In the early days they charged you to use the ATM, so I wrote myself checks and cashed them, because I wasn’t going to pay to do their job. That was in California. In New York I used them all the time because my bank allowed me to pay most of my bills with the ATM and didn’t charge me anything.

I saw that Terry Savage rant somewhere, and all I could think of was that these people pretend they are Christians.

When it is in full summer I offer people coming by ice water or lemonade, even Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses, because I don’t want them dying in my yard [it annoys the guy who mows the lawn, and Waste Management refuses to pick up bodies]. It’s hot down here and people out walking the neighborhood may not realize how easy it is to get in trouble.

For all anyone knows that lemonade stand could have been a project for school or a church requirement. If it was for school, those girls should have an easy A describing the reaction of a whacko to kids giving away lemonade.

It may also have been a decision to wipe out the competing lemonade stands and grab marketshare, just like WalMart does. How many web sites are there that started out giving stuff away, and then shifted to a profit-making model. Most of the major blogging sites work like that – the basic service is free, but if you want more you have to pay. You see sample give-aways all the time in supermarkets.

Some people really need to stop trying to frame everything as a policy decision.

I’ve been to countries that called themselves communist, socialist, and even fascist [Spain under Franco] and none of them gave away free lemonade, but I got a glass at a Sam’s Club for free.

The child lemonade industry is being held back by high taxes and too much government regulation. The little Trumps should be watering down the lemonade, buying their lemonade mix from cheap Chinese suppliers, and employing easy to exploit younger kids to sell their product. Everything else is just Obama loving communism. Umm.. or Socialism…Fascism? Dammit! What is the current meme?

Now is not the time for cost cutting or deficit reduction, it is the time for stimulus, real stimulus, not the watered down version that Obama, who is to the right of the Conservative Party of Britain, put forward. The economy needs a major boost targeted at state governments and fixing the infrastructure that Republicans have ignored since Reagan.

The articles you link to support what Badtux, Painted Jaguar, and I have all been saying, that you have to use the tools that were proven to work in the FDR administration, and stop thinking like Herbert Hoover.

I didn’t vote for Obama because I could tell from his voting record that he was well to the right of center, and right-wing policies would fail this time, just like they failed the last time.

The austerity moves in the UK are going to give you a slice of the misery, so I wouldn’t be celebrating, I would pay off all debt and hold on to any cash you can. Remember that gold is a hedge against inflation, it will cost you dearly in deflation.

That was punny, Steve, but not up to the high level of the “French foreign lesion”, which is certainly a 5 groan effort. 😉

In other words, businesses are becoming more and more profitable… but rather than hiring or giving raises to their current workforce, they’re shoveling the money into reserves as profits. This would have been inconceivable 40 years ago because the money would have just been siphoned away as taxes, which is why until the Reagan era, every improvement in productivity resulted in an increase in employee wages if the absence of customer demand justifying new hiring. But starting with Reagan — and especially with the Bush II tax cuts — wages started falling further and further behind as companies raked in higher and higher profits due to greater and greater productivity and just stashed the profits away as cash or gave it as enormous bonuses to the top executives. After all, if it’s not going to get taxed away, why spend it on your mere *workers*?

The problem with this is that higher wages would create more demand, and thus hiring… but without the demand, well. We currently have 5 unemployed people for each advertised job opening in America. That tells the story in a nutshell, and is the inevitable result of companies putting their extra cash under the mattress instead of giving pay raises to their workers.

– Badtux the Economics Penguin