conservation of Euros

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You can't fool Mother Nature. When a few hundred million people choose to not work much, not breed much, and consume a lot, you just can't spend your way out of the problem.

This is the leading edge of the European demographic crisis that's been building for generations now. There's no quick fix.

John

Reply to
John Larkin
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I hate to get political in a non-politics newsgroup, but a trillion (that's million with a "T" - a million-million) vanished into thin air in 24 hours. Brewster's Millions was suppose to be a comedy. Greece's Trillions turned out to be a tragedy. I hope people over here wake up and see that you actually have to *work* for achievements. On a similar rant while I'm fired up - the Army is going to give medals for **avoiding conflicts**. We're turning into France (and no, that's not good...).

Reply to
lektric.dan

Since the US has been running a huge balance of payments deficit since Regan was president, it does seem that you can fool Mother Nature for quite a while.

The Euro zone is running a balance of payments deficit, but it is an order of magnitude smaller than the US so you might be wise to concentrate on the beam in your own eye.

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-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

No big deal. We'll never pay it back.

Apparently the europeans had an emergency weekend fest and listened to that Nobel-prize-winning economist Barack Obama, and decided to spend a trillion dollars (or euros? they're getting to be about the same thing) to allow Greeks to keep being Greeks.

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It's hilarious, a bunch of countries making loan guarantees to make up for the fact that they've run out of money.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Obviously. You had sold off everything that was worth selling back in the 1990's.

Greece has run out of money - due to US levels of tax evasion, in an economy which wasn't all that productive to start with.

Spain and Portugal are a bit short at the moment - due to the recent economic downturn, tourism has been down - but the rest of the Eurozone is doing fine. Germany may have to ramp its exports up a bit higher to get the balance of trade for the Euro zone as a whole back in the black, but the euro is backed by a rather stronger economy than the US dollar, if the trade balance is anything to go by.

How's California doing at the moment?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

Nope. I kept it all. Got more, actually. Look: my icicles!

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A lot of Japanese bought US golf courses for numbers like $1e9 and sold them back a few years later for $1e8. Thanks.

Well, we can agree on that. Except the Greeks are much better at tax evasion. As in much, much better.

Kind of the Germans to sacrifice themselves; they are noted for kindness. I'm sure they will gladly work even harder in the future so that their southern neighbors can continue their picturesque, traditional lifestyles.

Mixed bag. The government is broke, but that's the ordinary fate of all leftist governments. Some regions are hit pretty hard. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are doing pretty good. The semiconductor industry, things like Google, biotech, all booming. Property values are up. Agriculture is very big in California, and people always have to eat.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Lots of lamenting about the problem John. What are you offering in terms of solution? Anybody can bitch.

b. Farmer

Reply to
Bit Farmer

Pension reform. Now.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Reply to
Joerg

solution? Anybody can bitch.

Am I bitching? I wasn't aware. The dynamics of modern society is just interesting to me. Personally, I'm perfectly willing to play by the existing rules. I do feel for people who don't have high-tech jobs like a lot of us do, people in manufacturing and construction and services, workers like that who aren't doing well in the global economy.

Solutions?

More people need to be productive, for more years of their lives.

Government has to stop hating and bleeding the entities that create genuinely productive jobs, and has to stop creating useless jobs.

Government has to quit lying and quit borrowing and quit spending.

Unions have to be restrained.

The financial system, and the stock market, are mostly casinos where the house wins, and the systems are getting more and more unstable. We need policies and laws that encourage longterm productive investment and discourage short-term speculation.

Traditional values, like having families, working, saving, being responsible and honest and tolerant, might be considered, too.

More sales tax, less income tax, no business taxes.

None of that will happen of course. So we'll muddle along, between crises.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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That was after you'd sold everything worth selling, and started cooking the books to make the worthless rubbish look better than it was. Your crooks managed to rip off a few suckers from the rest of the world - the sub-prime mortagage packages wee the most recent example - but today's suckers are now a bit more suspicious of your accounting practices.

In the US, tax evasion involves bribing your congressman to write your personal tax dodge into legislation. Even the Greeks haven't institutionialised it that extent.

Sustaining a successful manufacturing business is the kind of economic activity that you claim to understand; it isn't usually seen as as any kind of self-sacrifice.

If you'd paid enough attention to the subject to read the details of the agreement that got the Greeks their line of credit, you would have known that the IMF imposed the usual austerity measures on the Greeks. They won't be reduced to their traditional dirt-poor lifestyle, but there will be the usual stringent economies.

Not so very different from the Greeks then.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

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Allan Greenspan's autobiography blamed the decline of the US trade balance on on the export of less skilled jobs from the US to low- income countries - China in particular.

The Germans invested in getting their workers better trained and better equipped, so there weren't many unskilled jobs left to export.

If the manufacturer that provides the job choses to fire his workers and send the work overseas, the people he has dumped won't see much advantage in cultivating traditional values.

The French approach. Half the French state revenuse comes from value- added-tax (which is effectively a sales tax, albeit a rather sophisticated form of sales tax).

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Actually, you will progressively decline because your society - as a whole - doesn't invest enough in the people who are hired to do the work, as a consequence of giving too much of the political power to the people pay them to do the work. The people who dole out the salaries find it easier to divert cash into influencing elections - as by paying for television ads.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

Well, in that case, maybe i should guarantee all loans by all countries to all other countries with a cap of 2^30 dollars, said money to personally be delivered via helicopter by Ben B.

Reply to
Robert Baer

California needs more ObamaDollars printed in Sinaloa (personally delivered a dollar at a time by a resident that will stay in CA after delivery).

Reply to
Robert Baer

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California is broke and they run ads on the radio selling California junk bonds for who knows what interest rate. Los Angeles is worse, and the next move is to charge homeowners for fixing the sidewalks while the city still owns the land. Streets, trees, lamp posts, etc. will be next. The unions rule the place.

-Bill

Reply to
Bill Bowden

solution?  Anybody can bitch.

These curves seem to be going up:

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which isn't bad, considering the immigration situation.

as a consequence of giving too much of the political power to

Like unions?

Europe will decline at a steeper slope than the US because europeans aren't breeding. Better learn Arabic... you'll need it.

I suppose we are natural enemies. I work and you don't. Sort of like the Germans and the Greeks.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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terms of solution? =A0Anybody can bitch.

Unions are the recommended counter-weight to the economic advantage that individual capitalists have over the workers they employ. Because they do represent their members, they can't act as quickly or decisively as individual capitalists, but where they have been allowed to flourish they do a decent job.

US employers have always been terrified of effective unions, and those few unions that managed to survive the consequent legislative assaults were subverted by employers who corrupted the union officials, then complained that the unions were corrupt.

In Germany the unions are represented on company's supervisory boards.

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I might - if the present trend continued for several hundred years, and I lived that long. In fact the high fertility of the immigrant populations is going to decline in subsequent generations as they assimilate - fertility declines rapidly as families (notably better- educated mothers) recognise that almost all their kids are going to out-live their parents, and that the parents aren't dependent on their kids for care in old age.

The low fertility of the non-immigrant population of Europe is probably also transient. Modern European society is evolving very rapidly, and we've no real idea of what it is going to look like in another generation, and how the next generation of working women will manage their child-rearing.

You work from nine to five on electronics. I don't have that pleasure any more, so I do have more time to work on my knowledge of the world

- an area that you neglect, in favour of devoting your spare time to propagating ill-informed speculation, much of which you uncritically harvest from the right-wing political propaganda disseminated by your mass media.

We aren't "natural enemies". You publish nonsense, and I point out that it is nonsense. If I was your enemy, I'd let you continue to delude yourself, in the reliable expectation that what you thought that you knew that wasn't so was eventually going to destroy your business.

The Germans have - with the suport of ther est of Europe and the IMF - performed a similar service for the Greeks, who should - in consequence - end up with a rather more honest, effective and sustainable administration than they have had up to now.

Not that the recent administration - bad though it was - wasn't better than military junta that ran the country from 1967 to 1974

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The US does have a preference for right wing military regimes (like Pinochet's in Chile from 1973 to 1990), but doesn't actually seem to inspired the 1967 coup.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

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Union members should be terrified of effective unions. They destroy their jobs.

Last night it was until 11:30 PM. I decided to write the PADS netlist comparison program, and finally got it working pretty well by then. The PADS schematic and PCB programs have bizarre and entirely different netlist formats, which require a lot of ugly parsing and sorting and redundancy stripping. But it works, and all 4006 nets:pin pairs are identical between our schematic and our PCB.

I don't have that pleasure

Now that's hilarious, "knowledge of the world"... truly funny.

I'm just glad that I'm not funding your fatheaded indolence. Much.

in favour of devoting your spare time to

I don't harvest; I think.

Right, the Germans have a much more admirable history as regards preferring peaceful democracy.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Maybe. A 10% VAT would raise $1.5T a year, enough to pay for Obama's permanent spending bender on...whatever it was we got for all that dough he spent--I can't remember.

Of course a VAT's an optimally bad tax--maximally intrusive, maximum overhead. And it would damp the whole country.

My pals met some professors from Italy, working here in the States. They adore it here. They say Italy's lovely, but they could never afford the standard of living they enjoy here. Never. In Italy you just can't take all those vacations, buy the same car, TV, or send your kids to school. Can't do it--you've got to choose.

If we went to a straight flat sales tax, or the FairTax, at equal levels of federal "take", I bet productivity and GDP would grow 10% from that alone. For free.

Loan guarantees to one another! That /is/ funny.

This is too (back up to the 5/9/2010 cartoon)

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-- Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

Recommended by whom?

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Seems to me that, increasingly, unions workers aren't employed by "capitalists" - they have destroyed those jobs - but by governments. The upside of that is when they go out on strike, we're actually better off.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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Rubbish. That's standard employer-funded anti-union propaganda. Effective unions expect to see changes in the nature of the work their members do, and negotiate the retraining and re-deployment of the workers involved. This isn't an aspect of trade union activity that gets much publicity in the US media.

And you've got an example of my comical ignorance? No, but you really wnat to believe that you could find one if you could find the time to look.

An unconvincing claim. Your "thinking" reflects your indolent habit of picking up predigested nonsense that fits your fat-headed preconceptions.

In this thread you've claimed that the euro can't be stable currency because it shared across several countries with different economic strengths and weaknessess, while failing to note that the US dollar is shared across the united states of America - running from Alaska to Wyoming (neither of whose economies look much like California's).

This is the finest kind fat-headed intellectual indolence; you are too self-satisifed to notice that you are a particularly ripe example of the intellectual incompetence that you'd like to think that I represent.

If Henry Ford hadn't subsidised Hilter's nasty little political movement back in the 1920's, Germany might have a rather longer history of peaceful democracy, but Ford shared, admired and supported Hilter's anti-semitism.

The current German constitution was written with that history in mind, and presumably offers rather better protection to the German electorate than - say - your somewhat antiquated constitution offers the US voter.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
Bill Sloman

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