even been paying attention to the stimulus packages? These people do not fucking care about you, buy a clue. If they cared about waste, Obama would have used his veto pen umpteen times already instead of verbally admonishing earmarks and the undeserved bonuses begotten by giving billions of stolen money to idiots who drove their companies into the ground. If they cared, they wouldn't brazenly state it out loud that you don't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEfICUoWKBw

>> ^blankfist:
Freedom of choice?! That's crazy talk! Who will pay for the schools and the police and the fire department!


Please tell me you're not serious. Go research libertarianism and discover the difference between duties related to the protection of rights (police, fire, military, courts, some roads) and services within an economy (educating, insuring, advising, managing, delivering goods, entertaining, operating on bodies, etc...). Yes, we should be free to choose any product or service we want. No, we should not be anarchists without specific and very limited powers granted to a federal government. Why the hell would you want the government to forcibly appropriate money from you for services you do not wish to partake in? Should people who never go to public schools pay taxes towards public schooling? Should people who prefer to save and invest their earnings themselves be forced to participate in SS and Medicare ponzi schemes?

>> ^imstellar28:I can at least understand and sympathize with NetRunner's perspective on unemployment. That is a case of all people helping all people; even if I don't agree with forcing people to help, I can understand the reasoning. In the big scheme of things, unemployment benefits are such a small amount of money compared to our national income its really not a big deal. That cannot be said of trillion dollar socialistic bailouts to failing corporations, the governmental manipulation of markets, inflation, the creation of booms and bursts, etc.


My goodness, my efforts are paying off -- he's starting to have a grudging respect for my beliefs, even if he doesn't agree with them.

I think, imstellar, you just inadvertently stumbled into the main complaint us progressive/liberal people have about what Obama's doing with the economy now. He seems to be continuing this socialism-for-the-rich policy, which is vastly more expensive than anything we've ever dreamed of proposing in terms of unemployment, welfare, and health care, and that's saying quite a bit.

I would agree in general that we need for the losers to lose, mainly these investment banks that built these ponzi schemes. Problem is, when Paulson let Lehman fail, it triggered a run on the banks. In fact, the only thing that's stopped that from happening to all banks is the expectation that government will find a way to keep them afloat somehow.

That's why I see the question of how we deal with the banks as being one of the most important questions right now. If we let them fail, this really will be a huge depression, likely bigger than 1929, and more like the earlier "Long Depression" that followed the Panic of 1873. If we bail them out, not only is that unlikely to work, it would probably make the nation bankrupt, while heaping huge sums of cash into the pockets of the very people who built this house of cards.

I think the only reasonable option is to put them in receivership -- nationalize them. The government takes over the bank, wipes out the shareholders, brings in new management, straighten out the balance sheets, and then sell the bank back to private investors.

That way we keep the bank intact, make the losers lose, and while the risk is socialized, the taxpayers would get any upside that would be gained in the process.

All this talk about debt and deficit spending seems like hot air to me. Sure, we need to worry about it, but it's not really driving any of our issues right now. Cutting government spending right now would be a horrible idea, because it'd just add more people to the unemployment lines (even if I'd otherwise be happy to see the engines of war lose their biggest customer). Cutting taxes might help, but keep in mind Obama did that in the stimulus package (the largest middle-class tax cut in history, lefty demagogues would say), as well as spending money investing in infrastructure, to try to bring down unemployment. As Farhad said, it's probably insufficient to the size of the downturn we're in, but it should lessen the blow.

imstellar and blankfist, you both bring up inflation as a long-term risk. Here's what Brad DeLong has to say about that risk. I'm no economist, but my reading is that he's saying "good point, but here's how we would detect if inflation became an issue, and all of those metrics say we're good to go." From what I'm reading, deflation is the problem we're looking at, not inflation, and while it's true that if we make the stimulus too big it would lead to inflation, I think we're nowhere near that point right now.

Incidentally, that's the answer to imstellar's question about "why don't we do this in good times/developing countries too?"

I also love the compromise plan of saying that government should buff up our social safety net so that an economic crash doesn't put people on the streets, starve them, push them out of school (if there), or forgo medical treatments, then I'm all for letting the rest of the economy crash as hard as it cares too. I think, generally speaking, that's more in line with progressive ideology than what Obama's actually doing.

I don't remember saying that you're sister is responsible for losing her 401k. The consequences of the current financial crisis are obviously gonna affect people who haven't done anything wrong, I just assumed that was common knowledge.

Ok, enough "catchphrases", how about a statistic?

"The most recent Federal Reserve study showed that 43% of U.S. families spent more than they earned. On average, Americans spend $1.22 for each dollar they earn."

If you don't see how that's gonna come back to bite you in the ass then you're beyond saving, sorry. That statistic is probably a little dated, but I bet it has only gotten worse.

I don't doubt that there are smart americans on this site. I'm not saying that the average American is an idiot. I know quite alot of Americans personally, and very few of them are idiots. What I am saying is that in light of this crisis, people should examine the lifestyle they're living and the choices they're making. For 43% of Americans this is something that has to be done. However, I'm not making any excuses for the CEOs or politicians, I'm just saying that the Average Joe isn't neccessarily innocent either.

>> ^volumptuous:
Obviously if you think the American public is who's to blame for the ponzi schemes, 30-to-1 Hedge's and sub-prime CF, you know nothing about economics or Wall Street regulation.
How is it my sister's fault that she and her husband just lost their entire 401ks? Is it because of her bigscreen (10 yr old, 22") TV, or her fancy (2 bdrm falling apart) House? It must be because she's an idiot right? It's definitely not because of that "scary corporation" called GM who they've worked for the last 20+ years.
Your catch phrases of "big screen TVs" and "two cars" shows you have little grasp of what has happened and what's been happening. Then you toss on the go-to of how Americans are stupid. Nice one.
It seems the one who's getting all of his information from the teevee is you.
And I have yet to see anyone say John Stewart should run for president. This straw man is so transparent it makes my head spin.

And btw: I'm sure most of the sifter-yanks here are very smart people. The one's that I've personally met certainly are. So you're really talking to the wrong crew.

Obviously if you think the American public is who's to blame for the ponzi schemes, 30-to-1 Hedge's and sub-prime CF, you know nothing about economics or Wall Street regulation.

How is it my sister's fault that she and her husband just lost their entire 401ks? Is it because of her bigscreen (10 yr old, 22") TV, or her fancy (2 bdrm falling apart) House? It must be because she's an idiot right? It's definitely not because of that "scary corporation" called GM who they've worked for the last 20+ years.

Your catch phrases of "big screen TVs" and "two cars" shows you have little grasp of what has happened and what's been happening. Then you toss on the go-to of how Americans are stupid. Nice one.

It seems the one who's getting all of his information from the teevee is you.

And I have yet to see anyone say John Stewart should run for president. This straw man is so transparent it makes my head spin.


And btw: I'm sure most of the sifter-yanks here are very smart people. The one's that I've personally met certainly are. So you're really talking to the wrong crew.



>> ^campionidelmondo:
lpgas: I wasn't trying to rant on TDS or Jon Steward. He's very good at what he does. I wasn't saying that people who enjoy TDS are idiots. I've enjoyed it for many years and even though I can't really watch it on a daily basis or anything close to that, I still enjoy watching the occasional episode. The problem is that people start thinking things like "Oh that Jon Steward should run for President" that makes me want to slam my head into the wall. If you turn to Jon Steward for political leadership you must be really fucking lost.
volumptuous: No you don't solely own the crisis as americans, but you own a big fucking chunk of it. I have yet to see anybody own up to that responsibility though. It's all too easy to put all the blame on the big scary cooperations, "those fatcats in Washington". Instead, people in the US should look at the lifestyle they've been living. A lifestyle that's waaaaaay over their budgets. They've been living on money they don't have, continuously borrowing more and more. Hey, everybody should own a house, two cars, a big fucking screen TV right? Let's worry about the consequences tomorrow. Well, tomorrow's here and it ain't looking pretty.
Also, don't change what I've said and then put it in quotation marks, that's lame...

Good illustration, but actually just the tip of the iceberg.

The mortgage/credit problem is bad, to be sure. But it's just the trigger for the larger problem. It exposed the Ponzi scheme that is the unregulated CDS market which is where tens of trillions of dollars are in play (and potentially gone). That's the shit that has people scared.

The optimism keeping these realtors and builders from leaping off the top of one of their buildings is that the Ponzi scheme of the rich fleecing everyone else will keep on keeping on just as soon as they figure out a way of putting the train back on the tracks. What if that assumption is deeply flawed? What if things aren't mendable in the way they would like? What if the 99% of the planet that isn't filthy rich wants a new world order of their own? THEN what?