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

[NeverEndingMe]

I'm sure these are some sage, on-topic comments full of substance.


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when you post something intelligent, I will be nice and match what you posted. however, as you keep on posting Merc bullshit, I'll just use my shovel to toss the crap back at you

the true question is, why does Merc enjoy playing in his shit?

 

[NeverEndingMe]

we can still terminate another 40% of all government workers. funny thing, we wouldn't see a difference in "service" levels. all that this would do is require them government workers to "work" and take less breaks.

granted, donuts shops would be hurting as government workers would be forced to stay in the office and do "work"

I know government workers are allergic to "work" but hey, time that they sucked it up and stopped screwing the tax payer

again, this is the best post ever!

 

[mercury14]

N
I'm kicking the shit out of you here Vette. Better post something good really fast.

Where'd you go?

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Yes, it did start in 2006. Its causes go back further, but the collapse itself began in 2006.

You asked me to factor in the fact that there was a democratic legislature in '07-'08 to the collapse that started in '06. Kind of a funny question. Not sure it can be answered without re-writing history.

Really?

The causes go back further?

Let us guess. Reagan. Must be. Every time we mention CRA...

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What was the post # where the Obama team predicted the current economic downturn?




I mean, since they know everything...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

[Written Testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Committee on Financial Services, US House of Representatives, May 8, 2012]


In a seminal article published in 1920, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated that there is only one test of whether or not production of something conveys a benefit on society at large.[1] It must be shown that resources have greater value when used to produce a good to satisfy the preferences of some people than when they are used to produce a different good to satisfy the preferences of other people. Production left to the market satisfies the profit-and-loss test of socially beneficial production.

...

Like the production of all other goods, production of money left to the market is regulated by profit and loss. Additional money is produced when demand for money increases or demand for other goods produced by the same resources decreases. If the demand for money increased, the value of gold coins would rise. Minting companies would increase production to capture the profit. As they increased the supply of the certification service, its price would decline; and as they increased their demands for resources to certify gold, resource prices would rise and the profit would dissipate. If demand for other goods declined, input prices would fall. Minting companies would increase production to capture the profit and, by doing so, eliminate profit from further production. In this way production of money in the market is socially optimal.[2]

The profit-and-loss test also applies to the production of money certificates in the market.[3] Money certificates are titles of ownership to money issued by banks that serve as money substitutes. People may find convenience and safety in using checking-account balances instead of commodity money when making trades. Banks will produce and maintain checking accounts for customers if they are willing to pay fees to banks that generate revenues sufficient to cover the costs of managing the accounts. If the demand for checking accounts increased, then banks would expand them to capture the profit. As they increased their supply of checking account services, the fees would decline. And as they increased their demand for the resources to manage checking accounts, their prices would rise. As a consequence, profit would dissipate and additional production would cease at the socially optimal point.

The profit-and-loss test also applies to financial intermediation. Banks perform a middleman function in credit markets by borrowing from savers and lending to investors. They provide the services of pooling the savings, checking the creditworthiness of investors, and bearing the risk of loan defaults. If customers of banks find these services valuable, they will be willing to accept lower interest rates for lending to banks than investors will be willing to pay banks to borrow. Banks will provide financial intermediation services, if the revenues earned from the interest rate differential are large enough to cover the costs of producing the services. If demand for these services increases, banks will increase production of them. Their increased demand to borrow from savers and supply to investors will reduce the interest-rate differential. Their increased demand for the resources will raise their prices. Profit will dissipate and additional production will cease at the socially optimal point.

By subjecting all production, including that of money and banking, to the test of profit and loss, the market renders an integrated system of production that economizes the use of all resources for society at large.

Monetary Inflation and Credit Expansion

An elastic currency breaks the integration of production on the market by being an element foreign to the test of profit and loss. An elastic currency has two characteristics: a central bank empowered to issue fiat paper money and commercial banks empowered to issue fiduciary media.[4] The production of fiat paper money cannot be regulated by profit and loss. It is always profitable to produce more. In 2011, the average cost of the 5.8 billion Federal Reserve Notes produced was $0.091.[5] So a profit of around $4.90 is made by printing and spending a $5 bill. If the Fed continued order the printing of fractional reserve notes (FRNs) as long as it was profitable, then eventually prices of inputs would rise so that it cost more than $5 to print a $5 bill. Then the Fed could order the printing of $50 bills instead and so on indefinitely as we have witnessed in hyperinflations like Zimbabwe's. To avoid destruction in hyperinflation, production of fiat paper money must be regulated by policy, by a rule that is arbitrary with respect to economizing production for society at large.

The production of fiduciary media cannot be regulated by profit and loss.[6] Fiduciary media are redemption claims for money that are fractionally backed by a reserve of money. Banks issue fiduciary media by creating loans. For example, a customer applies at his local bank for an auto loan of $25,000. If the bank agrees to extend the loan, it just writes a $25,000 balance into the customer's checking account. The loan generates interest revenue for the bank while the cost of issuing fiduciary media is nominal. It is always profitable for the bank to create another loan by issuing fiduciary media. If a bank issues more fiduciary media by creating credit as long as it is profitable, it will become illiquid and insolvent and end in collapse. To avoid such destruction, a bank must regulate its issue of fiduciary media via credit creation by policy, by a rule that is arbitrary with respect to economizing production for society at large.

Advocates of an elastic currency realize that its production cannot even be subjected to, let alone pass, the profit-and-loss test. As F.A. Hayek wrote,

There is no justification in history for the existing position of a government monopoly of issuing money. It has never been proposed on the ground that government will give us better money than anybody else could.[7]

Advocates of an elastic currency merely assert that it can achieve a desirable outcome that a system of commodity money and money certificates cannot. There are three such claims for an elastic currency. First that it can keep the price level stable. Second, that it can prevent price deflation. And third, that it can accelerate economic growth.

Why these are Sophisms:

http://mises.org/daily/6044/Leave-Money-Production-to-the-Market

This is why we, and Europe are spiraling downward. Our money is a polite fiction and the intellectual and political class have lost touch with economic reality for the same fantasies that sunk the Weimar Republic.

 

[richard_daily]

You couldn't kick the shit out of a paper bag with your fucking bullshit. You're certifiable.

You're weaker than a paper bag.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Exhaustion of the Reserve Fund

The idea underlying all interventionist policies is that the higher income and wealth of the more affluent part of the population is a fund which can be freely used for the improvement of the conditions of the less prosperous. The essence of the interventionist policy is to take from one group to give to another. It is confiscation and distribution. Every measure is ultimately justified by declaring that it is fair to curb the rich for the benefit of the poor.

In the field of public finance progressive taxation of incomes and estates is the most characteristic manifestation of this doctrine. Tax the rich and spend the revenue for the improvement of the condition of the poor, is the principle of contemporary budgets. In the field of industrial relations shortening the hours of work, raising wages, and a thousand other measures are recommended under the assumption that they favor the employee and burden the employer. Every issue of government and community affairs is dealt with exclusively from the point of view of this principle.

An illustrative example is provided by the methods applied in the operation of nationalized and municipalized enterprises. These enterprises very often result in financial failure; their accounts regularly show losses burdening the state or the city treasury. It is of no use to investigate whether the deficits are due to the notorious inefficiency of the public conduct of business enterprises or, at least partly, to the inadequacy of the prices at which the commodities or services are sold to the customers. What matters more is the fact that the taxpayers must cover these deficits. The interventionists fully approve of this arrangement. They passionately reject the two other possible solutions: selling the enterprises to private entrepreneurs or raising the prices charged to the customers to such a height that no further deficit remains. The first of these proposals is in their eyes manifestly reactionary because the inevitable trend of history is toward more and more socialization. The second is deemed "antisocial" because it places a heavier load upon the consuming masses. It is fairer to make the taxpayers, i.e., the wealthy citizens, bear the burden. Their ability to pay is greater than that of the average people riding the nationalized railroads and the municipalized subways, trolleys, and busses. To ask that such public utilities should be self-supporting, is, say the interventionists, a relic of the old-fashioned ideas of orthodox finance. One might as well aim at making the roads and the public schools self-supporting.

It is not necessary to argue with the advocates of this deficit policy. It is obvious that recourse to this ability-to-pay principle depends on the existence of such incomes and fortunes as can still be taxed away. It can no longer be resorted to once these extra funds have been exhausted by taxes and other interventionist measures.

This is precisely the present state of affairs in most of the European countries. The United States has not yet gone so far; but if the actual trend of its economic policies is not radically altered very soon, it will be in the same condition in a few years.

For the sake of argument we may disregard all the other consequences which the full triumph of the ability-to-pay principle must bring about and concentrate upon its financial aspects.

The interventionist in advocating additional public expenditure is not aware of the fact that the funds available are limited. He does not realize that increasing expenditure in one department enjoins restricting it in other departments. In his opinion there is plenty of money available. The income and wealth of the rich can be freely tapped. In recommending a greater allowance for the schools he simply stresses the point that it would be a good thing to spend more for education. He does not venture to prove that to raise the budgetary allowance for schools is more expedient than to raise that of another department, e.g., that of health. It never occurs to him that grave arguments could be advanced in favor of restricting public spending and lowering the burden of taxation. The champions of cuts in the budget are in his eyes merely the defenders of the manifestly unfair class interests of the rich.

With the present height of income and inheritance tax rates, this reserve fund out of which the interventionists seek to cover all public expenditure is rapidly shrinking. It has practically disappeared altogether in most European countries. In the United States the recent advances in tax rates produced only negligible revenue results beyond what would be produced by a progression which stopped at much lower rates. High surtax rates for the rich are very popular with interventionist dilettantes and demagogues, but they secure only modest additions to the revenue.[1] From day to day it becomes more obvious that large-scale additions to the amount of public expenditure cannot be financed by "soaking the rich," but that the burden must be carried by the masses. The traditional tax policy of the age of interventionism, its glorified devices of progressive taxation and lavish spending, have been carried to a point at which their absurdity can no longer be concealed. The notorious principle that, whereas private expenditures depend on the size of income available, public revenues must be regulated according to expenditures, refutes itself. Henceforth, governments will have to realize that one dollar cannot be spent twice, and that the various items of government expenditure are in conflict with one another. Every penny of additional government spending will have to be collected from precisely those people who hitherto have been intent upon shifting the main burden to other groups. Those anxious to get subsidies will have to foot the bill themselves for the subsidies. The deficits of publicly owned and operated enterprises will be charged to the bulk of the population.

The situation in the employer-employee nexus will be analogous. The popular doctrine contends that wage earners are reaping "social gains" at the expense of the unearned income of the exploiting classes. The strikers, it is said, do not strike against the consumers but against "management." There is no reason to raise the prices of products when labor costs are increased; the difference must be borne by employers. But when more and more of the share of the entrepreneurs and capitalists is absorbed by taxes, higher wage rates, and other "social gains" of employees, and by price ceilings, nothing remains for such a buffer function. Then it becomes evident that every wage raise, with its whole momentum, must affect the prices of the products and that the social gains of each group fully correspond to the social losses of the other groups. Every strike becomes, even in the short run and not only in the long run, a strike against the rest of the people.

An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole doctrine of interventionism collapses when this fountain is drained off. The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.

The End of Interventionism

The interventionist interlude must come to an end because interventionism cannot lead to a permanent system of social organization. The reasons are threefold.

First: Restrictive measures always restrict output and the amount of goods available for consumption. Whatever arguments may be advanced in favor of definite restrictions and prohibitions, such measures in themselves can never constitute a system of social production.

Second: All varieties of interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters but bring about a state of affairs which — from the point of view of their authors' and advocates' valuations — is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go further and further until the market economy has been entirely destroyed and socialism has been substituted for it.

Third: Interventionism aims at confiscating the "surplus" of one part of the population and at giving it to the other part. Once this surplus is exhausted by total confiscation, a further continuation of this policy is impossible.

Marching ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then Great Britain and many other European countries, have adopted central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by Brüning, the Catholic chancellor of the Weimar Republic, and in Great Britain not by the Labor Party but by the Tory prime minister Mr. Churchill. The fact has been purposely obscured by the great sensation made in Great Britain about the nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal mines, and other enterprises. However, these seizures were of subordinate importance only. Great Britain is to be called a socialist country, not because certain enterprises have been formally expropriated and nationalized, but because all the economic activities of all citizens are subject to full control by the government and its agencies. The authorities direct the allocation of capital and of manpower to the various branches of business; they determine what should be produced and in what quality and quantity, and they assign to each consumer a definite ration. Supremacy in all economic matters is exclusively vested in the government. The people are reduced to the status of wards. To the businessmen, the former entrepreneurs, merely quasi-managerial functions are left. All that they are free to do is to carry into effect the entrepreneurial decisions of the authorities within a neatly delimited narrow field.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
http://mises.org/daily/6030/The-Crisis-of-Interventionism

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

Strong enough to snatch the life right out of you, chihuahua.

hahahahahahhahahah....

You're a riot, old gay dude...


You're not "snatching" anything... you're a cock in the butt man.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

More on shovel-ready stimulus:

The NBC Investigative Unit has raised questions about two grants totaling nearly $1.5 million dollars distributed to the University of California San Francisco. The money was part of the federal stimulus program and went to studies into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle aged men and the accurate reporting of someone's sexual history.

This is part of our ongoing series of investigations by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit into who got federal stimulus dollars, and why some projects did not break ground more than two years after receiving the grant.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investiga...tion-And-Sexual-Habits-Studies-151195105.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Sink with California
By The Editors, NRO
May 15, 2012 4:00 A.M.

California is in desperate fiscal straits, facing a nearly unbridgeable deficit of $16 billion, the result of spending that continues to exceed estimates and tax revenue that fails to meet them. Those in better-governed states who are tempted to sniff at the Golden State’s comeuppance, however, should bear in mind that California’s position as a national trendsetter is still quite secure: What is happening in California is very likely to happen in other states — and possibly at the federal level — if action is not taken. There are lessons here for both the Left and the Right, and those who would not sink with California as it falls into a sea of red ink would do well to study them.

California’s present condition is the direct result of welfare-state governance in its full maturity. Intransigent public-employee unions use the collective-bargaining process to maintain their inflated compensation packages, while poorly administered programs for the elderly and indigent have produced a permanent dependent class with attendant expenses that are difficult or impossible to reduce: When Governor Jerry Brown attempted to impose co-pays on some recipients of medical benefits, the Obama administration blocked him. Governor Brown’s attempts to cut spending on health care by lowering some physicians’ reimbursements and subsidies for low-income Californians were blocked by the federal courts. Governor Brown has demonstrated very little that might be called fiscal responsibility, but such attempts as he has made at spending discipline have been blocked by federal authorities when they have not been blocked by Democrats in the state legislature. Those who suspect that Obamacare may turn out to be more expensive and less effective at controlling costs than its admirers have claimed should take a good long look at California to appreciate the difficulty of rationalizing out-of-control health-care spending in a single state. (And multiply by 50.)

California’s finances will not be meaningfully reformed until its public sector is reduced and disempowered, and its health-care spending is made sensible. There are significant legal roadblocks to achieving either end, which is why California’s debt-service costs are pulling away from those of the rest of the United States and heading in a distinctly Spanish direction.

Governor Brown has, in the conventional Democratic fashion, proposed raising taxes on certain high-income Californians to try to close that $16 billion deficit. California, like the nation at large, already relies disproportionately on the high-income for its tax revenue, a situation that produces inherent instability: When less than a tenth of taxpayers provide the great majority of tax income, receipts are likely to be volatile in the best of circumstances. Add to that the fact that the very wealthy — especially Silicon Valley’s cosmopolitan entrepreneurial class — have options about when, how, and where to get paid. California expects to raise $1.5 billion in taxes from a single firm, Facebook, as employees and investors realize capital gains from the company’s initial public offering of stock. But such expectations are far from assured: The Brazilian-born Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s cofounder, has renounced his U.S. citizenship and taken up residence in Singapore, probably not for the city-state’s rich cultural milieu but because it does not tax capital gains. Others will not go so far as to cross the Pacific; for many, getting out of California will be sufficient. As California has just demonstrated, raising tax rates is not the same thing as raising tax revenue. Capital is fungible, and people are mobile.

In fact, California’s income-tax revenues are down by 21 percent, in no small part because of a decline in capital gains and other investment income. Raising tax rates and imposing new taxes, as Governor Brown proposes, would provide incentives for those gains to happen elsewhere — and, ultimately, for investment and jobs to follow them. That trend already is under way: A survey of CEOs in April ranked California dead last among the states as a place to do business.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I expect California and the nation will take the road used by the CSA in its final days: Government wards will get vouchers to use for medical, education, rent, etc, and the providers will use the vouchers to pay government taxes.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Did we say 9 Billion Dollar Deficit?



We meant 16.

It's not our fault!

Bush!
BAD LUCK!!
RACISM!!!
ATMs, KIOSKs & CORPORATE JETS!!!
TSUNAMIS, TORNADOS, & the ARAB SPRING!!!
EARTHQUAKES & HURRICANES!!!!!
EUROPE’s €PIIGS!!!!!!!!
OBSTRUCTION!!!
Americans have grown “Soft!”
MY LIMP STAFF
Greece is the word!
Roman Noodles!
Iran and the Jews!
You're all LAZY!
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/04/obama-wide-grin80.jpg

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A few years ago, the Social Security system going cash-negative, especially so quickly, might have triggered the recognition of a widely acknowledged crisis. I thought it would be treated as one in a column three years ago. It hasn’t happened, even though its legitimacy as a genuine crisis is beyond reasonable dispute. Why not? I see only two reasons: A profoundly far-left Democratic administration, and a supportive and at least as far-left establishment press. This tipping point could not have occurred in a Republican or conservative presidential administration without the press and the left going into hysterics. If Barack Obama loses in November, I expect that the crisis will magically move to the front burner.

The left’s abandonment of anything resembling common sense is proceeding at a rate at least as fast as the nation’s fiscal meltdown. An ever-shrinking pool of liberals understands the basic notion that the perpetuation of their precious entitlement programs depends on a consistently robust economy to generate the tax collections necessary for its funding. Yet those who most vocally applaud the breakneck expansions of food stamps, wish to return to the traditional incentive-barren welfare as we once knew it before its reform in the mid-1990s, and most of all praise the inevitable cradle-to-grave control of health care inherent in ObamaCare, are among those who attack the nation’s successful job and taxable income creators the most stridently. Where’s the money for all of this government largesse going to come from if productive people — more properly phrased, if even more of them than have done so already — decide that working hard isn’t worth it?

Bill Clinton, for all his considerable and impeachable faults, understood the fundamental importance of having a strong economy. That understanding enabled him to let go of HillaryCare in 1994, and ultimately convinced him after a great deal of kicking and screaming into acquiescing to welfare reform. These moves, combined with an ineffective opponent, ensured his reelection in 1996. Clinton signed on to a capital gains tax cut in 1997 and signed off on the GOP Congress’s balanced budget plan formulated by then-Ohio Congressman John Kasich and pushed through by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. For better or worse (I believe worse, but that’s for another day in another column), the booming economy which followed saved Clinton’s presidency in 1999.

Barack Obama, his administration, and his core supporters either don’t understand the importance of having a strong economy, or don’t care to. If it’s the former, they’re merely dumber than a box of rocks and really believe that their regime of reckless spending, rhetorical excess, and regulatory overreach will be consequence-free in the long run.

It’s far more probable that Obama and his inner circle know full well that they are wrecking the very entitlement programs they profess to love so dearly. They have convinced themselves that when it all falls apart and after the dust settles, they’ll have their hands more firmly on the levers of power, which to them seems to be all that really matters. We obviously can’t afford to test that belief, and we’re running out of opportunities to prevent it.

Tom Blumer
http://pjmedia.com/blog/social-securitys-implosion-continues/?singlepage=true

 

[NeverEndingMe]

hahahahahahhahahah....

You're a riot, old gay dude...


You're not "snatching" anything... you're a cock in the butt man.

there you go again, being all gay.

really dude, didn't your mother beat that out of you? she should have

the part that I find funny, is how you are Merc (and UD) are such fucking jokes

 

[koalabear]

Stocks gain on economic strength in Germany

 

[koalabear]

Stocks waver amid Greek political woes

 

[Disgustipated]

This thread is on page 666 for me right now. That's funny. And why can't vettebirther admit to being wrong? Ever?

 

[Disgustipated]

Someone quote this so the idiot can tell us how this is "bad news."

Home Prices Rise in Half of U.S. Cities as Markets Stabilize

Prices for single-family homes climbed in half of U.S. cities in the first quarter as real estate markets stabilized.

The median sales price increased from a year earlier in 74 of 146 metropolitan areas measured, the National Association of Realtors said in a report today. In the fourth quarter, only 29 areas had gains.

 

[Sean]

This thread is on page 666 for me right now. That's funny. And why can't vettebirther admit to being wrong? Ever?

His usual tactic is to run away then claim later he didn't see the post in question. I'm still waiting for a list of hospitals that are to be nationalised under Obama's "socialist" health care system.

 

[Disgustipated]

His usual tactic is to run away then claim later he didn't see the post in question. I'm still waiting for a list of hospitals that are to be nationalised under Obama's "socialist" health care system.

It must suck to go through life wishing the world was one way when it's basically the complete opposite.

 

[richard_daily]

It must suck to go through life wishing the world was one way when it's basically the complete opposite.

Why would anyone wish the world the way that veteman pretends that it is? Not even he can be that dumb.