"Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant sets new standard for low wages"

bhtooefr said:

I would argue that the Lincoln administration is actually what set us up for the strong federal/weak state system that has led to our downfall today.
(Note that I do think that slavery should've been abolished, but it should've been abolished in a way that didn't give the federal government extreme power over the states.)
Also, a Swiss system would be interesting to see working here - Switzerland's federal government is weak enough that, when their federal taxation ends in 2020, their federal government may well collapse... yet their cantons are very stable. I do think that some of Switzerland's policies wouldn't scale to the US - partially because a lot of Switzerland's services income is independent of land area or population. However, some of them are good ideas, IMO.

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Tooef, I want to point out that I think you're unusually bright with this observation about scaling. I think fundamentally what has gone on is that our 235 year experiment in democracy, known as a democratic republic, failed about 45 years ago and is going into death spiral. Thinking about it a lot, I think it's simply related to population, at its heart. 45 years ago, we had a population about 188 million, and our democratic republic **mostly** worked; Now we have 300 million people, and our democratic republic is utterly shattered. We have no unity. We have everyone with their hands out. Every industry demands special treatment and exceptions. Our political system responds to money and power, and we set it up so that those factors are naturally concentrated and enhanced.

Personally, I think the idea in my signature is the ONLY way to regain control of our democratic republic. As long as congress has the purse strings, they will be played like fiddles by the powerful, and spend us into oblivion for every "special" cause. The political parties are nothing but theater of the absurd for the doped masses. There is not one atom of daylight between them in actual practice, only in style--and that doesn't add up to a hill of beans.

The trick is, regarding your proposal, I think you'd get a bunch of people paying to support "this program that I use, but only if I get the money back, not that other guy".

And, worse, people can be convinced to go against their own best interests. ("Take your government hands off my Medicare!")

I think it'll take much, much more drastic measures to make things work in the US - the first thing being, reducing the governed population (while I also think that the world population should be reduced, the governed population is what's important to this discussion). There's various ways to do that - the most politically sound (scarily enough - the others tread into territory that, well, invokes Godwin's Law) and most ethical is, IMO, to break up the US, so that each state is its own separate nation. What does this accomplish? Well, it makes it so that the highest level of government only gets a state's worth of subjects. This has quite a few consequences - but most relevant to this discussion, if you're not one in 300 million Americans, but rather 1 in 11.5 million Ohioans (as an example), you're going to have more of a sense of community. (Well, OK, everyone wants to get the hell out of Ohio, but you get my point.)

I know I'm going to get laughed at for citing Cracked.com, but read this about the "monkeysphere" (there is real research behind it): http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

Cliff's notes, for those who haven't read it: Scientists believe that people can only care about a total of 150 people at most, and the rest are outside of their attention.

FWIW, this explains why communism only works in theory - it actually does work with small gatherings of people, and healthy families are communist by nature (most healthy families completely operate under Marx's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" philosophy). Communism only works when everyone cares about everyone else... which doesn't work over 150 people.

But, digression aside, the closer you get national-level changes to affecting you or your monkeysphere (which is more likely if the nation is smaller), the more likely those national-level changes are to be for the better. Especially if everyone in the nation is close to your monkeysphere, which is why the US worked far better at half the population than its current population.

I don't think that it is strictly related to population size. I think it is also related to how our government has stopped functioning as a voice of the people and started functioning as a voice of the pacs. One alternative to this would be to limit the terms in office that anyone can serve and it should be collective years. Limit it to ten years of total time in public office. Then they have to return to the private sector on either reap the rewards of their good work or suffer the failures with the rest of us.

nicklockard said:

Tooef, I want to point out that I think you're unusually bright with this observation about scaling. I think fundamentally what has gone on is that our 235 year experiment in democracy, known as a democratic republic, failed about 45 years ago and is going into death spiral. Thinking about it a lot, I think it's simply related to population, at its heart. 45 years ago, we had a population about 188 million, and our democratic republic **mostly** worked; Now we have 300 million people, and our democratic republic is utterly shattered. We have no unity. We have everyone with their hands out. Every industry demands special treatment and exceptions. Our political system responds to money and power, and we set it up so that those factors are naturally concentrated and enhanced.

Personally, I think the idea in my signature is the ONLY way to regain control of our democratic republic. As long as congress has the purse strings, they will be played like fiddles by the powerful, and spend us into oblivion for every "special" cause. The political parties are nothing but theater of the absurd for the doped masses. There is not one atom of daylight between them in actual practice, only in style--and that doesn't add up to a hill of beans.

Click to expand...

You guys can shuffle the deck chairs of the Titanic around all you want to, the outcome is the same. It is not the form of our goberment that is the problem, or the size of the population governed, it is the unreal expectations people place upon it. So lets stow the class warfare weak minded nonsense. Required classes in civics and basic economics is a good starting point .....

Don't like when a unifying common passion such as VWs becomes political. This draws a line. I'll only say that VW is a smart company and in a free country you make it or don't based on your business's decisions. People want a great product for the least amount of $$. Have enjoyed reading the diff opinions!

bhtooefr said:

The trick is, regarding your proposal, I think you'd get a bunch of people paying to support "this program that I use, but only if I get the money back, not that other guy".

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Well, yes, but 300 million people won't agree on priorities exactly, so what you'll get for a budget will be a giant amalgam of what people want on average. I trust average people a lot more than any political system.

bhtooefr said:

And, worse, people can be convinced to go against their own best interests. ("Take your government hands off my Medicare!")

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And how would that be any worse than what we have?

If you read my idea carefully, you'll see that only people and entities who actually pay taxes get a vote on how it's spent One dollar = one vote, in a sense.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that..

thebigarniedog said:

It is not the form of our goberment that is the problem, or the size of the population governed, it is the unreal expectations people place upon it. So lets stow the class warfare weak minded nonsense. Required classes in civics and basic economics is a good starting point .....

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Arnie, why can't it be all of the above? Government form (local/state/fed), population, expectations... these all work together to wreak havoc, don't they?

I particularly like your example of expectations.

In principle, and usually in reality: "Wants" are not limited, resources are limited. Even someone like Bill Gates wants things that he cannot afford. (Think solving world hunger/education/etc)

So, why are human "wants" unlimited? Is it really human nature, or is it conditioned?

What occurs to me is a couple I met once who had been eating live grasshoppers. Happily. They were full when I met them, and while it will revolt the average person, they had decided to purposefully live life with paleolithic technology (and therefore resources) for several years. They were motivated by many things, not least of which included a sense of conservation. Why are "wants" in economics always assumed to be "things that require more resources". Is living in this cushy world conditioning us to want things as if they're wishes from a genie's bottle?

I can't help but suspect that tooef (and his monkey evidence) is right when it comes to how many people we can keep track of. I believe this sort of thing applies to more than just other people. It applies to government size. Larger populations generally demand more government services than smaller ones. But, since people are ultimately in charge of managing ALL of these services, the result is too complicated for us to properly understand anything. It appears to be an unsolvable mess. (It's not, we're just not smart enough) It is indeed the expectations that we have of our government that are out of control.

But what can the leadership do? What leader has the courage to go down in history as "the guy who saved the economy by ending government aid"- subtitle- and harming innocent children whose parents couldn't afford food, (or whatever opposing argument fits the service cut)

Because of human nature and dark ethical decisions on both side of the knife, we're going to be stuck on this roller coaster for a long time.

We are still (amazingly!) riding the great wave of cheap food brought about by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. These eras practically invented the modern concept of "consumer". Where have the unreasonable expectations of government come from if not from the consumerism our economic model has encouraged?

More than anything, our government reminds me of an episode of hoarders. What's frightening is that there may be a very good reason for the similarities. Like the hoarder, each "thing" that is added to the collection of government services is backed up by a rationale. By itself, each motorbike, or collectible souvenir, or health care bill is doing very little harm. But once you've said "yes" to every little thing that makes sense, you've got an unmanageable collection of "stuff".

So why does this happen? I believe there is a simple flaw in error-checking logic present in normal human thought. We don't have the ability to recognize when a system is becoming too complicated to control until it starts to break.

I don't even think you have to necessarily reduce services, if you make it so that population is manageable.

Also, part of the problem with consumerism is the financial system that we have in the US. See, debt is money. The more debt a bank can make, the more money can be made out of thin air. The problem is, of course, because there's only a very, VERY tiny percentage of actual money in the system, the debt outgrows the money very quickly, and the only way to even keep up is exponentially, infinitely grow the debt to get more money to pay the older debt. This also requires an exponential, infinite growth in the number of people, and/or in what they buy. To even FUNCTION, the US economy, as it is now, REQUIRES planned obsolescence, and all of the worst kind of consumerism. Essentially, the US economy is a ponzi scheme.

bhtooefr said:

Cliff's notes, for those who haven't read it: Scientists believe that people can only care about a total of 150 people at most, and the rest are outside of their attention.

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The number I'd open my wallet for is a far, far smaller number.....




Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

bhtooefr said:

I don't even think you have to necessarily reduce services, if you make it so that population is manageable.
Also, part of the problem with consumerism is the financial system that we have in the US. See, debt is money. The more debt a bank can make, the more money can be made out of thin air. The problem is, of course, because there's only a very, VERY tiny percentage of actual money in the system, the debt outgrows the money very quickly, and the only way to even keep up is exponentially, infinitely grow the debt to get more money to pay the older debt. This also requires an exponential, infinite growth in the number of people, and/or in what they buy. To even FUNCTION, the US economy, as it is now, REQUIRES planned obsolescence, and all of the worst kind of consumerism. Essentially, the US economy is a ponzi scheme.

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Well stated.

VeeDubTDI said:

Well stated.

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And from tooef, no less!!!!

I know! What is this world coming to?

This is a big post, but it's necessary to provide evidence to rebut the following:

thebigarniedog said:

So lets stow the class warfare weak minded nonsense. Required classes in civics and basic economics is a good starting point .....

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Dr. Stiglitz said it's theft, not "warfare". To have a war, as I've mentioned before, you have to have two or more sides with power, rather than one powerless side and one side with all the power.

Dr. Stiglitz said:

One of six Americans who would like a full-time job right now cannot get one. Are things going to be better than that in the next year or two? The answer is probably not. It might get a little better, but there's also a substantial risk that it could get worse.

The key issues for most Americans are two-fold right now. One is, is it likely that the economy will be growing fast enough to create enough jobs for the new entrants to the labor force so that the jobs deficit gets reduced? The answer is almost no one sees growth in 2010, 2011 and even into 2012 at that rate. So we are going to maintain this gap of 15 million unemployed, 26 million Americans who would like a full-time job that can't get one. That situation is likely to be maintained. And it is possible that it might get a little worse; it might get a little better.

The second thing that is weighing down on most Americans is the threat of losing their home. The fact is that one out of four Americans with a mortgage are now underwater.

...we're beyond three years now since that happened and there is no recovery in sight. The housing market might get a little better. There's a greater likelihood it will get a little bit worse. But going back to where they can say their home is their reserve for retirement or paying for college education? The likelihood of that happening is just very low.

Corporations are a legal entity. We create them. And when we create them, we create all kinds of rules. They can go bankrupt. And that means they owe more money and they get away scot-free. They can create an environmental disaster, and then go bankrupt and again go away scot-free. So, as legal entities we have the right to make the rules that govern them. As individuals we have certain basic rights. We aren't created by the law. We exist by nature. But corporations are man-made. They are supposed to serve our interest, our society's interests. And we are creating them with powers that are not serving our society's interests.

Right now, the shareholders, who are supposed to be the owners, have no say in pay. They have no say in the decision about how much their CEOs get paid. In some countries there is a sense of corporate responsibility. There's a sense that the shareholders own it, and the owners should have the right to vote, at least in an advisory sense.

If you're going to rob your shareholders, shouldn't they have the right to say I don't like this? And yet in America, the corporations have been resisting this. I think it's the same thing in the area of advertising and campaign contributions.

I think it's basically a vicious cycle in which we've gotten ourselves, because the corporate executives control the corporations. The corporations have the right to give campaign contributions. So basically we have a system in which the corporate executives, the CEOs, are trying to make sure the legal system works not for the companies, not for the shareholders, not for the bondholders – but for themselves.

So it's like theft, if you want to think about it that way. These corporations are basically now working now for the CEOs and the executives and not for any of the other stakeholders in the corporation, let alone for our broader society.

You look at who won with the excessive risk-taking and shortsighted behavior of the banks. It wasn't the shareholder or the bondholders. It certainly wasn't American taxpayers. It wasn't American workers. It wasn't American homeowners. It was the CEOs, the executives. And they use all kinds of language that quite honestly is deceptive.

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Abraham Lincoln said:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

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workers' share of national income

note that things got dramatically worse for average Americans from 2007-2009 – a huge loss of net worth, so the chart below isn't as bad as it is now

wage deflation

employment to population ratio


guess which countries have the highest rating for citizen happiness and city quality...

The dots from 0 through the 80th percentile mark five-percent increments. From 80 to 99, the dots mark one-percent increments. The last two dots are at 99.5 and 99.9 — in other words, the top .5% and the top .1% in income. (The top .01% and .001% are off this chart.):

David Tepper, a hedge fund king, had a 2009 personal income of $4 billion.

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Dec '10 said:

The richest 1% of U.S. households had a net worth 225 times greater than that of the average American household in 2009. That's up from the previous record of 190 times greater, which was set in 2004.

The average family's net worth plunged 41% -- to just $62,200 -- from 2007 to 2009, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute.

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June '11 said:

Bank chiefs’ average pay in the US and Europe leapt 36 percent last year to $9.7 million, according to data compiled for the Financial Times.

Two of the industry’s biggest names – Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein – were paid more than 15 times their 2009 earnings.

Mr Dimon received nearly $21 million in 2010. Mr Blankfein earned $14.1 million, including a $5.4 million cash bonus.

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May '11 said:

Exxon made $19 billion in profit and got a $150 million tax rebate in 2009

The U.S. government currently hands out $4 billion dollars per year in subsidies to the most profitable corporations in the history of the planet

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no warfare here! said:

Two years ago, Haiti unanimously passed a law sharply raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. That doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it was two and a half times the then-minimum of 24 cents an hour.

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies"

Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum 'did not take economic reality into account' but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.

The Nation reports that a Haitian family of three (two kids) needed $12.50 a day in 2008 to make ends meet.

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Hedge fund king John Paulson earns more per hour than most Americans in a lifetime—and he pays a lower tax rate

He's the guy who got Goldman to create Abacus, a toxic derivative designed to fail, so he could short it.

Paulson asked Goldman to create Abacus, which they then sold as 'good' to to their other customers, so Paulson could bet against it. They not only did that for him (he was apparently a better customer than the rubes they sold Abacus to); they allowed Paulson to suggest which mortgages Abacus should contain. Stunning.

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priorities

Greenwald Apr '11 said:

Millions of Americans are without jobs and are having their homes foreclosed. The U.S. is currently fighting three out-in-the-open wars (or, if you prefer, one war, one occupation, and one kinetic humanitarian intervention) and several other covert ones. Financial and political elites are preparing to tell Americans (quite unpersuasively) that they have to sacrifice Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements because the U.S. debt is so large and unmanageable that it threatens to subvert America's superior creditworthiness. And we're constantly told that civil liberties erosions are necessary to combat the Great Menace of Domestic Terrorism. So what is our political class focused on, and to what are law enforcement resources being devoted?

'Nearly half of the members of the U.S. Senate are urging Attorney General Eric Holder to step up federal prosecutions of adult pornography.'

In a letter sent to Holder earlier this week, 42 senators encouraged Holder instruct prosecutors and FBI agents to counter what the lawmakers called "the growing scourge of obscenity in America'

'In the wake of a dramatic bust by the Justice Department, the poker industry is in turmoil. Three of the major sites -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker -- are inoperable'

First, imagine how the brain functions in a person who spends years and years flattering people and trolling for money in order to get to the Senate, then arrives and, after surveying all of America's problems, decides they're going to focus on stopping adults from viewing pornography and playing poker online.

Second, Americans in general -- and the Right in particular -- love to boast about what a freedom-loving, liberty-demanding people we are. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. The Rugged Individualists. Yet one finds not a peep of protest from virtually anyone -- and especially not our small-government, restrained-federal-power "conservatives" -- over this attempt by the Orrin Hatches and Dianne Feinsteins of the world to get together and use the coercive force of law to dictate to adult citizens what they can read online and how they can spend their money for entertainment or profit.

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some spending cuts proposed Apr '11 said:

$700 million from clean and safe drinking water programs

$390 million from heating subsidies.

$276 million from pandemic flu prevention programs

$1 billion for community health centers

$500 million from biomedical research

Republicans gave up cuts to the Agriculture Department's food inspection program.

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GOP House cuts proposed Jan '11 said:

If imposed across the board, such a cut would mean 42 percent less for food safety and inspection; 42 percent less for K-12 education; 42 percent less for protecting the environment; 42 percent less for the FBI, DEA, and border security; 42 percent less for the NIH and the CDCP; 42 percent less for health care for veterans, and so on.

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Apr '11 said:

Median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1%

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) awarded Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein $19 million in compensation for 2010, almost double the prior year.

... a record $67.9 million in 2007.

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Dec '10 said:

The bill slashes the estate tax and extends all the Bush tax cuts.

The Obama-GOP tax-cut deal, which already was passed by the Senate, was approved by the House 277-148.

Dr. Krugman: "We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-laQ0uvnl5M

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein and his top deputies will collect about $111.3 million in stock next month in a delayed payoff from last year and their record-setting 2007 bonuses.

Blankfein, 56, is poised to receive about $24.3 million in January. President Gary D. Cohn, 50, will get about $24 million. The payouts, just a portion of the $67.9 million bonus awarded to Blankfein for 2007 and the $66.9 million paid to Cohn, reflect a 24 percent decline in the stock’s value since it was granted at $218.86.

Within a year after the bonuses were approved, Goldman Sachs took $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury, converted to a bank and was borrowing as much as $35.4 billion a day from Federal Reserve emergency programs. This year the firm paid $550 million to settle U.S. regulators’ fraud charges related to a mortgage-security the company sold in 2007.

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Big Finance borrowed $9 trillion during the crisis

People should remember that number as we have the discussion over tax cuts for the top 2%.

98% of Fed lending during crisis went to six banks

Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan—received at total of about $8.78 trillion through the PDFC program.

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Nov '10 said:

The Obama administration has doled out about $2 billion in stimulus money to some of the nation's biggest polluters while granting them exemptions from a basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.

The administration has awarded more than 179,000 'categorical exclusions' to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing the projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.

It's so nice to have Bush still in the White House.

And, at the same time, he's giving federal workers a pay cut (so-called "pay freeze"). It's so nice to know that the priority is to make sure working people earn less so that the wealthy, with their polluting companies, will be able to continue the trend of wealth consolidation

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Dmitri Orlov said:

This new sanity is epitomized by the following family portrait: daddy is a 'Conservative Republican' mommy is an “Obama Liberal,” the son is a “Libertarian,” the daughter is a 'Green,' and the dog (the only one of them who is sane) is trying to run away. Meet the Losers: they are the ones who have no idea what class their family is in, or what their class interest is, and as far as their chances of making successful use of democratic politics to collectively defend and advance their class interest, well... they are the Losers—that says it all, doesn't it?"

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The first is a wage-race to the bottom by U.S. labor, so they can compete with third-world sweatshops (and second-world engineering firms). It seems that there are only two resolutions. The second is some way of keeping U.S. capital from going overseas.

If you can build a factory overseas which produces the same goods for less, meaning more profit for you, why would you build it in the US?

Until that question is adequately answered, by which I mean “until it’s worth investing in the US”, most of the discretionary money of the rich will either go into useless speculative activities like the housing and credit bubbles, which don’t create real growth in the US, or they will go overseas.

Rachael Maddow on the Chamber of Commerce and Foreign Money in US Elections

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Oct '10 said:

Wall Street pay expected to set record at $144 billion this year, up from a record last year.

White House senior adviser David Axelrod signaled Sunday that the Obama administration is opposed to a national moratorium on foreclosures.

There will be no cost of living increase for Social Security. This is only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year.

2000 average income — $61,500
2008 average income — $58,000

41.8 million Americans are now on food stamps.

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The 3% that enjoy 50% of "small business" gross income are huge entities. They range from the Koch brothers to Bechtel ($31 billion in revenue), down to the KKR range (a paultry $445 million). A big chunk of the pie for a very small world.

Small business' means billionaires who bought tax breaks from both parties for their partnership and S corp earnings.

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Sept '10 said:

As a reminder, in the US today, 1% of the population owns 24% of the wealth. This is considerably higher than during the Robber Barron years when the richest 1% owned 18% of the wealth.

According to Forbes magazine’s annual survey, just released, the combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans climbed 8% this year, to $1.37 trillion.

Robert Reich on the Super Rich Getting Richer While Everyone Else Gets Poorer

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White House/Dems ridicule labor June '10 said:

‎"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise..."

Another senior Democrat (who also would not be quoted by name) echoed the point: "Labor is humiliated. $10 million flushed down the toilet at a time when Democrats across the country are fighting for their lives, they look like absolute idiots."

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Carlin: "They've got the judges in their back pocket."

More than 50% of judges hearing spill lawsuits tied to oil industry.

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May '10 said:

Dems supporting tax loophole that allows hedge fund managers to only pay 15%. The top hedge fund manager made $4 billion last year.

It appears there are no new ideas circulating within Obama's deficit commission. Just the long, patient plans of hedge fund billionaires who want to dismantle the social safety net and not pay their taxes.

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Greenspan: "We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate..."

The White House, Federal Reserve and Wall Street lobbyists are kicking up their opposition to an amendment to audit the Fed as a Senate vote approaches, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the measure, said on Monday.

Rahm Working With Fed To Beat Back Audit

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Greenwald March '10 said:

After feigning support all year for a public option, Democrats are now whipping against it to prevent passage.

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from Dr. Krugman

It’s crucial to realize that the trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services we could have produced this year, but won’t, is a loss we’ll never make up. And that doesn’t count the suffering and damage to our future inflicted by the non-monetary costs of mass long-term unemployment.

Policymakers are congratulating themselves for avoiding total collapse, when they should be berating themselves for failing to engineer recovery.

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Feb '10 said:

Employees at Wall Street financial firms collected more than $20 billion in bonuses in 2009, the year after taxpayers bailed out the financial sector amid the economic meltdown, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said Tuesday.

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I hope this long post gives people some perspective about the so-called "war" that's been going on for a long time.

Greenspan: "We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate..."

The risk of a debate. Can't have that, can we?

Wow, I didn't realize that calendar dates could make posts. (posted by May '10, posted by Sept. '10, etc). I had always assumed that quotes came from people. Interesting!

Anyway, I agree that our economic system is a mess. The last time in our history when so much of our nations wealth was concentrated in so few hands was 1929. See any correlation? I do not have the answer, but I do have some faith that things will work out somehow (someday).

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: "The Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing - after they have tried everything else".

The problem with this country is that so many people (in both parties) think that they have "the answer". Politicians like to believe in (and espouse) simple answers, when in fact there are no simple answers to complex questions. However, complex answers do not get politicians elected. If our government officials were more concerned about the future of our country instead of just worrying about the next election - we would be in much better shape. This criticism applies equally to BOTH sides of the political debate.

Have Fun!

Don

JSWTDI09 said:

Wow, I didn't realize that calendar dates could make posts. (posted by May '10, posted by Sept. '10, etc). I had always assumed that quotes came from people. Interesting!

Anyway, I agree that our economic system is a mess. The last time in our history when so much of our nations wealth was concentrated in so few hands was 1929. See any correlation? I do not have the answer, but I do have some faith that things will work out somehow (someday).

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: "The Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing - after they have tried everything else".

The problem with this country is that so many people (in both parties) think that they have "the answer". Politicians like to believe in (and espouse) simple answers, when in fact there are no simple answers to complex questions. However, complex answers do not get politicians elected. If our government officials were more concerned about the future of our country instead of just worrying about the next election - we would be in much better shape. This criticism applies equally to BOTH sides of the political debate.

Have Fun!

Don

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Pretty spot on Don. To me it is always interesting when the "brilliant" solution offered is to fix the problems by curtailing or otherwise trampling on other peoples' rights ........

JSWTDI09 said:

Wow, I didn't realize that calendar dates could make posts. (posted by May '10, posted by Sept. '10, etc). I had always assumed that quotes came from people. Interesting!

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Just plug in a sentence or two into Google if you want to find the sources. It's usually easy to find plenty. I put the dates in so people could see how recent the information is.

JSWTDI09 said:

This criticism applies equally to BOTH sides of the political debate.

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The sides are different than what most people think, though. The two parties aren't the two sides. They're one side, along with their masters — the wealthy business interests. We're on the other side, most of us, anyway. The criticism applies differently to the two sides. More simply, we have plutocrats and the masses.

oxford_guy said:

Just plug in a sentence or two into Google if you want to find the sources. It's usually easy to find plenty. I put the dates in so people could see how recent the information is.

The sides are different than what most people think, though. The two parties aren't the two sides. They're one side, along with their masters — the wealthy business interests. We're on the other side, most of us, anyway. The criticism applies differently to the two sides. More simply, we have plutocrats and the masses.

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Plutocrats and the masses, very good, indeed......

ifrcfi said:

the number i'd open my wallet for is a far, far smaller number.....




Sent from my ipad using tapatalk

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lol!!!

Look, when it REALLY comes down to it. It's not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for your neighbor. Think locally, not politically. This is what they want you to do, we're all playing the game, by bickering over their scwabbles.

Most politicians can't change a tire, much less check the air. Don't waste your minds debating the future of whatever, they want mind, even if they had one.

The price US VW workers in Chattanooga are being payed, is what it is, so be it. All this discussion is doing what? Saving the world. Ha....right..,try again. Save your neighbor, when he or she goes, your the next one THEY'LL be looking at..

Der MEKnIZEd Wolf said:

Look, when it REALLY comes down to it. It's not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for your neighbor. Think locally, not politically.

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Local politics is important, but not all-important. One of the problems, for instance, with cutting federal and state taxes is that local taxes must be raised or services are cut. Like it or not, everything is entwined. A lot of people don't want to think too far out from the point of view of their personal situation, but what's out there affects each of us just as much as what's in front of us.

As for saving the world... humanity has come a long way in many respects. It could have come a lot further. It can also regress. It's actually up to each of us to make sure that doesn't happen and that we continue to improve, so we can leave the world in better shape for future generations.

oxford_guy said:

As for saving the world... humanity has come a long way in many respects. It could have come a lot further. It can also regress. It's actually up to each of us to make sure that doesn't happen and that we continue to improve, so we can leave the world in better shape for future generations.

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We just saw "Machine Gun Preacher". It really shows how far huminty either has to come or how far humanity can regress given the removal of checks and balances. Good movie but pretty depressing once you really listen to the story.

oxford_guy said:

Local politics is important, but not all-important...

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..and that IS the problem right there in a nutshell. Why does the Federal gov't feel the need to dictate protocol for the individual American?

People need to go back and read what the founding fathers had in mind: the United States of America. Each state was to dictate its OWN local laws for its OWN inhabitants. The Federal gov't was just in place for a couple key things. Foreign affairs (meaning, any interaction OUTSIDE of these United States), a common currency (so all these states could more easily interact with one another for commerce), and for any mitigation amongst the states (border disputes, water resource disputes, etc., much of which dictated the shapes of our states).

But several things happened that gave WAY too much power to the Federal gov't, so much so that it has become this bloated, oversized, runaway train with no brakes, and is now on fire, headed for a bridge, that was built by the Chinese....

1: War of 1812 (ie, the second Revolutionary War). This made necessary for the actual American military to be made stronger than any state militia could possibly be.

2: American Civil War. This made it clear the Federal gov't needed a stronger handle on ALL military, especially state militia, and the post-1860's American military became the new norm, bigger than it ever was.

3: Spanish American War, this new giant military was deemed necessary to kick the crap out of the Spaniards (we are still paying taxes set in place to pay for this, BTW... look it up!).

4: WW2... this galvanized the massive spending and massive size growth of the Federal gov't like nothing seen before, ushered in some taxation the likes of which no American had seen before, and was easily passed because so many Americans were really afraid of the Axis. And while there was very little threat to us really, the gov't made sure this threat lived on in the form of the Cold War, which of course took until the 1980s to peak then fizzle, and has now been replaced with "the War on Terror" (whatever that is).

Tax-tax-tax, spend-spend-spend... what the Federal gov't has gotten VERY good at over the years! And now, we seem to be running out of real wars to use as a reason to prop the giant albatross up, so let's start kicking the crap out of a bunch of Arab countries! Oh, and North Korea? Yeah, you're day is coming, too!

How about this: bring all our bloated military HOME, stop spending 11ty Billion a second to rebuild these crazy whack-job places that would rather blow each other up, and fix our local infrastructure at home instead???

You left out a very large factor between 3 and 4. The Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal. Through a lot of rebuilding the US, Roosevelt handed the federal government a lot of power. Two quick examples are social security and the gold act.

If Obama had studied the new deal and how it put americans to work on the infrastructure, he could have proposed his jobs plan a couple of years ago instead of grandstanding it as a tool for reelection.

oilhammer said:

..and that IS the problem right there in a nutshell. Why does the Federal gov't feel the need to dictate protocol for the individual American?

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Its all about control and maintaining a steady flow of dollars to the federal government coffers. That's the driving force behind all of this....

kjclow said:

You left out a very large factor between 3 and 4. The Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal. Through a lot of rebuilding the US, Roosevelt handed the federal government a lot of power. Two quick examples are social security and the gold act.

.

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Correct, I did forget that (don't know why, either, I know better!). Thanks for the addition. Yes, that indeed served a way to get more Americans hooked on the Fed's teet.

oilhammer said:

Correct, I did forget that (don't know why, either, I know better!). Thanks for the addition. Yes, that indeed served a way to get more Americans hooked on the Fed's teet.

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Hmmm...? (not speaking for everybody, but,,) I have paid into the SS/Medicare system since 1964 and never missed a year where I did not meet the maximum contribution. I somehow don't feel like I am hooked on the government's teet. And I am STILL putting big dollars in as I collect my small SS repayment.

aja8888 said:

Hmmm...? (not speaking for everybody, but,,) I have paid into the SS/Medicare system since 1964 and never missed a year where I did not meet the maximum contribution. I somehow don't feel like I am hooked on the government's teet. And I am STILL putting big dollars in as I collect my small SS repayment.

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Yes, you are not speaking for everyone. I'll end up paying MUCH more, and get hardly anything back. And folks younger than me expect even more "redistribution of wealth". They are on Wall Street right now whining about it. GET A JOB INSTEAD, YOU STUPID PROTESTERS!!!

They should move to China/India and take the jobs that we sent over there?

VeeDubTDI said:

They should move to China/India and take the jobs that we sent over there?

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Plenty of jobs here... never seen a newspaper in my lifetime that did not have pages of jobs inside. And if you are not qualified, GET qualified. People need to be a little proactive with their careers, not just loaf around and get drunk, smoke weed, and protest things. Buncha damned hippies, LOL!!!!

And if you are NOT educated or trained, then you get those $12/hr jobs. You don't sit on your ass and complain about it, because then those jobs WILL go somewhere else. Problem is, if the Fed gov't is willing to give about 50% of the populace money from the other 50%, then why bother? I could quit my job today, and still get food and health care. This system does not reward hard work anymore. It rewards laziness.

Much of my reaction right now is based off of a family member, who is expecting his FOURTH child, gets WIC/foodstamps, has had one house foreclosed on, had a car repo'd, and just somehow managed to purchase another house. He has a poor paying job, so all their healthcare expenses are on taxpayers... and he makes so little he not only pays NO income tax at the end of the year, he actually gets money BACK because his fat wife keeps shooting the baby-cannon.

Yet I am expected to not only pay through the nose in taxes, but also deal with my disabled children and expenses like $6400 wheelchairs, $250/mo medicines, and a new Audi payment's worth of diapers every month. I work hard, and get nothing.