The Glade 4.0

Riov : helping others is a great feeling. And people can give as much of their money as they choose. They can't give as much of my money as they choose.

I think a lot of people are tired of these band aid fixes to an obviously broken system. We need an amputation, not more snake oil. We can't afford to subsidize peoples lives.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Half of the debit card transactions in Washington casino's are state issued welfare debit cards...

This makes me feel really good when it comes time to pay my taxes...

Then the system is too large. If the system is too large, it's because we're trying to do more than we need to.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yes. Debt is debt.

No.


It's nothing of the sort. Or are you going to claim that every debt-to-equity ratio ever published for any business is skewed? The government's present-day debt = roughly $130T. The country's present-day GDP is roughly $14.8T. Our present day debt-to-GDP ratio is therefore about 8.8:1. In fact, if we're talking about actual debt-to-equity ratio, the picture is far more grim. That would be about 75:1 today.

I could compare present day debt to some mythical future GDP, but that be entirely dishonest since "future GDP" is a purely speculative value. There is no factual basis for determining what it will be.


Here we get to the crux of it. What you're not-so-subtly angling for in questioning my calculation is that you don't consider those unfunded liabilities to be real liabilities because the government can renege on them whenever it wants. But then, it can also just as easily renege on treasury bonds, etc. -- but for some ill-defined reason, you seem to think that would somehow be unacceptable behavior. Well, it's not odd that you think it's unacceptable -- it's odd that you think defaulting on its other forms of debt is somehow better. The government takes money away from its own citizens -- dis-proportionally from the poor, I might add -- and promises to someday give it back. Instead it spends all of that money and then reneges on its promise. I don't call that ethical. I call it one of the most depraved forms of theft there is. At least the person buying the treasure bill had a choice. At least they were (if they had a brain) aware that all investment has risk and that you can lose your principal. Those "unfunded liabilities" as you call them were taken away from people effectively at gunpoint. They had no choice. Reneging on them is actually far worse, ethically, than defaulting on what you call "real" debt.

Of course, you're also "not so worried" because instead of just flat out defaulting, they could either 1) Tax the citizenry arbitrarily, in order to pay them back WITH THEIR OWN **** MONEY or 2) fire up the printing press and defraud them all on a massive scale.

The fact that neither of these options leaves you not particularly worried I think says about all I really need to know about your ethics and your politics. No thank you.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Welcome, Olem!

Let me be the first to welcome you, the first to point out that you have a reading comprehension problem, the first to accuse you of creating a straw man, and the first to point out that you have no idea of what you speak.


There, you're not a glade virgin anymore! Grab some popcorn, watch the fireworks and don't be a stranger!

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In time, this too shall pass.

Welcome! I'll need to watch that when I get home.

/bonk

I read something a long while back about an idea of putting homeless, jobless people into military bases that aren't being used any more. It would be voluntary of course. To stay though, you had to work on the base. Keep it clean, work in the BX/Commissary. If you were busted doing drugs or anything illegal, out you went. I wish I remembered the rest of the details to give a better outline of it, but it was a fantastic idea from what I recall.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

1. I didn't say anything about borrowing money.
2. That's just BS, you're getting that number by adding in all the entitlement liabilities extended out to infinity, and probably without counting expected revenues. It's not debt, no money has been borrowed yet, there is no binding obligation to pay out on these programs, and Social Security explicitly states that they will stop paying out when the trust fund runs out. You say that future GDP is a purely speculative value, but then so are the entitlement liabilities.

Seriously, your position is that the debt problem is literally impossible to solve because the government MUST pay out 100% on the entitlement programs and isn't allowed to cut them.

Nah, just out to 2037. After that the CBO's simulation crashes under an 800% debt to GDP ratio.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

When calculating debt-to-equity ratios, businesses don't project future cash shortfalls decades out and add them into present-day debt, and GDP doesn't correspond to equity in any meaningful way. Even if it did, future GDP is no more speculative than the future liabilities you're suggesting we incorporate into the calculation - in fact, they're both projected using many of the same models and assumptions - so if one is dishonest, speculative and lacking in factual basis, the other is as well.


My reasons aren't ill-defined at all. Bonds are binding contracts with explicit terms agreed to between two specific parties. Social Security and Medicare, on the other hand, are generally-applicable programs subject to legislative amendment at any time. Just because the taxes that fund them are (theoretically) segregated from the general fund and appear as a separate line item on the W-2 doesn't mean there's any contractual right to benefits being created. Now, that's not to say I think it'd be hunky-dory for the government to cancel all those benefits, but only because many people need them, not because each taxpayer has acquired a contractual right to receive them.


So what is your preferred course of action? You consider all the future Social Security and Medicare payments that have been "promised" to be genuine debts that must be paid, yet you oppose raising taxes, you oppose further bond-market borrowing, and you oppose monetary expansion (and, presumably, the inflation that goes with it). What, then, is your solution?

Using this method of determining the debt does not mean we have 878% debt ratio; we have an indefinitely high debt ratio. There is no telling how long into the future the U.S. will persist, nor these social programs.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We start with "current benefits for current seniors" and work our way down from there, increasing quarters required, retirement ages and decreasing benefits paid out on a sliding scale, ideally ending with everyone joining the workforce for the first time (16 + year olds getting their first job) 30 days after this bill is passed gets squat, or gets to enroll in the new quasi private "you have a real account" social security replacement program. Also I'd like to give people in their 20s and 30s the ability to change programs or opt out if the numbers allow it.

I again want to repeat that if we go broke on this no one gets paid. If we continue as we are I believe we will reach the point where we won't be able to barrow (no one will give it to us) and/or tax enough (not enough GDP or point of diminishing returns) to pay for entitlements let alone anyone else. That means we do break promises and we do leave seniors to fend for themselves. So we can chip away at the problem or we can keep going and let it crash (hopefully on someone else's watch right?)

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I have been lurking for quite awhile. Thank you for popping my Hellfire Cherry, and thank you for being gentle.

/bonk Olem

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

America needs to be weened off these benefits eventually, IMO.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

More importantly, the government needs to be weened off collecting additional taxes to provide these benefits.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I agree.
The "replacement program" I'm talking about looks more like OPERS or TRS Texas then the current system. You'd have real money in a real account that isn't managed or touchable by congress nor subject to it's every whim. When i was in Texas at the public school I paid into TRS Texas instead of Fica, but TRS Texas has been fairly solvent, isn't raidable by the Texas legislature, and when I left the public sector I got to take my money with me. Why can't we have a Federal program where eventually everyone gets to pay into a TRS like program of their choice?

Also the director of OPERS comes out on the radio after the downgrade and crash and tells all the OPERS people not to worry, they're plenty solvent, and I don't think he was lying either.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Today the French government banned taking short positions on French banks.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

And now Italy, Spain, and Belgium have climbed on board as well.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

We don't like when the market says bad things so lets not let it say bad things.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

The market had lots of things to say today. For instance CME raised the margin on gold by 22%.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

In addition, the CME also hiked CHF futures by 443%, Yen futures by 25%, Ruble futures by 36%, as well as TEN, UBE and I3. The only margins that were cut were those of Uranium which dropped from 1320/1200 to 990/900 for initial/maintenance.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko