This is very true and wll put together.

So is it socialist because it represents Central Planning or the making public of private goods?

Looks like neither to me. Looks like a mildly subsidized enterprise. Compared to the BBC, it's like an open air bazaar. And I expect governments to keep a hand in that sort of thing...

And it's entirely possible I would not have known who Wm. F. Buckely was without PBS...

Heh. Yeah. Whining is not effective advertising, folks...

I tell ya what. Although Frontline, American Experience and the like are still frequently worth it.

I won't "do" HBO just because. We still get good stuff on F/X and AMC.

-- Les Cargill

Absolutely. One of my favorites. We've bought a couple of his BBC series in DVD form - "The Life of Birds" is great stuff.

His brother Sir Richard is also quite prominent. Played Frenchy Burgoyne in "The Sand Pebbles." Did some other things, too.

-- Les Cargill

Professional Bull Shit?

Thanks, Rich

It's socialist because it's funded with money stolen from the working stiffs.

Hope This Helps! Rich

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You'd be happy to support your own parents when they got old enough to need it - this just spreads the burden, so that those whose parents don't need care end up taking take some of the load off those whose parents need a lot. "Enslave" implies that the juniors wouldn't have the freedom to do anything else, which isn't part of anybody's package.

They can't save as much, if they choose to save at all, let alone for that particular purpose.

Quite a few of them do save enough to improve their lives and buy houses - this isn't an either/or thing (though it may be for you).

You do like to impose a false dicotemy - either social services or private enterprise - while the reality is that private enterprise is facilitated by a respectable level of state-run social security, in part because children brought up in total poverty mature into citizens who can't contribute as much as they might have done to the society they grew up in.

One of the more entertaining facts in "The Bell Curve" was that the coloured and illegitimate children of US servicemen who grew up in Germany didn't do any worse than their class mates, while the coloured and legimate children of the same US service men dropped steadily behind their classmates as they made their way through the US education system, and didn't do well in US society after they graduated.

Germany has a pretty effective social security system - pretty much based on what Bismark set up a century ago to undercut the electoral appeal of his social political rivals - and you don't. Which society gets better and more productive workers? Is German manufacturing industry doing better than its US equivalents?

Will Hutton's "The World We're In" (ISBN-10: 0316858714 ISBN-13:

978-0316858717) had rather more to say on the subject,but your blinkers would swing tight shut if you got within reading distance of the book.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Obama might have been spending more than he was earning at one time, but a more rational observer might note that Obama was then investing in his future by concentrating on activities that raised his political profile, rather than on keeping his short term income above his short- term outgoings.

As investments go, it seems to have been tolerably productive.

Your advice would have been - of course - that he should have dropped the politics and gone into some more profitable activity, as an ambulance-chasing lawyer or the like. Even you might now appreciate that he would have been unwise to take that sort of advice, no matter how well-meant.

There are nitwits around who think that this is socialist doctrine. People who know just a little more are aware that this was an aberration of the Russian communist party, which didn't work out very well. Democratic socialists have never gone in for collectivisation - the Israeli kibbutz movement did set up collective farms, but they were separate entities, each one run just by the people who worked on a particular farm, which makes them cooperatives, rather than collectives, and part of the anarcho-syndicalist socialist tradition, rather than the Fabian democratic socialist style which I happen to favour.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I stopped watching PBS about 30 years ago when the station in Cincinatti ran a spot with someone being turned away from the 'Pearly Gates' by Saint Peter, because they didn't support PBS.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Cheapskate. Are you a contributor to PBS? ...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     |

      Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

Not lately. You damn right I'm a cheapskate.

-- Les Cargill

Obviously too cheap to use a "'re". ;-)

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Actually, Pelosi doesn't do bad with investments worth 58 million. Maybe it's her husband who's the thinker. I wonder if he/she sold short in 2008?

"Nancy Pelosi is among the richest members of Congress,[110] with an estimated net worth of approximately $58 million, the 12th highest estimated net worth in Congress, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics[111]

While members of Congress are not required to disclose their exact net worth, organizations such as the Center for Responsive Politics prepare estimated ranges based on public disclosures. The CRP's midpoint estimate of the Pelosis' net worth is $58,436,537 as of 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, with a possible range from $-7 million to $124 million.[112]

In addition to their large portfolio of jointly owned San Francisco Bay Area real estate, the couple also owns a vineyard in St. Helena, California, valued between $5 million and $25 million.[citation needed] Pelosi's husband also owns stock, including $1 million in Apple Inc.[citation needed], and is the owner of the Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League."

-Bill

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Denial isn't a particularly convincing form of arguement.

It does seem to have fooled enough of the people for enough of the time to stave off an actual depression, and sustaining the illusion for another year of so mihgt even get you out of recession.

Clearly, while everybody knows that while today's deficits are tomorrow's taxes, most people have the sense to realise that the taxes that you can raise from an economy that isn't quite in recession are a whole lot bigger than you can raise from an economy that's in depression (with 25% unemployment).

Your blind conviction that pump-priming can't work and isn't working has blinded you to the reason why people do tolerate it.

You are engaged in the economic equivalent of insisting that "a R-5R divider divided by a voltage 5". "Pump-priming" looks like a transparent swindle to you because you can't - or won't - get your head around the way that it works. Most people know better.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

n h

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Odd that doctors in Germany and France get by perfectly comfortably while collecting roughly 2/3ds of the money per head that the US medical system seems to need to collect.

So why is your imperfectly "socialised" system half again more expensive than universal health care in France and Germany? There everybody gets the same quality of health care that you restrict to the fully insured, and the cost per head is only two-thirds of what you system has to collect to break even.

Or copy one from over-seas.

Of course, James Arthur doesn't believe that pump-priming can work, so he has to believe that the present state of the US economy doesn't owe anything to pump-priming.

This is an assertion, based on James Arthur's fixed conviction that the government can't do anything right. Of course, if he was running it, he'd be right.

From James Arthur's idiosyncratic point of view. If he were the Reverend Terry Jones he'd be telling us that we ought to burn more Korans

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I've never had any pay channels, except when I worked for United Video and maintained the headend on second shift. If there was something I wanted to see, I would arrange my work so I could at least listen to it, and have my hour lunch break while it was on.

I did look into Netflix's streaming video, and Hulu Premium, but didn't get either.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

That's s'posed to be dialectical speakification :)

But of course! I've had HBO, and it went underutilized, so next time we got cable, ixnay.

That was before "The Sopranos".

-- Les Cargill

I spend on it, but it's mostly a waste of money. You find the odd old movie now and again, but not frequently.

I expect the kids will have to make up their own stories in the future. We've pretty much made a pyre of ours.

-- Les Cargill

I watch Stargate Atlantis on Hulu, but didn't se anything worth paying for on the pay services.

Isn't that true for every generation?

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid? on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

That doesn't add up. Without delving into the individual programs--we don't need to--we're spending 1.79x our revenue. That's unsustainable.

Revenue's off a bit from the bubble years--about 20% IIRC--but even with the /bubble/ revenue we'd still be massively negative, and falling behind the accelerating growth of gov't.

The amounts matter!! It's one thing to overspend 20% for 6 months when you can afford it, and another to overspend 79% year after year when you're already up to your neck.

Those are abstractions. The simple fact is that if you require people to spend their time doing non-productive things, as Obama does, that reduces productivity. Further, beyond the regulatory compliance burden, he's misallocating resources. Paying people to crush perfectly good cars, for example. Putting ethanol on steroids. Those damp productivity too.

Productivity is high because companies have laid off excess workers. That raises productivity, if you're employed.

Wages are low because there's little demand, including for workers. The latest employment report shows the average work week is 34.3 hours. Not much reason to hire when your current workers aren't fully occupied.

"The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.3 hours in March."

Obama's filling the bag. He's the one writing the checks, spending all the money, heaping on Obamacare, stopping drilling, seizing assets, setting bonuses, etc.

Obama's unemployment scheme competes with private companies for workers (why work when unemployment is nearly as generous?), and Obama's spending makes every reasonable person and employer hoard against the higher taxes sure to follow.

Obama's FY2012 budget plans to double corporate income tax revenues over the next two years. Rational companies hold back, facing that headwind.

Obama's increasing the cost of employing people, such as with Obamacare.

Obama's hampering the economy on every front, the death of a thousand cuts.

a) Erza Klein is a lightweight. b) Those external factors admitted, we aren't using our own resources. Obama's hampering oil, and he's hampering coal (the source of most of our electricity.) We have more energy than Saudi Arabia. If their actions influence world markets, surely ours do too in at least like proportion, right?

As we pay more for coal AND oil, people will buy less of everything else, period. That suppresses demand yet again, thanks to President O..

I understand that, it's just a reasonable metaphor. But, we have a finite ability to tax and raise revenue, and I calculate that we're nearly at the limit of what we can actually pay back.

I also posit that the taxation levels necessary to repay the debt would destabilize the regime, which is why they won't do it, ergo my statement "We won't pay." We can't pay, absent thinning the soup and repaying in diluted dollars. So, that's what we'll do.

These are unconventional times, but it's not rocket science to say we can't spend 1.79x our income, continue to grow spending >12% per year (or even Bush's 7%), while only growing revenue at 4% or less.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

No doctors, no problem? ;-)

That's far below their cost, which just ensures scarcity of services. No one can work for less than subsistence wages.

a) Paying taxes on it just makes it more expensive, as the gov't drives up the cost. They control the entire market, from the production of doctors and drugs, to the uses thereof, to pay schedules, tests & procedures allowed, required, etc. Being >50% of all health care dollars spent, gov't demand (and demands) drives the market. Up.

b) The gov't made that attractive--it was a tax dodge, which the gov't encouraged. More "free" market, eh?

Good for you, that keeps costs down. Most people don't do that, as doctor #1's surprise confirms. More people would, if they were spending some of their own money. Imagine 300+ million people spending to get the best care for their dollar, making billions of personal choices every day. /That/ would control costs.

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