What I truly do not understand with many people today is why they cannot fathom that keeping more money in the private sector is beneficial over transferring it to government. Government needs to be placed in check! Whatever index we wish to use, government cannot exceed a percentage of that index except in a declaration of emergency. I prefer to use per capita spending, and if the collective we decide it should be $10K per citizen, then this determines the government spending budget...period! And it's these same people who whine that more jobs are not created, or that more companies are moving off-shore...go figure...
So you're saying fiat currency is the main reason for the huge gap between the middle and upper classes, right? Please correct if I misunderstood. The use of American Eagles would hold value and provide much more stability, but the conversion process back to real money sounds like it will take an excruciating amount of time. For now, we are stuck with fiat currency which isn't real, yet it has value enough to put food on the table. The income cap would ideally allow for more currency to flow back into the economy, which would hopefully create more jobs, which would then give more Americans the ability to provide for their families. Although the nation isn't operating on real money, there are too many families barely making enough to buy groceries and pay their bills. So just for now, until some kind of conversion can be worked out, the taxation of millionaires and billionaires in the interest of combating the rise in poverty doesn't sound like a bad idea.... not to me anyway.
Military spending will be hit as well. The problem is that if you cut all spending on the military, we would still have a half-trillion dollar deficit this year. Military spending just isn't enough to fix the problem.
I'm not against those who earn hundreds of millions, I'm against those who earn hundreds of millions and got there by using immoral business practices. If the global economy is just fine and capitalism is working so well, then why have other countries been crapping their pants while watching our congress argue over the debt deal for the past six months? The loss of thousands of American jobs to outsourcing can be credited to "efficiency". During a depression, people aren't likely to afford a decent wine. They are better off going to a liquor store like the one owned by a family friend of mine who has profited quite a bit during the past few years. Huge losses for the entertainment industry have really shown this year with record breaking movie premier sales that have been earned... considering the unemployment rate and all. So in other words your advice to an 18 year old would be, to get into as much student debt as possible, never pay toward owning a home, always buy the latest gadget, and never compare yourself to the guy making a hell of a lot more than you (can't have people valuing their worth as much as that guy). I'll have to agree with you on the bits of advice I left out though.
I wouldn't want all military spending to be cut, but do we really need all those bases in ally countries?
It is helpful to have a foothold in various countries, and we are required by treaty to have some of them. We could probably cut about half of them, but that would likely only cut about $100 billion of our budget. Stopping the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will cut close to $200 billion, so between ending the wars and cutting unnecessary overseas bases we could probably cut about 40% of the military budget. Even so, we would still have a $900 billion deficit to figure out how to eliminate.
The federal government was never meant to micromanage domestic issues. that includes social security, medicare, medicaide, education, and many other extra-constitutional programs. Eliminate them and watch the deficit fizzle. Kill the military empire and suddenly we have a surplus. But back to the domestic abuses of the federal gov't, eliminating those programs at the federal level doesn't mean the help would disappear forever or that people would be dying in the streets. State and local agencies would spring up to fill the voids, providing 50 programs to benchmark against each other, which means continuous real improvement tailored to the region rather than a few archaic one-size-fits-all bureaucratic nightmares.
The reason we have federal programs is because there was not enough springing up to fill the voids and people were dying. Can you guarantee that others will rush in to fill the void or are you just making stuff up?
Your first statement has no proof. It's a regurgitation of biased history books. Yes, I guarantee it. If I'm wrong, come find me and I'll give your money back.
"Extra-constitutional". How quaint. You realize all these programs have been held constitutional via the constitutional process we have to determine that: judicial review. So it's hard to take you seriously when you mouth such nonsense. Frankly it's hard to take you seriously period.
I see, it's difficult for me to trust state run programs as I'm originally from California and received an I.O.U. in lieu of my state tax return. Meanwhile, thousands of teachers were losing their jobs. I bet there are many states with more sense than that though.
The only difference between Sacramento and Washington is that Sacramento is prohibited from printing money whenever they want. Otherwise, You'd be getting federal IOUs, too. This is another reason why we should limit government to only those few services that only they can do, because they screw up whatever they touch.
Then the problem is that our government is incompetent. I think strict campaign restrictions could help to weed out the bad apples over time.
Think about the federal government...it's size...the number of employees...the diversity of programs...the amount of money spent...the geographic locations, etc. and common sense should tell us that even the best CEO's in the private sector would struggle running such a company of this complexity and scope. Therefore, what can we expect the performance and successes to be when we vote people in office with zero experience?! Obama for example is arguably the least experienced president in recent history! In Congress we have soccer moms and criminals and a gaggle of idiots making ALL OF THE DECISIONS. This is harsh, but the reason the federal government is a complete joke is because voters do not possess the wherewithal to take their heads out of their political bias, assess the qualifications of ALL candidates, and vote for the BEST candidates. This is not going to change for decades or centuries so it's a given to me that the federal government will always be marginal at best, perhaps 50% efficient, etc.
I never said people with zero experience should be elected. People with conflicting business interests should be kept away from holding any kind of office. That would be one of the goals of eligibility and campaign reform. If the best interest of the people is truly kept at heart, I could see the complexity and scope being much more simplified. Then again, a common goal of looking out for the well being of every citizen is way too much to ask. Sad.
I supported that for a long time, but I could never get around the almost certainty that it would only drive the bribes underground. There's just too much incentive to own your own politician. If we could somehow reduce the federal gov't to its constitutional duties then the rest would be decentralized and difficult to control from corporate headquarters. Congress would have more time to police their interstate-dealing corporations to prevent such illicit & unethical behavior.
If the federal government were "printing money" all the time, there would be no debt. The fedeeral government isn't printing money -- it's borrowing, like we all do, to pay debts (mostly Reagan and Bush's) as a result of lack of revenues to pay them (mostly as a result of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy). Another Tea Party obsession not based in reality.
The federal government doesn't print money, it prints Federal Reserve notes which are promissory notes (currency) at the request of the Federal Reserve and then gives those notes to the Federal Reserve at no charge (except for the cost of priniting). The Federal Reserve uses those notes to purchase the promissory Treasury notes to back the promissory notes its received for free from the Treasury and collects interest on those Treasury notes while not paying any interest on the promissory notes it has obtained for free from the US Treasury. But this is only a small piece of the picture as there are only about $500 billion in physical Federal Reserve notes in curculation from what I've read. Predominately the Federal Reserve merely makes an entry on its computer logs to create digital Federal Reserve notes. Then it issued a check to the Federal government to purchase Treasury securities to back the creation of digital currency. It costs virtually nothing to make a digital entry that adds a trillion dollars to the "money" supply and the Federal Reserve collects interest on this digital currency. It collect interest regardless of whether it purchases Treasury securities or whether it loans it out to banks. Ultimately the People pay for this increase in the money supply though inflation. Labor that has been saved as "dollars" is lost as the purchasing power of the dollar diminishes. An hour of labor expended today will only be worth 54 minutes of labor when inflation over time results in a 10% reduction of the purchasing power of the dollar over time. Since the introduction of Federal Reserve notes an hours worth of labor stored in Federal Reserve notes has been reduced to less than two minutes of labor. When people want to know where the wealth of the average American has gone then all they need to look at is fiat "money" created by the Federal Reserve to know the answer. It literally steals the labor of the American worker that is stored in "dollars" and gives it to the Federal Reserve, the banks, and the wealthy that don't generally have their assets stored in dollars.
For example, something like 80 million Americans own public stock. Do you believe that anyone who owns stocks have 'conflicting interests' when government is discussing any legislation regarding stocks, and therefore should be banned from being in Congress? If you try to ban everyone from government because of perceived 'conflicting interests' you won't find enough people to manage your government...
