N2264J

Cute but still a miss. What I said was we need a strong government not owned by
the corporations to level the playing field.

By the way, did you do this graphic yourself? If you were familiar with the movie
where the logo originated, I don't believe you'd butcher the point so completely.

This is where Libertarianism falls apart. Letting corporations do whatever they want
is precisely why no one is happy about the way things are going today. We need a
new sheriff in town.

.

jungle

Help us out here and tell us which corporations wrote the budget for the city of Detroit.

Which corporations write the budget for the US?

You tend to steer as far away from facts and actual numbers as possible, even to the point of ignoring them completely, but the facts are very clear here. It is always easy to make claims without any evidence at all.

If a city/country goes bankrupt very few causes can make this happen. If corporations are calling the shots, the budget writers are corrupt. If the budget writers do it themselves they are incompetent. The third and only remaining possibility is that the budget writers are both corrupt and incompetent.Take your pick.

N2264J

Corporations don't write the budget directly but they do write the laws and the tax code via their hired hands in congress which drives the budget.

Corporations, known as "special interests," are the reason you think you don't like government.

Investigating ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council

jungle

So you picked corrupt and incompetent?

And you want more?

How do you feel about a law requiring a balanced budget and taxing all at an equal rate? This would eliminate the possibility of trying to influence the budget and mean groups could not be targeted unfairly.

You have told us that paying taxes is patriotic, shouldn't everyone be equally patriotic? You don't want to force some people to not be patriotic do you?

Allowing free latitude with budget and taxation is like dropping your checkbook into a hospital for the criminally insane.

galaxy flyer

What we need is a government so limited in its powers that "capturing" it is pointless. Pointless to corporations, unions, tribal groups and anyone else. If government has powers of taxation or regulation, someone will use their money to use the power of government to their advantage.

GF

jungle

Totally true and just as unlikely to be changed.


“What I was looking at was a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich. As judged by the standards of a civilised society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.”



Alfred Jay Nock - Memoirs Of A Superfluous Man - 1943

N2264J

The budget writers are not necessarily corrupt or incompetent. They are just working within the law and current policy. It's all legal.

The system is corrupt. Getting the money out of politics by reversing Citizens/United, no more than 6 weeks for any elections, tax payer funded elections for anyone
wanting to run, locking the revolving door between industry and Washington - these would go a long way toward getting our democracy back.

I don't necessarily want more government. I want to fix the government we have.
For example - meaningful oversight of the executive by congress and federal
regulators that do their job without sucking up to the industries they're suppose to
be policing to parlay a cushy job when they leave government service, unfunding the empire and dialing back the defense/intelligence apparatus which is breaking us.

It's fixable if we have the political will to establish a fascist firewall between corporations and Washington.

.

brianb

So, if we can print our own money(?), then why do we have to "borrow" money from other countries? The purchasing power of the dollar in 1913 now costs $23 dollars in today's money. Have you noticed that none of the Major networks, not even FOX, will do an expose on the 100yr anniversary of the Federal Reserve? Illuminating don't you think?

jungle

You are somewhat confused, you are only looking at the devaluation of the dollar, but not the inflation of wages to match over time.

Take a look at per capita GDP adjusted for inflation to get a better picture:http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf

We actually have a fairly small amount of debt in foreign hands, about 3 trillion. Most of it is owned by US Taxpayers.

As debt rises more and more of the GDP goes to service the debt cost, if wages don't keep pace with inflation you end up like Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperin...eimar_Republic

The real danger is that if debt grows large enough it can consume a large chunk of revenue or all of it, killing jobs, GDP and revenue.


In other words if wages don't inflate along with the dollar most of us will end up holding the short end of the stick.

Another way to think of it is how many hours the average person needs to work in order to pay the cost of living, and the hours required today are much lower than in 1913.

Even the most robust economy has finite limits to expand and pay debt, we are now seeing several western economies reaching and exceeding those limits.

brianb

That may be so but, it is the Fed that prints money from nothing, yes? Unsound monetary policy is, in my opinion, the major crux of this nations financial problems. Duh. Wages have to increase to match the never ending printing of monopoly money with no end in sight. Our purchasing power is so weak what will it take to return thus Nation to sound financial principles? It ain't working now, at least not for the average Joe. The Fed must go. We did fine before them even with the occasional fubar, but, we still made it. They haven't made our country more financially stable in the last 100 years and in fact, history proves they have made it worse. Like 17 trillion in debt.