We're turning Californian, turning Californian!

4est_4est_Gump said:

There is no such fucking thing as "International Economics."

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klippert said:

What really pisses me completely off about The Peoples Democratic Republic of Kalafornia.... All those fuckers voted for this ruination of that state... Now like fucking vermin....there leaving in droves. Only to land in some nice quiet burg....where they will set a course to fuck that town, county and state UP. If you move from PDRK.... Leave your Marxism at the state line.... else wise.... You voted for it....YOU SUFFER WITH IT. Prop30, step 4 to Barry'O' bail-out.

One lining for it.... With Barry'O' Goose stepping back into the Why Howz.... All but those bitter-clinger states could be PDRK lite.

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Ishmael said:

In how many threads have I railed about the same theme you're presenting here?

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Those colleges have had to dumb down the curricula in order to take advantage of all that 'free' money the government was handing out. And as the student ranks swelled they merely followed the laws of supply and demand and raised their tuition's. And people sit around and grouse about the results as shown in the examples above. It's easy for the nay-Sayers to point to those examples as the exceptions, mere anecdotal fluff thrown around to make a point. Unfortunately those 'anecdotal' stories are proving to be the rule and the success stories are the exceptions.

The entire premise of government subsidized higher education is built on the success of the post WWII GI bill. Which was an unqualified success due in part to two particular aspects of the bill. The first being that it was NOT open to everyone and the second being that the colleges did not adjust their standards downwards to try to capture the 'windfall profits' associated with the program. (Nor did they immediately ramp up courses in fringe degree programs, which few, if any, served any legitimate societal need.)

The entire model is as bad as the Social Security model, a snake swallowing it's own tail with the student becoming mere fodder for the system. Young people spending valuable working years studying some specialty in which they will never be gainfully employed.

Compounding all of this is the fact that the so much value is placed on this 'higher education' that the colleges are quickly becoming mere 'finishing schools' for the public education sector. Students are having to spend their first semester, and in some cases their first year, taking college courses that are essentially teaching what they should have learned in High School. And High School diplomas have become nothing more than really bad jokes.

And education is but one of the many 'causes' that the liberal continually offers up the same solution......"more money." If it were merely a matter of money most of our social ills would have disappeared long ago.

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Republicans think they’re importing hardworking immigrants who want a shot at the American Dream; the Democrats think they’re importing clients for Big Government. The Left is right: Just under 60 percent of immigrants receive some form of welfare. I see the recent Republican proposals for some form of amnesty contain all sorts of supposed safeguards against gaming the system, including a $525 application fee for each stage of the legalization process. On my own recent visit to a U.S. Immigration office, I was interested to be told that, as a matter of policy, the Obama administration is now rubberstamping all “fee waiver” requests for “exceptional hardship” filed by members of approved identity groups. And so it will go for all those GOP safeguards. While Canada and Australia compete for high-skilled immigrants, America fast-tracks an unskilled welfare class of such economic benefit to their new homeland they can’t even afford a couple of hundred bucks for the necessary paperwork.

It’s hardly their fault. If you were told you could walk into a First World nation and access free education, free health care, free services in your own language, and have someone else pay your entrance fee, why wouldn’t you? So, yes, Republicans should “moderate” their tone toward immigrants, and de-moderate their attitude to the Dems who suckered the GOP all too predictably. Decades of faintheartedness toward some of the most destabilizing features of any society, including bilingualism (take it from a semi-Belgian Canadian), have brought the party to its date with destiny. Or as Peggy Lee sang long ago in a lost land, “Mañana is soon enough for me.”

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(Reuters) - Two leading U.S. economists expressed deep pessimism on Friday that politicians in Washington will be able to strike a deal to rein in America's soaring national debt.

Sheila Bair, the former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Stephen Roach, a veteran economist at Yale University's School of Management, also said the Federal Reserve was creating another catastrophic financial bubble with attempts to stimulate the economy through its policy known as quantitative easing.

The two were speaking at a conference on global risks sponsored by the Rand Corporation and Thomson Reuters, at Rand headquarters in Santa Monica, California.

Bair, who stepped down as head of the FDIC in July 2011, said the Federal Reserve's policy of pumping money into the economy, combined with an unprecedented period of historically low interest rates, was creating "the mother of all bond bubbles."

Bair said she believed the United States was heading for a financial crash on the scale seen when the housing market collapsed six years ago, but this time because of investors who were looking for higher and riskier returns in other asset classes.

Roach called the Federal Reserve policy of low interest rates and quantitative easing a "ticking time bomb that keeps on ticking."

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333583/tribal-america-mark-steyn

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While Barack Obama pretends to care about the fiscal cliff – in reality, he’s all to happy to watch Americans’ tax rates rise across the board, and to cut spending on the military dramatically, even if it means economic failure – his Democratic counterparts in the Senate can’t hide their apathy. Today, the Senate decided to close down until after Thanksgiving. The Senate has passed no major legislation since the election, despite the fact that Democrats have a significant majority. Congressional leaders are slotted to meet with President Obama today, but they won’t be back in session until the week after next. Democrats are putting real negotations off, Politico reports, until December.

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Byron In Exile said:

That's rather accurate.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

It is not hard to see unless you live in the fantasy realm where A is not A.

You know that world where the more you pay out in benefits, the more you get back in taxes, so the quickest way to National Wealth is to borrow and spend. All you have to do is cover the interest, no one ever asks for their principle back...

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4est_4est_Gump said:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...ther-crash--debt-crisis-looms--top-economists

Let us also not forget the ticking time-bomb that is the education bubble...

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miles said:

"Quantitative easing" is government doublespeak for "printing more money."

The education bubble will burst because of the idiotic invention of a "right to a college degree."

Sound familiar? Remember when the government created a right to own a home?

Is there any doubt what the right to healthcare will do the country?

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Byron In Exile said:

Don't take this the wrong way, but you ought to understand the money system better.

It's elastic.

The Federal Reserve can loan the US government an infinite amount of money. The only question is: are you prepared to pay the interest on it?

You can even borrow money to pay the interest, but that adds to the debt, also.

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miles said:

"Quantitative easing" is government doublespeak for "printing more money."

The education bubble will burst because of the idiotic invention of a "right to a college degree."

Sound familiar? Remember when the government created a right to own a home?

Is there any doubt what the right to healthcare will do the country?

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4est_4est_Gump said:

It creates bubbles with this elasticity. Read Ron Paul's farewell speech.

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Byron In Exile said:

I don't need to read it.

I know everything he knows and more.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Aren't we full of ourselves...

*chuckle*

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So what do we win? Well, turns out there's only one detail worth remembering when dealing with the slew of tax hikes that kick in next year: We must reverse Bush-era tax rates on the rich. According to rosy projections of the Congressional Budget Office, this would amount to around $824 billion in revenue over the next decade, or less than one year of deficit spending by the administration. Democrats also support a millionaire "Buffett" tax, which could raise—maybe—$47 billion over the next decade, or less than $5 billion a year, or around half a workday of the federal government's budget.

In other words, we get the genuinely unserious government we deserve.

Republicans have already conceded huge swaths of their argument to the president. Both House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are now ready to meet with Obama to tackle a nonexistent "revenue" problem rather than an unsustainable spending problem. So elections do have consequences—most notably, surrender.

Meanwhile, as the GOP plots an honorable out, the president is crushing them on the broader political and ideological front. It is the president who lays out the populist parameters of this debate (rich vs. the rest) and the Republicans who are unable to muster a cogent retort or a single enticing reform-minded agenda. Instead, the GOP has cooked up a political strategy that repetitively calls out the president for his lack of "leadership" in hopes of pressuring the White House. Good luck with that!

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4est_4est_Gump said:

http://reason.com/archives/2012/11/15/republicans-have-already-lost-fight-on-f

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Byron In Exile said:

Oh, you were right in voting for Obama.

People are not going to see where they're going until they get there and see it for themselves.

Republicans need to dial it back, and let Nature take her course.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Aren't we full of ourselves...


*chuckle*

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4est_4est_Gump said:

I agree 100%. Give him his Californication: it is what the voters demanded.

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The decentralization of money, as proposed by Hayek (1976) and explored by Selgin and White (1994), has an increasing strong claim on our attention. Concerns with political feasibility should be separated from the more fundamental reconsideration of a market based money supply. In light of our continuing experience with a bubble-prone central bank, we might well anticipate that a comparative-institutions analysis would favor a market solution to our money and credit problems. At the very least, a better understanding of the workings of a decentralized monetary system would help identify the perils and pitfalls of continued centralization. ("Interest-Rate Targeting during the Great Moderation: A Reappraisal," p. 199, links added)

...

O'Driscoll concludes,

We have two bad systems: the fiscal and the monetary. They are intertwined now as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries. They must be reformed, or together they will destroy the economic system that sustains them. They have become parasitical. The unsettled question is whether anything less than radical reform of both will work. Can central banks be constrained to a Bagehot‐like role, or must they be abolished? Can a "bad system" be made better, or do we need wholesale replacement? That is the question that monetary economists should be discussing. (p. 30, links added).
While most Austrians favor replacing central banking with a market-based decentralized money, most mainstream economists opposed to broadly discretionary monetary policy favor rules to restrain central bankers' actions, not abolishment of central banking. As examples, John B. Taylor strongly defends rule-based reforms, while Scott Sumner and market monetarists recommend nominal GDP targeting. However, some economists are clearly beginning to recognize, as most Austrians have, that central banks are or are becoming dangerous financial central planners.

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miles said:

I love that show - especially the chick who plays the wife.

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