Pornocracy? Kakistocracy? Kleptocracy? Meritocracy?

[trysail]

So...
what form of government do we have?

I watch as the House of Representatives passes a so-called Energy/Climate Bill that is 1,200 pages long. Nobody has read the damn thing. Nobody really knows what the hell is in it. It is a well-known fact that Waxman made compromises out the ying-yang with "special interests" in order to get a bill ( any bill ! ) passed. That's what 1,150 pages of this obscenity are all about.

Here's a bill with the potential to raise every U.S. household's cost of energy by a minimum of $200-$500 or more ( depending on who you choose to believe ) per year and one that is fraught with potential unintended consequences— and nobody's read the damn thing!



http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601207&sid=avLVPogS6lh0

Climate Law May Fuel Imports
By Joe Carroll and Edward Klump

June 26 (Bloomberg) -- America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports.

Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, ... which... would create a competitive imbalance.

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” ...

... The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.

“They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don’t carry the same level of carbon costs,”...

...The equivalent of one in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits...

... Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline...

...“If you can import fuels without the same carbon costs as domestic refiners, you will have an advantage,”... “Does that open the door for offshore refiners? I think it does.”

 

[Zeb_Carter]

It's just another form of wealth redistribution to support the sham global warming political agenda and will bankrupt the people of the United States.

If it was such a good idea then why is Australia in the process of reversing it's Cap and Trade laws? Do they know something we don't?

But it's all about power, not energy, but political power. The dolts in Washington what more and this is a way for them to get more.

Oh well, maybe I should step over the boarder and work from Mexico.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I plan to make a bazillion dollars raising supergerbils that can run generator wheels. We can sell them to individual households for their energy needs.

The real profit isn't in the animals; it's in the patented mutated grain they must eat to stay alive.

wanna invest in the startup?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Nope, I plan on selling my carbon credits to big government.

 

[JamesSD]

I chose pornocracy, simply because that sounds awesome.

 

[Liar]

Wotz a kakistocracy?

 

[Liar]

I chose pornocracy, simply because that sounds awesome.

I'm already porno-crazy. Close enough.

 

[SumLightCat]

Wotz a kakistocracy?

It's similar to khakistocracy, where those wearing khaki rule. But in a kakistocracy it's those eating the kaki fruit that rule.

 

[TE999]

I chose a kleptocracy because Congress can't stop stealing from the productive and giving it to the non-productive...with a little something off the top for their expenses of course.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I fear we're soon to discover that China really runs things in Washington.

 

[trysail]

Today Fred Grandy is 61. Who is he? He played “Gopher” on The Love Boat and then went on to become a 4-term Congressman from Iowa.

 

[Handley_Page]

I chose a kleptocracy because Congress can't stop stealing from the productive and giving it to the non-productive...with a little something off the top for their expenses of course.

And this is unusual ?

 

[trysail]

Pardon me while I puke.


"A patriot is one who loves his country... and expects to be paid for it."
-H. L. Mencken


[ emphasis mine ]
( Fair Use Excerpt )
Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) -- If there is any doubt that President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul U.S. health care is the hottest topic in Congress, just ask the 3,300 lobbyists who have lined up to work on the issue.

That’s six lobbyists for each of the 535 members of the House and Senate, according to Senate records, and three times the number of people registered to lobby on defense. More than 1,500 organizations have health-care lobbyists, and about three more are signing up each day. Every one of the 10 biggest lobbying firms by revenue is involved in an effort that could affect 17 percent of the U.S. economy...

Full article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aZdbr0YXz5jI


The only thing the U.S. produces is: noise, pizzas, ambulance chasers, swindlers and influence peddlars. No wonder the USD continues to lose value.

 

[xssve]

Kakistocracy: Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.

I fear we're soon to discover that China really runs things in Washington.

I think you mean KKR not PRC.

 

[Pure]

note to trysail, amicus, et al

your comments in this thread bespeak utter hypocrisy. none of you believes in either limited government or bill of rights 'freedoms', except on sunny days, where the Leader feels like observing them. the term, "conservative" does NOT apply to your positions at all.

NOT ONE of you made a peep when the Patriot Act of 300 odd pages was passed with NO DEBATE in the House, despite its encroachment on a number of BR provisions. the congressmen were given 30 minutes to look it over.

for that matter, none of you opposed ANY of the extensions of executive power, brought about in a number of ways, including other legislation, 'signing statements' [essentially, "i will ignore this as it infringes on the powers of the Commander in Chief"]

i dare any of you to produce a single post about abuse of legislative process, or infringement of the Bill of Rights during the entire post 9-11 portion of the Bush, two term, administration.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/napolitano2.html

Patriot Act
by Andrew P. Napolitano

The compromise version of the Patriot Act to which House and Senate conferees agreed last week and for which the House voted yesterday is an unforgivable assault on basic American values and core constitutional liberties. Unless amended in response to the courageous efforts of a few dozen senators from both parties, the new Patriot Act will continue to give federal agents the power to write their own search warrants – the statute’s newspeak terminology calls them "national security letters" – and serve them on a host of persons and entities that regularly gather and store sensitive, private information on virtually every American.

Congress once respected the Fourth Amendment until it began cutting holes in it. Before Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1977, Americans and even non-citizens physically present here enjoyed the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. That Amendment, which was written out of a revulsion to warrants that let British soldiers look for any tangible thing anywhere they chose, specifically requires that the government demonstrate to a judge and the judge specifically find the existence of probable cause of criminal activity on the part of the person whose property the government wishes to search. The Fourth Amendment commands that only a judge can authorize a search warrant.

FISA unconstitutionally changed the probable cause of criminality requirement to probable cause of employment by a foreign government, hostile or friendly. Under FISA, if the government can demonstrate the foreign agency or employment status of the person whose things it wishes to search, the secret FISA court will issue the search warrant.

But even FISA respects constitutional liberty, since it prohibits prosecutions based on evidence obtained from these warrants. Thus, if a FISA warrant reveals that the embassy janitor is really a spy who beats his wife, he would not and could not be prosecuted for either crime because the evidence of his crimes was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a judicial finding of probable cause of criminal activity. Instead of being prosecuted, he would be deported.

A year later in 1978, cutting yet another hole in the Fourth Amendment, Congress revealed its distaste for fidelity to the Constitution and its ignorance of the British government’s abuse of the colonists by enacting the Orwellian–named, Right to Financial Privacy Act. This statute, for the first time in American history, let federal agents write their own search warrants, but limited the subjects of those warrants to financial institutions. Just like FISA, it recognized the unconstitutional nature of evidence obtained by a self-written search warrant, and banned the use of such evidence in criminal prosecutions.

In 1986, Congress continued to cut. It disregarded yet again the Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy when it enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which allowed federal agents to serve self-written search warrants on collectors of digital financial data, but continued to recognize that evidence thus obtained was constitutionally incompetent for criminal prosecution purposes.

The deepest cut came on October 15, 2001 when Congress enacted the Patriot Act. With minimal floor debate in the Senate and no floor debate in the House (House members were given only 30 minutes to read the 315 page bill), Congress enacted this most unpatriotic rejection of privacy and constitutional guarantees. Together with its offspring the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal 2004 and the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, the Patriot Act not only permits the execution of self-written search warrants on a host of new subjects, it rejects the no-criminal-prosecution protections of its predecessors by requiring evidence obtained contrary to the Fourth Amendment to be turned over to prosecutors and mandating that such evidence is constitutionally competent in criminal prosecutions.

 

[trysail]

Kakistocracy: Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.
I think you mean KKR not PRC.

Nope, he ( correctly ) meant the PRC.



http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=ay3ayJvt3t3s
Buffett Says Federal Debt Poses Risks to Economy
By Shamim Adam

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. must address the massive amounts of “monetary medicine” that have been pumped into the financial system and now pose threats to the world’s largest economy and its currency, billionaire Warren Buffett said.

The “gusher of federal money” has rescued the financial system and the U.S. economy is now on a slow path to recovery, Buffett wrote in a New York Times commentary yesterday. While he applauds measures adopted by the Federal Reserve and officials from the Bush and Obama administrations, Buffett says the U.S. is fiscally in “uncharted territory.”

*****​

“Once recovery is gained, however, Congress must end the rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio and keep our growth in obligations in line with our growth in resources,” Buffett said. “With government expenditures now running 185 percent of receipts, truly major changes in both taxes and outlays will be required. A revived economy can’t come close to bridging that sort of gap.”

*****​

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aCM5WaqsP.98
Pimco Says Dollar to Weaken as Reserve Status Erodes

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s biggest manager of bond funds, said the dollar will weaken as the U.S. pumps “massive” amounts of money into the economy.

The dollar will drop the most against emerging-market counterparts, Curtis A. Mewbourne, a Pimco portfolio manager, wrote in a report on the company’s Web site. The greenback is losing its status as the world’s reserve currency, he said.

“Investors should consider whether it makes sense to take advantage of any periods of U.S. dollar strength to diversify their currency exposure,” Mewbourne wrote in his August Emerging Markets Watch report. “The massive amounts of U.S. dollar liquidity produced in response to the crisis” have helped reduce demand for the currency, he wrote.

The Dollar Index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of currencies, touched 78.823 today, the lowest this week. It has fallen 12 percent from this year’s high in March as U.S. authorities pledged $12.8 trillion to combat the recession. China, the world’s largest holder of foreign-currency reserves, and Russia have both called for a new global currency to replace the dollar as the dominant place to store reserves...

*****​

 

[trysail]

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought and six, result misery."

-Charles Dickens
David Copperfield



_________________________________________________

© 2008 Warren E. Buffett
An excerpt from the 2007 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation

"Whatever pension-cost surprises are in store for shareholders down the road, these jolts will be surpassed many times over by those experienced by taxpayers. Public pension promises are huge and, in many cases, funding is woefully inadequate. Because the fuse on this time bomb is long, politicians flinch from inflicting tax pain, given that problems will only become apparent long after these officials have departed. Promises involving very early retirement – sometimes to those in their low 40s – and generous cost-of-living adjustments are easy for these officials to make. In a world where people are living longer and inflation is certain, those promises will be anything but easy to keep."
________________________________

The (awful) facts:
U.S. states have accumulated an estimated $2.73 trillion present value of pension and benefit obligations to retirees, according to a December report from the Pew Center on the States. State pension and benefit funds are short almost 27 percent, or $731 billion, of that amount. The Government Accountability Office said last week that 58 percent of 65 large state and local pension plans were adequately funded in 2006, down from 90 percent in 2000.

Such studies may overstate the health of pensions because they are allowed to include expected returns in determining their funding gap, said Mark Ruloff, director of asset allocation at Arlington, Virginia-based consultant Watson Wyatt Worldwide Inc.

 

[DesertPirate]

How about a Moronocracy?
Based on the performance of the Thundering Herd of Dumbass formerly known as Congress.

 

[DeeZire]

Trysail's point is.... that it's time to raise taxes? I'm glad ol' Try has finally seen the light.

 

[trysail]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aXji_RIiqjL0

... China’s $776.4 billion in Treasuries, up 45 percent in the past year, “are not safe, and we should be worried about that,” Yu said. The current strength of Treasuries, which returned 16 percent in two years according to a Merrill Lynch & Co. index, is ”a temporary phenomenon, because I think the U.S. economy is not healthy” and there are no alternative investment havens, he said...

*****​

... Change in the U.S.-China political and economic relationship is inevitable, Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who helped re-establish ties between the two countries under President Richard Nixon, said in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg Television.

“I think the center of gravity of the economic world is beginning to shift towards Asia,” he said.

Chinese economists and leaders are beginning to feel “that the global financial system should not be determined primarily by one country,” and that “a new alternative or companion currency to the dollar would be created, built around the Chinese currency,” Kissinger said.

 

[trysail]

Trysail's point is....

Sixty years ago, the United States was the world's dominant economy. The country was the world's largest creditor nation, the world's largest producer of petroleum and possessed a majority of the world's steel and auto-making capacity. Treasury securities and the U.S. dollar were considered the world's safest investments.

Today, the country is essentially bankrupt and its currency is viewed with widespread suspicion. Decades of wild overspending and financial profligacy are coming home to roost.

 

[xssve]

Of course that was largely because we'd bombed the rest of the world to rubble.

Our current problems have to do with pandering to rent seeking corporations like Microsoft, republicans killing off basic research in favor of more corporate handouts and running up the debt in the process, all in the face of an incipient rise in the dependency ratio.

China will have the same dependency problem soon, but they've been pouring money into research instead of starving it, adding brain drain to the list of problems we face.

All the people who thought it would be a good idea to learn Mandarin turned out to be right.

 

[trysail]

While the purported authorship of Alexander Tytler has been disproven, the accuracy of the statement inaccurately attributed to him is unfolding:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Whether the eventual bankruptcy of the United States will lead to dictatorship, I do not pretend to know. Given its current trajectory, we're going to find out. The "something for nothing," finger-pointing, envy-peddling, overspending, name-calling, entrenched politicos are taking the U.S. down a path that is bound to have unpleasant consequences.

______________________

It is a fine line we tred between being widely understood and technically correct.

When one talks about phase changes and the heat released or absorbed when they occur, most people's eyes glaze over and they tune out. If one says that it takes less heat to boil alcohol than water, they seem to get it.

I don't really know how to deal with the fact that even most "educated" people don't have a solid grounding in math, chemistry and physics. A person can get a Ph.D. today and never even be exposed to the term "heat of vaporization," much less understand the implication of it in practical terms.

Hell, most people don't even have a feel for orders of magnitude - they bandy around millions, billions and trillions like they are about the same. They are just generic "big numbers" in most minds.

The sad result of this lack of well-rounded education among so-called educated people is they (and the people who follow them) are vulnerable to superstition based on emotion.

I'm amazed about how little the average guy knows about the "size" of things....I've asked smart people to guess the approximate size of the container that could hold all of the humans in the world, in cubic miles. The guess is always hundreds or thousands of cubic miles....The answer is a little more than a tenth of a cubic mile.

The volume of petroleum produced each year is a little more than a cubic mile.

I find it helps to visualize thing in terms of physical size.

This applies to money also. One trillion dollars— $1,000,000,000,000— do you have any idea how much money that is? It would represent twenty million ( 20,000,000 ) $50,000 packages. Where the hell is that kind of money supposed to come from? The stuff doesn't grow on trees and it cannot simply be runoff on a printing press without producing the direst of consequences.

The economic illiteracy and innumeracy that abounds in this country is appalling and it will eventually be ruinous. The gargantuan amounts of money that has been thrown willy-nilly into education has had no discernible effect on the general population's ability to distinguish the something-for-nothing schemes of demagoguery. The looting of the public treasury continues unabated.


http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Poster-ScaleofPowerGeneration.pdf


________________________________

"First rate men will not canvass mobs and, if they did, the mobs would not elect the first rate man."

-Lord Robert Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury

 

[trysail]

Our current problems have to do with pandering...

If you'd just left it at that, you'd have been largely correct.




Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this week. Leaving huge monetary and fiscal expansion in place for too long is a recipe for economic disaster. Mr. Buffett did the math in a very simple and understandable way. This year we face a $1.8 trillion deficit. Just so you understand what a trillion means, a trillion is one million times one million. How does a millionaire become a trillionaire? He has to earn one million dollars a million times. If you could earn $1 million every single day of your life, you would reach $1 trillion in just under 2,740 years. This fiscal year alone, our government will spend $1.8 trillion more than it takes in and it will have to borrow (and in theory pay back) every one of those dollars. That is a big number.

Mr. Buffett tries to explain how this is all going to happen. In round numbers, our trade deficit will push $400-500 billion overseas that will return in the form of Treasury bond purchases. Americans are starting to save more as well. They might buy a similar amount of bonds. Add the two and you are roughly halfway there. What about the rest? The Fed prints it. We all know what that means in the long run. It means inflation. Printing more money quite obviously dilutes the value of the dollar. President Obama says he will cut the deficit in half during his first term. If he accomplishes that and brings the deficit down to a mere $900 billion he might be able to allow the Fed to turn off the printing presses if the total of our trade deficit and net American savings stays in the $900 billion range. That is a lot of ifs.

 

[JackLuis]

If you'd just left it at that, you'd have been largely correct.




Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this week. Leaving huge monetary and fiscal expansion in place for too long is a recipe for economic disaster. Mr. Buffett did the math in a very simple and understandable way. This year we face a $1.8 trillion deficit. Just so you understand what a trillion means, a trillion is one million times one million. How does a millionaire become a trillionaire? He has to earn one million dollars a million times. If you could earn $1 million every single day of your life, you would reach $1 trillion in just under 2,740 years. This fiscal year alone, our government will spend $1.8 trillion more than it takes in and it will have to borrow (and in theory pay back) every one of those dollars. That is a big number.

Mr. Buffett tries to explain how this is all going to happen. In round numbers, our trade deficit will push $400-500 billion overseas that will return in the form of Treasury bond purchases. Americans are starting to save more as well. They might buy a similar amount of bonds. Add the two and you are roughly halfway there. What about the rest? The Fed prints it. We all know what that means in the long run. It means inflation. Printing more money quite obviously dilutes the value of the dollar. President Obama says he will cut the deficit in half during his first term. If he accomplishes that and brings the deficit down to a mere $900 billion he might be able to allow the Fed to turn off the printing presses if the total of our trade deficit and net American savings stays in the $900 billion range. That is a lot of ifs.

Always the optimist, aren't you? So far the printing presses are still spewing our currency into a gaping maw of inflationary spending. I don't think Obama has the political courage or power to stop the presses, too many fat cats would be discomforted if he held the flood back.