Comments on: Doomed to Collapse?

By: American

American — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:39:36 +0000

There are 77 million baby boomers now rang-
ing from age 41 to age 59. All are hoping to collect
tens of thousands of dollars in pension and health-
care benefits from the next generation. These
claimants aren’t going away. In three years, the
oldest boomers will be eligible for early Social
Security benefits. In six years, the boomer van-
guard will start collecting Medicare. Our nation
has done nothing to prepare for this onslaught of
obligation. Instead, it has continued to focus on
a completely meaningless fiscal metric—“the”
federal deficit—censored and studiously ignored
long-term fiscal analyses that are scientifically
coherent, and dramatically expanded the benefit
levels being explicitly or implicitly promised to
the baby boomers.
Countries can and do go bankrupt. The United
States, with its $65.9 trillion fiscal gap, seems
clearly headed down that path. The country needs
to stop shooting itself in the foot. It needs to adopt
generational accounting as its standard method
of budgeting and fiscal analysis, and it needs to
adopt fundamental tax, Social Security, and
healthcare reforms that will redeem our children’s
future.

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By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:36:33 +0000

I was watching this guy Dan Mitchell critisize Keynesian economics.. Here are some things that he doesn’t understand or failed to talk about. First of all, the reason that the economy is bad is because the federal reserve has been taking money out of the economy through interest called the federal fund. What the government is doing is replacing the money that was taken out in the first place. Second, he says that the government can’t put money into the economy without taking money from the economy. That is totally incorrect. The government creates the money through treasury bills which adds to the deficit and never gets paid back through the process of rollover bonds… Third, the man said that an increase of money would not increase spending and that the money would be better off sitting idle. Well the money wouldn’t exist, so it couldn’t be sitting idle. And if you understood capitalism, than you would know that a shortage in money results to less demand and a shortage in trade. So when there is more money, there is more trade and more demand. That is where inflation comes from as stated previously… Fourth, the man contridicts himself when he says that the money sitting idle is better for the economy bc it is lent out by the bank. He then says that a stimulus is worthless bc people put their money in the bank instead of spending it. So wouldn’t that grow the economy using his words?.. Another thing, he says that government spending increased during President Truman’s years in office leading to a declining growth in the economy and an increase in unemployment. What Dan didn’t mention, was that there was a stunting growth in money supply during this time. Money stocks fell by 33%, a continuous annual rate of 10 percent. Banks couldn’t afford to loan money because people kept trying to withdraw accounts. So banks liquidated assets for close to nothing to remain open. This messed up corporate and government bonds dangerously reducing prices.. The reason that this all occured was because the Federal Reserve sat back and didn’t pump money into the financial system. The reason the Federal Reserve sat around and did nothing is bc the New York Bank tried to set policies that they couldn’t agree on.. Thats a lil history lesson for u.. Another thing, this man is comparing FDR’s stimulus plan to ours. The only thing is FDR did raise taxes to pay for the stimulus, so money was redistributed like he was talking about earlier, but this is not at all the same practice and a totally different theory as current day stimulus plans. He talks about this again with General Ford. They never increased money supply, they just redistributed it, so all of this is totally irrelevant.. Then this guy talks about President Bush’s spending which again is not relevant because Bush’s spending went towards protection, not growth. You can’t have economic growth when spending goes towards protection vice versa.. Last thing he speaks about is the failing economy of Japan. This shows his lack of understanding because the problem was completly the opposite. Japan had such a high trade surplus, that they had an abundance of money causing too much demand and high inflation. Of course making credit more available and increasing government spending hurt the economy. They needed to reduce the amount of money, not increase it. Just like the Federal Reserve decreases money supply when there is inflation by raising interest… That was the whole video. I did not hear one word of proof, just very very poor arguments…

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By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:06:40 +0000

“one of the silver linings in this huge grey cloud is that we’re seeing some improvement and greater balance in our current account deficits.” Ben Bernanke was talking about having a greater balance in spending. We stunned our growth so much that commodities can get ahead on production and bring down the price of goods deflating the dollar.. This is identical to the idea of giving people a month off their house payments to get out of debt.

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By: 10 Things You Might Not Know About Ron Paul

10 Things You Might Not Know About Ron Paul — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:35:02 +0000

[...] This is a quote from his latest column at Ron Paul.com, “Politicians may not have any real idea about how to build a car, run a bank, educate a [...]

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By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:27:23 +0000

You can check out scientific journals about population threat to go into more detail.

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By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:10:18 +0000

Without the Federal Reserve there would be skyrocketing inflation because our economy grows faster than industries can produce goods. Thats why the price of steal, gas, electricity etc. has more than doubled in the past 30 years. It cost more to retool and structure to the mass growing population. The value of the dollar and all value adjust its price to commodities(necessities). The rising price of steal makes cars and construction more expensive. Since buildings and cars are the only things of true value, the price of everything else goes up to pay for these things. This is why minumum wage raises, to adjust to the new price of homes, businesses, and cars and everything else. Thats where inflation comes from..
What the Federal Reserve does is keeps our unemployment to a certain level so there isn’t excess spending devaluing of the dollar growing the economy faster than the amount of goods can handle. Population is always a threat. We need more investors to produce commodities. We can lower taxes and stress the importance and value of a commodity open market.
This is a true state of monopoly. This is what people warned us of. We need more producers to handle production of the growth of our economy in the 21st century. Most people don’t understand time, which is said to be mans worst enemy. We will reach pop. 1 BILLION by the year 2100, how can Exxon handle the gas for three times the amount of consumers as today? Time really does fly, they did it for the past 100 years, and they are going to do it for another hundred years continuously raising the price to pay for new production. This is our threat, not some non-profit organization that helps keep a balance from growing faster than we can handle.

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By: david

david — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 04:12:03 +0000

mobsters. business and government alike. all mobsters. we everyday schmucks will pay the price.

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By: Matthew Stone

Matthew Stone — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:27:34 +0000

Thought-provoking article… So are you arguing we need ‘A Fed’ and not just ‘The Recent Fed’? It cites movement by other Central Banks as a boon to the respective economy, as well as a “failure to use its power” rather than ‘they played too active a role in messing with the economy’.

In short, the article states the current failure is “We’re left with a Federal Reserve that defines its mission very narrowly; it doesn’t even want to use the powers it has.” This could be construed as very pro-market.

What are the changes, or direction, that you think should be instituted?

Regards,

Matt

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By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:56:21 +0000

The fed and treasury tried to rework a better path of non socialism by sticking to the books and just pumping back more money into the banks. It was the government and oversight committee who demanded the treasury to become socialists and stop what they were doing to buy up illiquid assets. And giving a loan to a corporation doesn’t make us socialists. That was the reason the Fed was set up in the first place, to help give loans to corporations in dire needs.

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By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:41:35 +0000

Without the Fed, the country would grow to fast and there would be too much demand for not enough supply of goods. The Fed takes money away from banks to control a balance between inflation and unemployment. What we really need is to focus on reducing cost-push inflation (rising costs of monopoly owned commodities). Because these commodities are monopoly controlled, the industries cannot grow as fast as the growth of our economy and resulting to greater demand with less supply (inflation). Changing our currency is not going to fix the cause of the problem. Even if we change our money to something backed by gold, we will still have to create money just as fast to keep up with a growing economy. This will lead to higher demands for commodity with the exact same high inflation risks only without an organization to manage and prevent heavier reprocutions.. Our population doubles every 50 years and the economy grows at around 3% a year, so our money supply is going to have to grow 3% a year wheather if it’s backed by gold, god, or nothing. We need to control rising prices of commodity if we want to control inflation.. Then we wouldn’t need a Federal Reserve.

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