Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
AndrewB

Debt ceiling fiasco

Recommended Posts

Quast said:

Um...Holy shit you are ignorant. Do you realize how little oil the us actually produces (especially compared to what we use)? And how much of it is NOT used by vehicles?


You can thank Canada for perfecting its oil sand extraction techniques ;-) That should keep the shack goin' for a while, eh?

Quast said:

Honestly, when push comes to shove and gasoline becomes too scarce and/or expensive, I guarantee you electric cars will be the LEAST of our concerns.


That. The reason why electic cars are hoped for in the future is mainly to keep primary combustion pollution outside of cities and maximize the start-stop efficiency. An electric car would have almost no advantage on a long-distance trip, other than making the owner anxious about range.

Cars are the biggest source of city pollution, but, as you said, NOT the biggest reason for oil consumption overall: there are also plastic industries, aircraft fuel, ships, etc. and those can't be made to run on batteries like RC toys: you can't replace the chemical versatility of petroleum or the raw power of a 5000 HP Turboshaft-powered Chinook helicopter or a military jet with a couple of batteries and a solar panel.

Edit: if you really want to get a good insight on how the car industry is a really tough one to stay afloat and how some issues like electric cars (and the misconceptions and misinformation around them) are older than dirt, read Wheels by Arthur Halley. It was written in 1971 and yet the issues it touches and even the predictions it made (especially the technological ones) seem very actual and realistic even today. Most are even made very early in the book, so there's no excuse not to give it a peek ;-)

Share this post


Link to post

geo said:
So what you do is put a ban on all products with elements made out of the country. I'm talking parts of products made out of country too like some car companies make the parts overseas and then assemble them here.

that's insane and it'd only make your country lose more jobs in the long run. other countries would just implement reciprocal measures and your companies wouldn't be able to export goods anywhere in the world. the cost of domestic products would skyrocket, because it's not cheap labour force in china that makes their stuff so cheap, it's the non-compromising mass production and you'd be reverting to small scale business.

i've read an article how t-shirts "made in china" aren't all that at all. it's, like, turkish cotton sent to china for procession, the fabric is sent to, like, france for chemical treatment and colouring, then to bulgaria for shearing, then back to china for seaming the parts together with that "made in china" strap. we're deeply global world society already and the only nation still playing at self-reliance is north korea, which is not an inspiring example. even the soviet bloc countries were self-reliant in name only, especially the soviet union, which left russia in serious debts to its own satellite countries after ussr fell apart.

geo said:
We've got millions of Americans that can easily work in sweat shops for minimum wage. Plenty of people already do it. They're called factories.

okay, but those people are called mexicans. this is happening in europe as well - local populations are too good and spoiled to slave for minimum wage and there's no need for it when the immigrants (from east/south) can do it.

Maes said:
Yeah right, good luck pulling this kind of stunt today without the Chinese pulling the plug on your debts and making you default for sure (they are your largest debt owner, AFAIK).

In the time it took you to type these lines, some thousands of Chinese sweatshops just produced enough products to fill dozens of containers that WILL be shipped to your shores. And all that, with a manufacturing cost lower than what you paid for the can of coke or beer you guzzled down while you were at it.

these two paragraphs contradict each other. china is the last nation on earth that'd wish for usa defaulting, BECAUSE they hold so much of their debt. to oversimplify it, china's own currency is fucking worthless, because its value is state manipulated, so they hold most of their reserves in dollars. tearing usa down would devalue both dollar and euro, so china would have a lot of funky toilet paper in their central bank. even better, population of the western civilization wouldn't be able to buy so much chinese-manufactured crap and the crisis would swing back at china without mercy. china is better off waiting and watching and buying off greece.

D_GARG said:
Electric cars are the future IF we get a clean electrisity sources that can:

nonsense, electric cars are a futile fad of scientist hippies. we don't have the technology to create lasting batteries and hey, i live in a country where we get -20 degree celsius sometimes. even chemical batteries in regular cars get freaky, electric cars are crap useful only for florida or something.

Share this post


Link to post

I know how little oil there is in the US, but you don't think in the US that we can't think of a way that doesn't use oil?

What can't America do? We don't have to cut off oil supply that was probably extreme to say. Just cut out factories in other countries. Nothing would ever go from $10 to $300 you may as well have said $300,000. It might go from $10 to $50 but you know what shipping costs would go down instead of being on a ship and then trucked everywhere, it would just be trucked everywhere. And if it goes from $50 you're still supporting America and you have the damn job to pay for it. Or hey go garage sailing, hand me downs, thrift stores.

Think... There are several options for you to do and use, not just one single thing.

Actually come to think of it the US is like a 21 year old always going to its uncle for money. When the US just needs to stand up on its own and be independent.

How would having everything domestic cost more jobs in the long run even if no other country bought from us? We'd still be supporting ourselves. We'd buy our own stuff.

Hey my ideas might not be perfected the first time I say them here on a Doom forum, that's why I say them so you guys can pick out my ideas and I can extend my ideas and forge them to be better.

Share this post


Link to post

You lost me there somewhere, partner.

Share this post


Link to post
geo said:

How would having everything domestic cost more jobs in the long run even if no other country bought from us? We'd still be supporting ourselves. We'd buy our own stuff.

Where would your money come from and where would it go to? Money doesn't just simply appear out of nowhere...unless the state prints more, which causes the value to plummet. You can't expect all the money that's in circulation to remain in circulation without anyone saving money up. And once people start saving in a closed economy the circulating amount of money becomes smaller, meaning that companies have less money to pay wages -> people lose jobs -> people spend less -> companies have less money -> people lose jobs -> ...

If you want to have a closed economy you'll have to ditch money and begin using something else of value for trading, like animal pelts and pearls. At least those will never run out, as long as hunting and pearl diving remain regulated. :P

Share this post


Link to post
Jodwin said:

If you want to have a closed economy you'll have to ditch money and begin using something else of value for trading, like animal pelts and pearls.


...or North Korean won ;-)

Share this post


Link to post

materials cost X amount
factory costs A amount
shipping costs B amount
labor and retailers costs Y amount
product costs Z amount



Z - X+A+B+Y = profit

Plus over time things get cheaper anyway. Technology especially. A lot of tech is made in White Plains, NY.

I'm a little concerned about money because with the population growing... that's why I suggested in a different topic to put a finance cap on people and companies once they get over a certain tremendously high amount like people that make $100 mil a year.

Food and water would become big commodities if there was no economy. Everyone would farm to a certain extent.

I'm really surprised more people aren't getting into farming... but I guess doing circles in a tractor isn't fun to most people.

Share this post


Link to post
geo said:

I'm really surprised more people aren't getting into farming... but I guess doing circles in a tractor isn't fun to most people.


Actually, they might start doing just that.

In Greece at least, the crisis has driven many young people back to the countryside and agriculture, after they realized that the whole "Service based economy! Be a web designer/stock market analyst/white collar worker!" bubble burst, and that living in small cities and/from land was easier and less expensive, so the trend that manifested in the 80s and emptied fields of working hands, starts reversing.

Share this post


Link to post
geo said:

materials cost X amount
factory costs A amount
shipping costs B amount
labor and retailers costs Y amount
product costs Z amount

Z - X+A+B+Y = profit

This is profit to the company, yes, but the profit they earned came from within the closed system, so no new money actually entered into play. Things will be fine as long as all of the money stays in circulation (although any kind of growth will be negligible), but as soon as any party starts saving or hoarding (be it the people or the companies) stuff gets bad.

Look at it this way: Imagine you have your closed economy. Now, assume that people will be saving 2 % of all circulating money each year to fund their children's education. After ten years only 81.7 % of the original sum of money will be left in circulation and almost 20 % of all the money in the nation is hidden inside mattresses. So what will you do, let the economy collapse because there'll be no money left to fuel it, or print new money and destroy the money's value?

Share this post


Link to post
geo said:

I know how little oil there is in the US, but you don't think in the US that we can't think of a way that doesn't use oil?

This is a discussion about a looming issue. Replacing petroleum is not at all a simple thing. It is something that will take centuries if at all.

read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Without petroleum products fueling the world we live in, particularly the food we eat, hundreds of millions will die. That has little to nothing to do with gasoline.

What can't America do? We don't have to cut off oil supply that was probably extreme to say. Just cut out factories in other countries. Nothing would ever go from $10 to $300 you may as well have said $300,000.


Uh, considering workers in the united states would get paid, oh, 100 times what people in sweatshops would make for doing the same thing? I'd say so.

Jodwin said:

Look at it this way: Imagine you have your closed economy. Now, assume that people will be saving 2 % of all circulating money each year to fund their children's education. After ten years only 81.7 % of the original sum of money will be left in circulation and almost 20 % of all the money in the nation is hidden inside mattresses. So what will you do, let the economy collapse because there'll be no money left to fuel it, or print new money and destroy the money's value?

But saved money IS in circulation, no? Unless it is literally hidden in mattresses. The only money not in circulation are nickles and dimes in your couch. Everything else is sent off to banks to be invested or loaned out.

Share this post


Link to post

Not too many people store their money in mattresses, because that's risky (theft, fire, etc.) and also because the banks will pay them a small interest on it, if they open a money market account, savings account, or whatever. The banks then use this money for lending to others, and make a profit on the deal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8

Investing in mutual funds (stocks, bonds, money market funds) works similarly. It's just much less risky to invest into a broad index fund than buying Company X stock directly. Those who held only S&P500 index during dotcom crash didn't lose their shirt, unlike people who bought some random stocks.

In all those non-mattress cases, the money returns into circulation. Companies need to be able to borrow money in order to do business. Even the government needs to be able to raise money, and that's what treasury bills are for. But it all falls apart when they go doing bad shit, like raiding Social Security trust fund in order to fund their shitty wars and other lame projects. In the past, they didn't give a shit, because they knew it wouldn't come to bite them in the ass for many years to come, but things are a-changin' and one day it will be time to pay the piper.

Share this post


Link to post
AndrewB said:

I'm surprised there's no topic on this. I'm too lazy type up my own argument, so I'll just post a video that reflects my opinions on this.



The debt is something like 14.6 trillion now. America is increasing its debt load at a rate of about 2 trillion per year, while the two political parties are debating whether this increase should be reduced to 1.6 trillion per year or 1.8 trillion per year. An actual reduction of the debt is absolutely not being considered by anyone.

We are all screwed.


No topic on this cuz this is getting OLD :P people already knew, or should've known, that this was coming since the day the US govt decided to print more money for the first stimulus fund

Share this post


Link to post

this is based on one attribute: Limited Resoures

the more unlimited stuff you have the more stuff can you do
unless you are totaly independent, which is only possible if you recycle everything that is limited, such as metals, oils, plastics etc

and thats why we even have trades, markets, people who are there to ensure the shit works. now that the politicans fucked it up is them to blame since they were the ones in power.

and about envorimental talks; why dont everyone grow their own vegetables? well for example spain and france would collapse in panic since no one would buy their vegetables. with this as example, the price for a backup VS diverse food collapses is that some markets shrink and maybe even crash if people just wake the hell up and do something themselfes. a way to go when it comes to cars is to put up a new law; obligatory catalyst component or enhance upgrade catalyst.
that cant be hard to achive, besides there you have work to do.


china can crave the US to pay back the entire debt.
injecdting more dollars wount change anything in length, because what the country have produced havent changed before it has produced anything. US isnt a producing country anymore, its more like a consumer.
China dominates this league (since they are also cheating[their people live like zoo critters in comparison to their economical power], if they didnt, India would dominate by now. in other words, that position would cykle instead of being held by one nation) and on top of this, we have large numbers of envorimental destruction [link]http://noseconenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/sea-of-plastic-twice-size-of-us.html [/link] and eco systems being poisoned and may not be expected to survive, not to mention the effect on us humans. and yes, the envorimental activists are ignored since they dunno wtf to do.
If nothing is done, this train will crash, and that means that we have to jump down the gorge.

Share this post


Link to post
D_GARG said:

why dont everyone grow their own vegetables?

Limited resources, as you said yourself. Many city dwellers simply don't have anywhere to set up a garden.

Share this post


Link to post
GreyGhost said:

Limited resources, as you said yourself. Many city dwellers simply don't have anywhere to set up a garden.


true.
hmmmm, I've seen articles which contained pictures of gardens on roof tops, that could be sulution, as long as no one screws 'em up

Share this post


Link to post

Let alone that you need to wait for months before you even get to eat one tiny shriveled tomato or corncob. OK if you want to grow a couple just for kicks, not so OK if that's meant to be your only form of sustenance.

It's unrealistic to expect that you can pump out tomatoes and lettuce and other vegetables which need constant care at a rate of several kg a week all year round, and with no effort, using only a few square meters of dirt, with no irrigation and no pesticides.

For that matter, you can also keep chickens or a piglet if you have the space, but again, you'll have to feed them for months before you can eat them. Keeping egg-laying hens makes more sense, but even then you can get at most one egg per chicken per day, assuming you look after them properly and they don't die on you.

Share this post


Link to post

came by this old video, kinda intresting, I think this could explain some on topic

Share this post


Link to post
Quast said:

I would totally go for hyperinflation just to have a 100 trillion dollar bill regardless of it's worthlessness. Maybe they'd put sarah palin on it too.


Really? You don't have to! I bought a set of 100, 50, and 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars off ebay for the low price of 8 US dollars. That's 160 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars - what a deal! I seriously did though, I think they're hilarious. Zimbabwe devalued their money so badly it's no longer valid currency.

Share this post


Link to post

I\'m not gonna lie, I don\'t know much about politics, but my dad does because he\'s watching the news all the time, so I adopt his opinions on matters since he\'s experienced in knowlege about it. He says that alot of this is obamas fault because of the 2009 bailout.

Share this post


Link to post

Well kid, the bailout does suck and while it did increase the deficit, the US was already $11B in debt when Obama took office. It was $4.5B when Clinton took office and $6B when he left. So figure it out.

Your dad is on to something though. People don't like Obama because nothing is being done about spending, it just keeps on increasing. It would help though if cutting military spending or increasing taxes for the wealthy weren't political suicide thanks the ten years of TV propaganda.

Share this post


Link to post
hobomaster22 said:

Really? You don't have to! I bought a set of 100, 50, and 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars off ebay for the low price of 8 US dollars. That's 160 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars - what a deal! I seriously did though, I think they're hilarious. Zimbabwe devalued their money so badly it's no longer valid currency.

haha just bought one. Thanks!

Share this post


Link to post
bloodmartyr_x said:

so I adopt his opinions on matters since he\'s experienced in knowlege about it

You should learn about the issues yourself and form your own opinions, don't let someone else dictate what you think.

Share this post


Link to post

For as long as I can remember, I've been firmly entrenched in the "raise taxes on people who can afford it" camp. As altruistic as anyone can be, I've always supported public health care, funding for education, funding for media, funding for low cost housing, etc etc. It just made sense. So many of society's problems are rooted in poverty, and if you can reduce poverty, then many other problems go away as well. So fiscal liberalism made sense. When you factor in social issues such as gay rights, abortions, religion, etc, I've been about as extreme a liberal as they come.

Then, one day, a few months ago, I somehow stumbled across this video:



It astounded me how someone could have been so right about so many things over such a long period of time while still have his predictions met with laughter and scorn. Suddenly, money and finance and economics all became incredibly intriguing to me. I spent at least 20 hours a week, month after month, reading every differing opinion I could find about US finances, real estate, bubbles, herd mentality, and so on. I watched videos by Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, and Gerald Celente, noted inflationist doomsdayers. I watched videos posted by their opponents, who fell into both the "deflationist doomsdayers" category and the "sunshine and lollipops" category. Three distinctly different camps, each with their own common theme to their arguments.

So, in parsing all of these different viewpoints, I started looking for certain "key" traits: I looked for consistency in arguments. I looked for a lack of contradictions and a lack of "missing pieces" in the arguments. I looked for a lack of circular logic. I looked for a strict adherence to logic and reason. I looked for clear, simple language, where the debater tried to make his argument easier to understand ("this is very simple and anyone can understand this"), not difficult to understand ("this is very complex and only I am smart enough to understand this"). Perhaps more importantly than all else, I looked for a good track record. I looked for investors who were able to see the economic situation clearly, in advance, and position themselves to profit. I wanted to find where the "smart money" was headed.

After a few months, I got to a point where I simply could not find any points of view that I hadn't already heard. By this time, a clear theme emerged in my research. All of the traits I mentioned in my previous paragraph belonged to one key group: The Austrian conservatives. The inflationist doomsdayers.

It's hard to believe it, but I can no longer call myself a pure liberal. I am now a strong fiscal conservative and strong social liberal, better known as a libertarian. This belief is backed up with a bedrock of months of tireless research and unrelenting skepticism.

Maybe more importantly than anything, I came to understand that caring about underprivileged people is not a partisan issue. I understand how loose monetary policies and government spending have contributed to making more people poor and widening the gap between the rich and poor. How allowing the government to guarantee home loans and take away risk from both the banks and the homeowners helped propel home prices to the most extreme overvaluations we've seen in human history, thereby defeating the original goal of making homes more affordable. I understand that we're all living beyond our means, and we need to self-impose some austerity sooner in order to prevent more disastrous austerity later. I understand that perfectly well-intentioned laws, designed to protect the lower and middle class, actually achieve the opposite. Minimum wage laws are akin to making the first step of a career ladder 10 feet high, meaning only those privileged enough to already own a 10-foot ladder can make a life for themselves, while those less fortunate continue to wallow in joblessness, homelessness, and misery. Corporate taxes and strict employment regulations add a risk factor to employers, forcing them to be much more selective and careful when hiring people. Of course this contributes to higher unemployment. How could it not?

Maybe in the best of times, we can afford a lot of government control, complex regulations, and attempts to redistribute wealth. These are not the best of times. The world economy is rotten to its core, and the only way anything can be fixed is to blow everything up and start from scratch. We'll have to return to fundamentals for a while. That means smaller government, lower taxes, more capitalism, and living within our means. We need risks to be limited by fear, not fostered through government guarantees. This isn't heartless in any sense of the word. It's exactly what is needed to return jobs to the lower and middle classes and give real opportunities to the most vulnerable.

Share this post


Link to post

Laughable. Yeah, your government had a retarded scheme for guaranteeing loans that should never exist, but what you're proposing is ludicrous.

Minimum wages are necessary because capitalist types don't want to pay wages workers doing unskilled jobs can live on. Taxes are necessary because certain things need to be run by the government. For example, the lack of public, universal healthcare in the U.S.A. is appalling and is a big part of why sane middle-class people never want to move there.

Properly constructed regulation helps ease the pain of these cycles, or even stop them. Pure capitalism has never worked for the poor in any economy and it never will. Countries with more-regulated economies have weathered this better. For example, Canada's banks haven't collapse. Our housing bubble didn't entirely collapse either, which is a shame because houses should be cheap (investing in houses you don't plan to occupy/rent probably should be illegal).

The scariest thing about America these days is too many Americans don't have a sense of pride in building anything bigger than their own company or their own pile of money. Americans are always whining that public transport is bad, the space program is stupid, free healthcare is communism, etc. All us foreigners want back the America we used to envy because it funded massive projects that were just cool.

And then there's this. The banks foreclosed rather than refinance people with in the mess they created, let the houses sit, and then bulldoze them rather than make sure they become something affordable for people to live in. Disgusting.

Share this post


Link to post

I haven't thought about it much, but so far I don't see why products themselves couldn't be used as currency in the event of a supposed 'economic meltdown' crisis where dollars become as valuable as toilet paper (besides that products tend to be too large to easily store in a wallet, and its harder to trade precise values measured to the penny).

I've heard the argument that it might be difficult for me to 'buy' a haircut with a SNES cartridge, or something, if the haircutter doesn't like or want SNES games... but it seems the haircutter wouldn't mind accepting that SNES game regardless of not wanting that specific item, because it can be used as 'barter money' for his next transaction. So what's the big deal if dollars become as valuable as toilet paper if we have products all over the place to use as 'money' instead? And why specifically buy gold when you can horde any other product/food/ammunition/whatever to use as money instead?
Here's some shit I just watched:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGuZhBSoWI0
Most political/doomsday/conspiracy/economic/etc crap just goes over my head and I never know if I'm being manipulated or joining some modern quasi religion by paying attention to it.
Even stupid/false ideas can 'memetically evolve', snowballing over time into more complex but equally stupid ideas. That evolved complexity might give them an undue appearance of sophistication. I suspect the world could be organized in a superior way somehow, practically a utopia relative to the present.

Being an american, I was practically educated in a giant walmart like in the movie idiocracy, so needless to say I know little about this debt such as who mainly owes it or who it is borrowed from. I've heard its mostly borrowed from china.. but is china retarded or something, I mean if you notice you've lent out, like, trillions, or whatever, aren't you concerned about it not getting paid back? Shouldn't you have been concerned long ago when it was 1/10th as much debt? Hell, 'debt' is a good thing if you never pay it. The ones who appear to have lost out are china because they won't be paid? Defaulting on that much money sound like something that might catalyze war to me.
Also it seems weapons have a strange economic 'value'. If a hypothetical world only had 5 people in it and there was 500 total dollars in circulation, a 10$ gun could be 'worth' 500 dollars because it can be used to rob every one else. Maybe USA 'borrowed' all that money to invest in military so they can steal the rest.

Share this post


Link to post

It's way too complex to use physical objects as currency. You never know which ones are going to lose all value within a few weeks. SNES carts are only valuable to a small segment of the population. Your barber would be wasting his time to go looking for them, and if there were middlemen doing it they would be wasting even more resources. Granted, these sorts of people exist with money too, but at least your barber knows he can always trade the money for what he needs.

The guys in the video are stupid. I wasn't willing to listen to their whole thing because it goes on forever? What are they advocating? A gold standard? That never stopped inflation before.

Share this post


Link to post
Aliotroph? said:

Minimum wages are necessary because capitalist types don't want to pay wages workers doing unskilled jobs can live on.

The alternative is that the unskilled workers don't have any job, the companies don't hire any unskilled workers, and you have increased joblessness and crime. With jobless rates around 20% now in the U.S. and rising, this is the situation.

Minimum wages also make it less feasible for companies to hire unskilled workers and train them on the job, turning them into higher skilled workers. Instead, we rely on an educational system where students have to go 10s of thousands of dollars into debt to get a degree which may or may not be useful for obtaining any job, assuming they can even get accepted into the program. Again, all of this is an example of setting the first rung of the ladder of life incredibly high, making it impossible for the most skilled and underprivileged people to turn their lives around.

If I was an 18-something year old, with no college education and no real job experience, and I wanted to make something of my life, what would I hope for? Would I want to work for $9.25 an hour at Starbucks, living in a dump and saving every penny, after 10 years scrapping together enough money to afford a college education? Or would I want to work for $3 or $4 an hour as a electrician's apprentice, getting valuable training on the job, not being able to afford any apartment but at least being able to feed myself, but having a hope of actually being able to earn $10 or $20 an hour after a year of two or work? This is the real reality of the situation, and unfortunately, the reality is that the first scenario is the only possibility for underprivileged people in the U.S.

Taxes are necessary because certain things need to be run by the government.

Absolutely true. Public infrastructure, police and law enforcement, legal services, immigration and military pretty much have to be governed.

Countries with more-regulated economies have weathered this better. For example, Canada's banks haven't collapse. Our housing bubble didn't entirely collapse either, which is a shame because houses should be cheap (investing in houses you don't plan to occupy/rent probably should be illegal).

Banks don't face bankruptcy unless and until their investments go bad. In the case of the U.S., this started happening around 2006 because of subprime mortgages with teaser rates. When the rates reset, people couldn't afford homes and the domino effect of foreclosures began. This hasn't happened yet in Canada because the lending was never focused specifically on subprime borrowers. However, this doesn't mean that Canada won't face collapse. It simply means that the U.S. had a canary in its housing coal mine and Canada doesn't.

Just look at Australia's housing market right now. They said the same thing about Australia's banking sector that they're saying about Canada. Yet, Australia's real estate prices are in free fall. Whereas the U.S. had to bail out Fannie and Freddy when everything went bad, neither Canada or Australia need to do this because the bailout is pre-programmed into the system through government guarantees. This means that Canadian and Australian banks are not liable for insured mortgage defaults because a government agency was set up to guarantee these mortgages. So while the banks haven't, and likely won't, go bankrupt in Canada, that won't be any consolation to Canada overall because in the end it's the Canadian government, and therefore the Canadian taxpayer, that will have to bear the cost of the mortgage defaults when they inevitably occur. And they will, beginning the day that the bond bubble bursts.

The scariest thing about America these days is too many Americans don't have a sense of pride in building anything bigger than their own company or their own pile of money. Americans are always whining that public transport is bad, the space program is stupid, free healthcare is communism, etc. All us foreigners want back the America we used to envy because it funded massive projects that were just cool.

I think the scariest thing about America is that everyone feels entitled to have money handed to them. Americans used to believe that they were entitled to get rich by doing nothing more than owning a house. Nothing is more unproductive or self-destructive than seething sense of entitlement.

There are certain things that I struggle to decide whether they should be operated by government or not. Health care, public transportation, and utilities the ones I struggle with the most. I think that space exploration would be virtually extinct without government support, mainly because the benefits of space exploration are far too intangible, global, and in many ways, non-existent.

And then there's this. The banks foreclosed rather than refinance people with in the mess they created, let the houses sit, and then bulldoze them rather than make sure they become something affordable for people to live in. Disgusting.

It is disgusting. However, I choose to focus more of my disgust on the fact that the glut of homes were ever built in the first place, squandering all those resources in the process. I don't really have much sympathy for any family that was dumb enough to buy a home in an obviously expensive and unusual housing market. There are consequences to taking a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase as lightly as most people take them. Most of the financial problems we now face in the world come from trying to protect people from the consequences of their own decisions.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×