What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

vetteman said:

Federal court, filled with activist judges, is the preferred fascist solution to big liberal ideas that fail to survive the normal democratic process.

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richard_daily said:

It's amazing how many wingnut talking points you can fit into one sentence... They don't require rational thinking, or using your mind, just parroting what you've been told to say by your handlers...

kudos veteman, think you deserve a prize... a trip to the glory hole with your furry friend koalabear!

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vetteman said:

Tell us why?

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vetteman said:

Federal court, filled with activist judges, is the preferred fascist solution to big liberal ideas that fail to survive the normal democratic process.

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The latest Gallup Poll confirms what most of us had suspected all along: the rich -- that top one percent, the folks whom radical leftists like OWS rail against -- are not as conservative as the rest of us. The greater conservatism of the 99% rest of us is slight -- one percentage point -- but it does bring home the fact that many of those with wealth are rather happy with the struggling middle class keeping to its place.

Wealth is not income. The income of the middle class comes from hardworking folks; often husband and wife both hold full-time jobs, trying to reach a level of security, comfort, and leisure which people like leftist Senator Jay Rockefeller or Senator John Kerry have always taken for granted. These leftists do not need to earn money. They simply preserve their acquired wealth.

Leftists' fear is not that some Americans are miserable and poor or live in dysfunctional families (created by the awful social welfare programs and godless social science of the left). Their real fear is that some hardworking Americans may be able to join their country club or buy a big home in some swanky and exclusive neighborhood.

Leftists do not want "Hope and Change." They want, instead, glacial immobility. That is why saving every single species on the planet really matters to leftists, even though species quite naturally die out all the time. That is why climate change troubles the left so much; climate change, man-made or not, may actually improve our lives, but any real change terrifies the left.

This is also why the left still spouts Keynesian nonsense fifty years after Keynes died and long after this economic theory was empirically disproved, and it explains why Obama still seems to idolize that misanthropic quack, Karl Marx, more than 150 years after his proposed "science."

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Leftist ideology constricts radically the number of permissible ways to get rich so that those who sing the party line rake in the dough. Leftists today resemble the nabob of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its hideous heyday. Solzhenitsyn once said that no one in the leadership of the Communist Party actually believed the claptrap it routinely proclaimed. The party itself was simply a vehicle for the greedy, corrupt, or perverted to live their ugly lives without moral sanction. Power, acquired for the ostensible purpose of social justice, is just a scam, just like leftism is also just a scam.

Where is income highest in America? It is not where oil company executives live or where computer software executives roost, but rather the environs of our nation's capital: ten of the top-sixteen highest-income places in America are Virginia or Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Forbes Magazine lists the place with the highest income in America as Falls Church City, Va. Consider over the last four elections how well the Democrat running for the highest office did in that county: Obama 70% (2008 presidential), Democrat Creigh Deeds 65% (2009 gubernatorial), anti-Israel Democrat Jim Moran 64% (2010 congressional), and Democrat Dick Saslaw 66% (2011 State Senate.) Radical leftism thrives where the rich dwell, because leftism keeps those who are not rich in their place -- no hope and no change.

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The recently completed summit of EU leaders came up with a solution of sorts to deal with the sovereign debt crisis.

But what it didn't address was the growing crisis over credit access for european banks. The Telegraph:

The European Central Bank admitted it had held meetings about providing emergency funding to the region's struggling banks, however City figures said a "collateral crunch" was looming.

"If anyone thinks things are getting better then they simply don't understand how severe the problems are. I think a major bank could fail within weeks," said one London-based executive at a major global bank.

Many banks, including some French, Italian and Spanish lenders, have already run out of many of the acceptable forms of collateral such as US Treasuries and other liquid securities used to finance short-term loans and have been forced to resort to lending out their gold reserves to maintain access to dollar funding.

"The system is creaking. There is a large amount of stress," said Anthony Peters, a strategist at Swissinvest, pointing to soaring interbank lending rates.

[...]

Alastair Ryan, a banks analyst at UBS, said there would be "no Lehman moment" - or single catastrophic event - for the European banking sytem, but added that without a full backstop of bank liabilities by governments the system would "struggle to finance itself in the next year in a durable way".

"The system at the moment hasn't got funding of a duration that allows it to function, so it's failing," he said.

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One analyst said that "even if the European rescue funds were able to raise €1 trillion of funding this would only meet the needs of the Italian and Spanish government and banks." Moody's downgraded the three largest French banks just this week for "liquidity and funding constraints." This would seem to indicate that the central bank has its work cut out for it if it is going to keep the european banking system up and running.

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As the country continues to suffer from joblessness and excessive federal deficit spending, the Occupy Wall Street protesters continue to aggressively chant that the lack of job growth and national debt are due to a simple cause: corporate greed. Corporations are wealthy and should be paying higher taxes, they maintain. And corporations are responsible for the lack of jobs; they are allegedly sitting on trillions of dollars of cash, and their only goal in life is to take more money from hardworking Americans.

This "corporate greed" rhetoric must be put into perspective. The American people are not told that there are two kinds of social domination: 1) class domination, due to the fact that some people are wealthier than others, and 2) political domination, due to the fact that some people gain political office and government jobs1. These are the political elites. Media and the Democrats tell us only about the first "class warfare" kind of domination, and never the second kind -- i.e., exploitation by those in public office2.

There are two recent examples of exploitation of working people by political elites. Both come from states that have been dominated by Democrats for decades: California and Illinois. It is important to keep in mind that the longer a political party remains in control, the more time its political elites have to form strategies and partnerships in corruption. The simple fact is that while it is easy to state that "both parties are the same," the great majority of big cities in the Midwest and Northeast have been controlled by Democrats since FDR. And since 85 percent of people live in cities, Democrats have controlled most of the country's population for the past eighty years. These facts are not widely known, simply because then Democrats would have to be held accountable for their mismanagement of budgets (deficits) and corruption. All of the states suffering huge deficits are run by Democrats. These deficits create future debt for the 99 percent who work for a living.

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The left's obsession with equality is the primary reason they despise the market. A market economy generates unequal wealth and incomes. That bothers them so much they are willing to forego all the advantages of a market economy.

In regard to many of life's most important dimensions we are, in fact, equal. Most important is the fact that "death is the great equalizer." Sooner or later we all die. No one, no matter how wealthy, lives forever. Rich or poor, if you eat too much you're probably going to gain weight. If you act like a jerk you will have no real friends. In many ways, life treats us all the same. The same basic rules apply to us all.

Both liberals and conservatives care about equality. They differ, however, in regard to what they mean by equality. Conservatives want equality of opportunity, liberals want equality of outcomes.

In his book Free to Choose Milton Friedman wrote, "A society that puts equality -- in the sense of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom…. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality."

Cuba is one of the left's favorite countries. Almost everyone in Cuba receives the same income: $15 a month. Grinding poverty in a country in spite of their amazing natural and human resources, but at least they have economic equality! (And, of course, "free" health care.) Cuba is a case study illustrating the real cost of making economic egalitarianism "the heart and soul of liberalism."

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JohnnySavage said:

With respect to the National 55 mph (now 65 I believe) - if it's a federal funded and maintained road - they can set it wherever they want. As a minor point; States and communities are free to have a speed limit of 1000 mph if they want. But if they want to feed at the public trough, they have to eat what's served.

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richard_daily said:

It's amazing how many wingnut talking points you can fit into one sentence... They don't require rational thinking, or using your mind, just parroting what you've been told to say by your handlers...

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patrick1 said:

<< This "corporate greed" rhetoric must be put into perspective. The American people are not told that there are two kinds of social domination: 1) class domination, due to the fact that some people are wealthier than others, and 2) political domination, due to the fact that some people gain political office and government jobs1. These are the political elites. Media and the Democrats tell us only about the first "class warfare" kind of domination, and never the second kind -- i.e., exploitation by those in public office2.

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vetteman said:

Like big surprise eh?

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patrick1 said:

Gump quotes from the American Thinker:

<< This "corporate greed" rhetoric must be put into perspective. The American people are not told that there are two kinds of social domination: 1) class domination, due to the fact that some people are wealthier than others, and 2) political domination, due to the fact that some people gain political office and government jobs1. These are the political elites. Media and the Democrats tell us only about the first "class warfare" kind of domination, and never the second kind -- i.e., exploitation by those in public office2.>>

This must be written by someone who's never worked in a real job. The social domination most working people experience, day by day, is a set of power relations in the workplace. Owners - Senior management - management - supervisors - shop-floor - cleaners. I've experienced this in one way or another all my working life. That's the predominant kind of social domination. And it holds within it much of what you're talking about, and much of what you're denying. 'Corporate greed' in the day to day means that over the last 30 years the owners and the senior management have been rewarding themselves more and more, even when things have gone badly, and rewarding the rest less and less, even when the rest have increased their productivity.

Patrick

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"From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped make the Depression Great," writes Amity Shlaes in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. "The trouble, however, was not merely the new policies that were implemented but also the threat of additional, unknown, policies. Fear froze the economy, but that uncertainty itself might have a cost was something the young experimenters simply did not consider."

Roosevelt's goal was to enlarge the power of the public sector, increase revenues to the government, and expand the economic controls of the centralized bureaucracy, even for dubious projects (today's version of unending and equally dubious projects include federal handouts for the Chevy Volt, $500 million in loan guarantees to politically correct but economically bankrupt Solyndra, Cash for Clunkers, and federally-imposed mortgage goals that promoted zero-down loans to unqualified buyers).

"Businessmen and businesses were the targets," writes Shales, while Roosevelt "made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes."

The craving for political power took precedence over national unity. "Roosevelt and his staff were becoming habitual bullies, pitting Americans against one another," writes Shlaes.

As Roosevelt stated it in his second inaugural address, he sought "unimagined power."

Those two words alone were enough to turn employers and investors into John Galt, the fictional character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged who, refusing to become a cog in an anti-individualist society, urges the world's producers, including businessmen, to strike, to withdraw their talent and investments from society in order to bring about the collapse of collectivism.

In their 2010 book, Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Superpower Status, Stephen Moore and Arthur B. Laffer summarize the Roosevelt legislative victories that deepened and lengthened the Great Depression.

Draining investment capital from the system, the top income tax rate was raised from 25 percent to 63 percent in 1932, and then to 79 percent, creating clear disincentives for business expansion and ever-higher obstacles to capital accumulation and new investment.

The corporate tax rate was raised from 11 percent to 12 percent in 1931, 13.75 percent in 1932, and 15 percent in 1936 with a 27 percent surtax on undistributed profits.

The highest inheritance tax rate was more than doubled in 1932, from 20 percent to 45 percent, raised to 60 percent in 1934 and 70 percent in 1935. In 1932, a gift tax was reinstated with a top rate of 33.5 percent, raised to 45 percent in 1934 and 52.5 percent in 1935.

The result was enduring stagnation. "The DOW did not return to 1929 levels until nearly a decade after Roosevelt's death," writes Shlaes, while the unemployment rate "did not return to pre-crash levels until the war."

After summarizing the aforementioned triumphs of Roosevelt's anti-rich, anti-business policy agenda, Moore and Laffer issue a clear warning: "U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today, just as they were in the 1930s."

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4est_4est_Gump said:

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/12/craving-another-great-depressi

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4est_4est_Gump said:

You are conflating separate issues.

Then you post as if only Corporate greed has a bad outcome.

Even a Left-wing Libertarian can admit, or should be able to admit, to a right-wing communist such as myself that the good works of government also put quite a squeeze on the working man and every application of government to alleviate that squeeze is, so to speak, merely feeding the boa...

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vetteman said:

Obama's bullshit notwithstanding:

Wonkbook: The real unemployment rate is 11 percent
Posted by Ezra Klein

Typically, I try to tie the beginning of Wonkbook to the news. But today, the most important sentence isn't a report on something that just happened, but a fresh look at something that's been happening for the last three years. In particular, it's this sentence by the Financial Times' Ed Luce, who writes, "According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent."

Remember that the unemployment rate is not "how many people don't have jobs?", but "how many people don't have jobs and are actively looking for them?" Let's say you've been looking fruitlessly for five months and realize you've exhausted every job listing in your area. Discouraged, you stop looking, at least for the moment. According to the government, you're no longer unemployed. Congratulations?

Since 2007, the percent of the population that either has a job or is actively looking for one has fallen from 62.7 percent to 58.5 percent. That's millions of workers leaving the workforce, and it's not because they've become sick or old or infirm. It's because they can't find a job, and so they've stopped trying. That's where Luce's calculation comes from. If 62.7 percent of the country was still counted as in the workforce, unemployment would be 11 percent. In that sense, the real unemployment rate -- the apples-to-apples unemployment rate -- is probably 11 percent. And the real un- and underemployed rate -- the so-called "U6" -- is near 20 percent.

There were some celebrations when the unemployment rate dropped last month. But much of that drop was people leaving the labor force. The surprising truth is that when the labor market really recovers, the unemployment rate will actually rise, albeit only temporarily, as discouraged workers start searching for jobs again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...is-11-percent/2011/12/12/gIQAuctPpO_blog.html

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