I've always thought that a good rule for voting would be that your vote counts in proportion to the taxes you pay.
Thus the mooching classes would have virtually no vote in deciding how much they could mooch ;-) ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Obama: All Sizzle and No Steak
Leftist-speak for "slavery". The only "social contract" is the Constitution. There is no mention in there that I be forced to take care of *anyone* else. Rather the opposite, in fact.
All else being agreed, I've agreed with you, you don't.
I don't think that necessarily follows. I think what sometimes happens in actuality is that people can be very good at, e.g., designing circuitry or programming software or whatever, but absolutely devoid of what you'd call "common sense" when it comes to things like how they handle their money. They can state with absolute honesty that they consider themselves "responsible" adults, truly not realizing that the financial choices they've made (e.g., getting a bigger mortgage than what you or I would ever find "reasonable") put them in a rather risky position.
Well, I don't think there's *necessarily* much correlation between the two -- you need more information. As I say, in the Real World I think what ends up making people appear irresponsible is often really just incompetence. (This is perhaps a slight variation on the adage to not mistake malice for incompetence?)
On the flip-side, there seems to be no shortage of people who'll happily extend credit to the likes of someone like Donald Trump, even though multiple businesses of his have gone belly-up !
Agreed.
I suppose we could have him not pay child support or something, but let's not go there with my hypothetical (straw-?) man. :-)
Heck, my father paid his court-ordered child support for something like one year and then quit altogether. Nevertheless, AFAIK his employer felt he was entirely responsible insofar as his job duties were concerned.
I'm rather surprised about that!
But, yeah, if it's your company -- I'm not going to walk around with a sign outside your shop protesting that you hired the 850-credit-rating homewrecker. My company, though -- I'm going with the guy who went bankrupt trying to save his kid from cancer.
a. CPI doesn't measure inflation--it measures how much Congress has promised to increase your check. So, they exclude food and energy. b. Phase delay. About two years, Friedman said. c. The economy's still flat. When demand picks up, inflation.
Which is rare. More often, ten dollars paid to an IRS agent causes many times that in inconvenience and lost productivity amongst those she services.
Not always. They've been printing money since the '70s, and it has not made money much less valuable ( nor has there even been that much inflation since 1983 ).
We've had "money printing" this year. the CPI is still hovering around zero.
Not when they offset negative externalities caused by lousy products.
There are time constants, too. Raising corporate tax rates may in the short term increase tax revenues, but in the long term kill or export businesses. Some tax and social policies take generations to do their harm. So the Laffer effect has a time dimension, too.
A bigger question is whether it's even good for society to find the rates which maximize tax revenue.
The nature of taxation is as important as the raw rate. Making labor more expensive kills jobs. Sales taxes, less so. The US now taxes productive assets more than unproductive ones, and guess what happens?
That is a good thing. That low pass filters the measures. SFAIK, food and energy are right on track in regressing to mean prices. Haven't looked this week.
By then I expect GDP increases will pick back up. Receipts are off because employment is down.
And if what you are saying is true, bond traders should be screaming. They're not.
No, not even close. We haven't had "inflation" in decades, and only then because Volcker was burying the 'Nam war debt. That hung on a little past '83. Part of that was going off the gold standard (finally).
When the economy picks up, growth masks the debt. That's how this works. That's how it's always worked. We have a fairly consistent ( amazingly consistent ) 4% exponential curve we've been tracking since about 1820.
Dunno about you, :), but I've seen this movie three times now. it always ends up the same.
There's a nonzero probability that we're facing Doom, but it's much closer to zero than to one. Here we are, printing money like mad, and when places like Libya go astable, people start buying even more bonds.
I agree there. The income tax is horribly inefficient.
I am not saying there is nothing to worry about. But I am saying it's a pattern we have seen before, and will see again.
Think of the blowout preventers in the recent Gulf mess. Granted, that was probably a deployment problem... emphasis "caused by" - if the lousy product don't cause no externalities, then regulation probably won't improve things much.
Yes, private schools are somewhat biased, usually towards Christianity, but there are also examples of Islamic schools teaching Bin Laden is a saint, and Israel doesn't exist on a world map.
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Yes, but the public school system used to work, when I was a kid, and they didn't bother explaining complex life issues, expelled the trouble makers, and stuck to the basics. What's different now?, other than teachers want more money?
Yeah, lingo like "lousy product" is most often reserved to a complaint by one of the two parties in a voluntary trade, not a third party.
IIRC, there was regulation in the case you mention. Of course, it did not seem to provide complete protection. Next time, "they" promise to get it right. lol.
Regardless, an unfunded mandate (regulation) is a cost that can be thought of as a tax, whether or not you believe it is worth it.
Well, a dollar was worth 1/35 of an oz of gold in 1970 and it's worth
1/1500 today. So, it's lost 97% of its value. If it was a discharging capacitor, that's more than 3 time constants, and close enough to zero for many purposes.
Funny about all the price increases (often in the form of hidden costs, surcharges etc.), even in a very, very weak economy.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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That's circular logic. Food and energy, as inputs consumed by every person, drive all the other costs in society.
Energy's being driven up by Obama on several fronts, including blocking coal, blocking oil, and diverting resources to foolish, wasteful energy sources. Food production being very energy-intensive, all of those also drive up the price of food.
Meanwhile, food is being made more expensive by gov't interventions that incentivize farmer to burn food.
Other costs will rise to meet the new costs of food and energy, not the reverse. IOW, inflation. The phase delay from one end to the other should be obvious, too.
Employment is down because of all the other policies--it's more expensive to employ people, people are being paid not to work, etc., etc.
Were stock traders screaming just before the internet bubble burst? Nope, they were piling on. Even those who knew better practiced the Greater Fool theory, to its logical conclusion.
For sufficiently large values of growth and sufficiently small quantities of debt, yes, but that's the problem. Both growth (low) and debt (high) are in virgin territory.
In a typical recovery, within a few quarters we'd be growing 5, 6, or
7%, snapping back from the undershoot associated with the initial drop. Now, 7 quarters into the "recovery" we're growing around 2%. That's less than the birthrate, i.e., the population's growing faster than the economy. Further, the cost of employing a person has leapt under PrezBO, further reducing jobs, and at an increasing rate.
That's a recipe for long-term, structural unemployment.
I expect growth to increase, but they'll never return to pre-Obama levels. The parasitic loads are too high. He's left his mark..
4% annual growth in GDP cannot overcome 12% annual growth in gov't. That's what we have now. Plus an historic debt to be serviced, which makes everything even harder.
They buy our bonds as a safe-haven. Where else can they go, Europe? We're safer than Libya, and safer than Europe. All we need to maintain bond-appeal is to be slightly less wack than the other guys as all of our currencies fall.
I don't expect Doom. That only happens if Hope and Change acts too quickly. Otherwise I expect the gov't will stealthfully devalue the currency & debt. We'll all lose savings and have to work a bit harder, that's all. Like France, they'll continue to promise benefits beyond our ability to pay, and we'll do it all again some time later.
I don't think that is true anymore. The "vast majority" around here are "legacy" schools... just fundamentals with no religious affiliation.
I recently was asked to be a judge at a science fair at such a school. I was delighted to see students dressed properly, no bad language, and a significant parent turn-out.
Ultimately we need to go to a voucher system.
Yep. The majority of "parents" only want minimum-cost baby-sitting. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Romneycare is nothing like Obamacare
Except for those parts which are the same ;-)
As for what's different: My guess (I can't claim to be well-versed in this subject matter) is that the average parent today just doesn't care as much about their kid's academic performance as parents did historically. I think that, in popular culture, a good education was simply more valued than it is today -- despite the fact that one can readily show on paper how valuable graduating from high school (and, now, college) is, popular culture in general strikes me as having a somewhat more anti-intellectual bent than in decades past. It also surely doesn't help any that there are more single-parent families these days than in decades past.
It does seem to me that, if anything, it's actually easier to expel kids today -- although some of this likely reflects the fact that these days it's not as harsh of a measure as it once was (e.g., your kid can still just get his GED on-line).
One other issue with public schools today is that many "basic" topics that were once non-controversial/non-politicized now are -- history classes being the most obvious example, but even things like English classes now have their curriculums questioned (recall, e.g., the Ebonics debate). Math remains pretty much unscatched, whereas in the sciences you have major contentions over evolution vs. creationism and just how real -- or not -- anthropogenic global warming is, but otherwise it seems not to have suffered too much.
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