We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
It's the corollary to "For a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail."
Re my post yesterday, I still cannot understand why a jelly shop needs to be licensed and regulated. Haven't farmers been selling jams, jellies, and pies to happy customers for hundreds of years?
Lengthy and complex regulations are employment schemes for government employees and lawyers as much as anything else. Forget state regs -there are 86,000 pages in the Fed Register. Nobody knows what is in there, but it you violate one of them, you can be screwed.
The rules are stacked against even the smallest of entrepreneurs. If and when I decided to set up my own thing, I already know what I'll need to borrow money for: Lawyers.
So proclaims Andy Stern in the WSJ: China's Superior Economic Model - The free-market fundamentalist economic model is being thrown onto the trash heap of history.
A centrally-controlled Communist economy? Brilliant idea, Andy. Quite a novel idea. You in charge, of course?
You just have to laugh. I remember when the left envied the Soviet economy, the Cuban economy, the Japanese economy, the West German economy, the European economy. Now, the Chinese - until it blows up.
#48 is a good one: You beat 50% of the people by just showing up. You beat another 40% by working hard. The last 10% is a dogfight in the free enterprise system.
"We created a group of self-entitled monsters." Hey youths, this is for you. Hey, OWSers, this is for you, too. Adam Carolla tells it like it is (language not entirely SFW, and h/t, SDA):
"Life is difficult." That book did me a lot of good, a few years ago. Got me into a little therapy, changed my life for the better, helped me realize that I was my biggest obstacle in getting on with life. Corny as it sounds, that empowered me. Shrink told me that there was nothing wrong with me except for being a "blaming and excuse-making a-hole" and I had to get my shit together, quit blaming and making self-flattering excuses, and take charge of my life like an adult who was willing to deal with reality instead of fantasies. Mean SOB was spot on. That's why I am, at present, having a very good life in New York City.
It is also why I don't do the morning posts here anymore. I am grandfathered in, to post whatever I want, whenever I want.
Those greedy 1%ers (household AGI $350,000 and up) are Hollywood and Broadway actors, rock and hip-hop stars, sports stars, popular writers, entrepreneurs, TV people, fancy restaurant owners, artists, theater impresarios, prosperous small business owners, some accountants and portfolio managers, opera stars, the CEOs of big businesses, neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and some other high-income medical specialists, NYT columnists, college presidents, retired politicians, law partners, real estate magnates, and a few high-level investment bankers.
Not exactly an evil bunch of people. I plan to join that crowd, at least for a while. How many people are permanently in that group? Very few, I suspect. Careers rise and fall, which is why people need to save a little of their money while making sure to fully enjoy and make good use of the rest.
...as (Keith) Richards noted about the band’s early days, “Benedictines had nothing on us. Anybody that strayed from the nest to get laid, or try to get laid, was a traitor. You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.”
Read it. HuffPo, working on the envy meme: U.S. Income Inequality: Top 1 Percent Take Home 24 Percent Of U.S. Income. The economic ignorance, or feigned ignorance, is astonishing. There is no set "pie:" the pie is infinitely expandable. It's is called "Growth in GDP." Wealth can be created out of thin air, out of effective, creative, and unique qualities of work and investment. The Rolling Stones, on their next final tour, do not "take" their greedy % of American income. Those old boys earn it.
I see no reason to care about income inequality in America: I hope the very prosperous 1% spend and donate their money wisely and enjoyably. The poorest have more comforts and conveniences than middle-class Americans had in the 1960s, and, in fact, live in larger quarters than members of the European middle classes do today.
The poorest, most dysfunctional or unfortunate have abundant governmental and charitable supports, but, unfortunately, these supports are not counted in their income status thus exaggerating disparities. Just Medicaid alone is equivalent to around $10,000 of income.
And, of course, income varies over the course of life; down, up and down and maybe up again for many, so statistics do not tell you who is newly poor and who is newly but perhaps only temporarily prosperous.
Of course, one way (if you want to address the statistics alone and ignore the people behind the numbers) to reduce income disparities is just to tax the hell out of the upper 10%. They'll quit working, of course, if they can afford to. Seen many big entrepreneurs in Europe lately?
Barone makes a few good points. Here's one:
...surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That's because, in Ryan's words, "the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers."
In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don't pay income but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.
Politicians love it, because they can pay for votes today, and the next generation can worry about it after they have retired. I can buy a boat today, and hope I keep my job so I can pay it off over the next five years. Or I could buy a tiny 1 BR condo in NY, and pay if off over 15 years while taking an interest deduction from my crippling federal, state, and city income taxes. Businesses need it, in fact, require it, for investment purposes, in the hopes that they can grow. Banks love it, because they can lend the money and profit from the interest. Students love it: they can go to school now, and hope to pay off their loans in the future. Christmas shoppers love it, of course, because Santa is credit.
In the end, using credit makes people, and governments, debt slaves, slaves to bond markets and slaves to banks who offered the loans. This is annoying to debtors, who have already enjoyed spending the money and are peeved, if not in trouble, because they owe it. The bond market now controls the global economy, not because "it" wants to, but because of governments and people willingly, freely, democratically, taking on debt to pay the bills instead of taxing the heck out of the people who work. Borrowing is all voluntary, the loans are from one's neighbors, - and it is a big house of cards.
I was raised by parents who refused to ever go into debt. They viewed it as a temptation for the weak. They never even had a credit card. They saved for 15 years to buy a modest house, and never viewed it as an investment. They made it home, and live there now while the trees they had planted become enormous, dwarfing their home. They have hardly ever gone anywhere, or had much fun or adventure as I think of it, but they love their church and their little town where everybody knows them. A simple life. In my adult life, I have learned to take out loans for no reason, and to pay them back after a few months, just to have a good credit rating. A good credit rating, today, is like a grade in reality living. Someday, I might want to use some credit, but today I do not. I use credit cards as if cash, to keep my rating perfect.
I might need a loan, someday.
Easy money is dangerous. Living within your means, whether as a family or as a government, is just no darn fun. There's always a good excuse or rationale for taking on more debt. I fear that the world will soon see the economic consequences of excessive debt in which everybody has borrowed from his neighbor, and his neighbor from him. A bank, after all, contains nothing but one's neighbor's money, leveraged.
"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today":
Gee whiz, the banks won't lend them any more money to maintain a fake, debt-based life style. Why would they, if they know it cannot be repaid?
Some of these countries have been, in effect, ripping off gullible lenders just as much as people taking mortgages or student loans who know they can never really pay them unless they get very lucky. It's close to theft, or fraud, or something.
One is tempted to conclude, at this point, that the political theory of the EU today is being written by financiers and financial analysts in their credit reports. They are anxious, after all, only secondarily about markets. They are primarily anxious about governance and structures of governance — because the markets are trying to figure out whether the institutions of the EU and its members are serious about their legal and political commitments, and in what ways and to what
Who cares whether it's hacked? It's government-paid science, isn't it? We paid for this crap. What their emails show is that these guys argue amongst themselves about how to twist and spin to present the data they want people to get. It is disgusting, a major scandal. Somewhat happily, some amongst the cabal actually want to be honest.
I have known science majors and scientists, and they never talked like this about things they were curious about. This is money politics, not science. Sounds more like a Wall Street bond sales meeting than science, to me. "How to we unload this crap to the suckers without totally and permanently compromising our reputations?"
Revkin wants to focus on the hacking, not the content. Well, Watergate was basically a pre-internet hacking, was it not? And Teapot Dome? Our thanks to the mystery hacker who cares more about the truth than these scientists do. I think there will be a third email dump in the future.
"But, gee whiz, we sure have had a lot of weather lately, haven't we? Storms and droughts? Terrible."
The climate alarmists are corrupt and contemptible, but we try to be sympathetic to their scam. They need government grants to pay their mortgages, and we also understand why governments like this stuff - it means more tax income for them. Governments will take tax income anywhere and everywhere. They don't care where it comes from so they will get on board with any "crisis," real or imaginary. (With the MSM in the tank with them: See the NYT's "near-poverty crisis." We are all near poverty, for heaven's sake, unless we work. That's life unless you are on the dole or, on the other end of the bell curve, hit the jackpot and live in Hollywood.)
How many "crises" have governments used to rip us hard-working souls off in the past 30 years? It's always something, if only to justify their existence. Always a crisis to be addressed, and only government experts can deal with it. Who believes that baloney anymore? You can only cry wolf so many times until people learn the game. And you can model anyway you want. That's the beauty of models: you'll be retired when the long-term results come in. Too bad Corzine didn't have time for his models. Neither did Long Term Capital.
I think I'll fly to Paris in my plastic glued-up model of a P-15 I made in 5th grade.
Rahm Emanuel said it best: "Let no crisis go to waste." Meaning, government should grab power at every opportunity. These incompetent, sleazy, professional politicians know best. That's the Chicago Way, the old Big City machine way. It helps them maintain their meal ticket while others work to pay them for attending meetings, lunches, and lobster dinners while picking up chicks. Models, whenever possible, of course.
Of course, most of us at Maggie's would welcome a global warming trend. It would be a blessing to the darn human species, and would lower our heating bills in the Northeastern US.
Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street - Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?
And this: Damn It Feels Good to be a Banker. I'd rather be a kick-ass banker than a Consultant - or an OWS lowlife, but really do not wish to be any of those things:
Even the NYT can see the Green Energy Scam now. It's a scandal, if not criminal. Freebies to the 1%, and feel-good nonsense for the benighted greenies.
I had a good morning of bird-hunting today. How about you?
Just like Jefferson County, Alabama, you cannot borrow forever, and when you begin borrowing (as we have begun to in the US) to make your interest payments, it's a bad sign, not sustainable unless God intervenes.
In my view, all Euroland can do now is to pray that somebody strikes oil in Provence or Tuscany - and I don't mean olive oil. Problem is, they don't pray over there anymore. I think they are screwed, and it will affect all of us. A slo-mo death spiral.
The Euroland project is in hospice care, it seems to me, on oxygen and IV morphine. There is not enough money available in the world to cover their crappy debt from their crappy, lazy, hyper-regulated welfare states, and they will never be able to pay it back. Never. Furthermore, as my Wall St. friend tells me, defaults will trigger more CDSs than anybody in the world can cover. It's a shit show, as they say.
I would advise getting popcorn to watch the earthquake unfold, but it can hit us in the US with a financial tsunami here, across the pond.
Maggie: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money." She never mentioned that you can run out of credit, too.
David, I am sorry to inform you that Americans have no interest in being ruled by our betters. We just don't believe they are better, and have little evidence for it since after the founders.
William F. Buckley Jr:
I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
Good grief. 44% of NY residents support these smelly low-life losers, bums, perverts, slackers, paranoids, anthropology majors, commie wannabes, community organizers, and potheads? I don't believe it.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
Those greedy 1%ers (household AGI $350,000 and up) are Hollywood and Broadway actors, rock and hip-hop stars, sports stars, popular writers, entrepreneurs, TV people, fancy restaurant owners, artists, theater impresarios, prosperous small business owners, some accountants and portfolio managers, opera stars, the CEOs of big businesses, neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and some other high-income medical specialists, NYT columnists, college presidents, retired politicians, law partners, real estate magnates, and a few high-level investment bankers.