Comments on: The Way I See It

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:59:04 +0000

You prepare for it like any other disaster, only you plan on it being of a longer duration.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:31:42 +0000

Yep. Buying time, and hoping the horse will learn to sing. Thing is, I don’t know of any horses that ever learned to sing. But what can you do?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 05:02:41 +0000

In reply to Badtux. We are buying time and hope that the people with power figure it out before we reach the point of no return. A hell of a way to run a country ... into an early grave.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 04:11:23 +0000

I guess the difference is in how long it takes to end badly. There's too many guns floating around in America for it to *not* end badly, but with Zero it might end badly far enough in the future that I have time to prepare for it, while with Rmoney, it will happen so quickly that by the time you realize it, you're in the middle of it. And who knows, if we drag things out far enough, maybe the horse will learn to sing.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 19:55:10 +0000

This is government by the 1% and it is going to end badly. People are too busy trying to stay afloat to get involved with what is going on politically. They are hoping that someone will fix it, but have no idea what needs to be done.

Both parties are guilty of hiding the causes of the problems, and degrading the real solutions.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 06:22:18 +0000

This election is a choice between things getting worse slowly (the big O), or things getting worse very very fast (the crazies who own Rmoney). What a choice. Well, I’m going to choose things getting worse slowly, because there’s a chance of turning that around in the future, rather than things going to **** fast because given how many guns are circulating in America, when things hit bottom it’s going to go bad *fast*, but …

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 21:39:16 +0000

On the framing side, Steve, we need to keep reminding people that nothing, nada, zip, came out of that commission. It reached no conclusions and issued no report. There was no agreement on what to do about the non-existent budget crisis, only a lot of suggestions, many of which that we know will make the deficit worse, like austerity.

We know what worked the last time this happened, and that’s what we should be doing now, if we didn’t have a lot of people in charge whose paychecks depend on remaining ignorant.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:41:53 +0000

What? you mean someone is even considering the, um, stuff that came out of the Catfood Bowls Commission?

Keynes was proved right in the 1930s. He would be proved right again today if anyone in power were paying attention, which would happen only if their own gravy train were in danger. Great Depression II, here we come, with the same distribution of wealth as in Great Depression I, which suited the elite just fine…

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:19:14 +0000

First off as a matter of clarity: there is no Simpson-Bowles plan. The Simpson-Bowles committee couldn’t agree on a plan and gave up. People are talking about ideas that were proposed by Simpson and Bowles, but they were never agreed to by the committee. It is a myth.

Congress is the one who screwed up the tax system by including all kinds of exemptions and exclusions rather than making it simple and straight-forward. People didn’t do this, Congress did it with the guidance of lobbyists. People didn’t ask for a mortgage interest deduction, the banks did. There is a industry behind every deduction, and every loophole in the tax code.

There should be one standard deduction for a household, and a second deduction based on the number of people in the household, both indexed to inflation. Deduct those from the gross and everything that is left is taxable income. All income, no matter what the source, is treated exactly the same. People would be free to do whatever they wanted with their money without worrying about ‘the tax implications’, because there wouldn’t be any.

Congress won’t do it because the special interests would oppose it tooth and nail. Tax attorneys, accounts, and tax preparers would be up in arms as they became irrelevant. The only way anyone could cheat would be by hiding income and that is much harder to do than ‘misapplying dubious deductions’.

Putting the minimum wage at the level of a living wage, is the first step to a guaranteed annual income. The current minimum wage needs to be a third again as high to match the minimum wage in the 1970s.

People are paying the Treasury to sell them bonds. Currently US bonds have a negative interest rate, and with the Euro imploding, that isn’t going to change in the near future. Now is the time to repair and build infrastructure, and expand the economy and jobs. We need to expand the GNP, not make it contract with austerity. You pay off the debt in boom times, not in depressions. You cut government jobs in boom times, not in depressions.

By: paintedjaguar

paintedjaguar — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 13:41:02 +0000

Americans pour what must amount to billions per year into the effort to limit government benefits to the “deserving”… whatever that means. I’m certain it would be cheaper in lives, resources and general misery to have a guaranteed annual income… a ridiculous, extreme-left notion that was supported by both of those well-known communists, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman