Posted on 09/26/2009 2:00:32 PM PDT by tired1
They are not assumptions. They are observations. The unions used the government to force employers to pay their members more than the fair market value of their labor. Consumers had to pay for that.
Realistically you are looking at a window of maybe as little as 24 months or less.
check out this site and read on a daily basis:
the market ticker.org
You will then have an idea of what is really going on.
My 77 year old father just told me the same thing. He feels that he lived a good life and reaped its sows and were stuck with the bill.
So then, I have to ask ... What would the value of our dollar be, compared to other currencies, if we had no national debt whatsoever?
They are not assumptions. They are observations. The unions used the government to force employers to pay their members more than the fair market value of their labor. Consumers had to pay for that.If a cartel is price-fixing anyway, consumers will pay either way. Consumers actually paid *less* for goods and services(proportional to their income) during Union's heyday. So your argument doesn't work.
So then, I have to ask ... What would the value of our dollar be, compared to other currencies, if we had no national debt whatsoever?Whatever gold it was pegged to?
I don't know where you're getting that but it doesn't matter. What matters is that they still paid more then than they would have if there had been no union. The money to pay higher wages had to come from somewhere.
I don't know where you're getting that but it doesn't matter. What matters is that they still paid more then than they would have if there had been no union. The money to pay higher wages had to come from somewhere.I don't think the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords missed it that much.
What about their stockholders?Let's just say they did okay.
We had factories then.
Remember factories?
You know, jobs? “Free trade” fixed that...
It would be nice if you used more precise terms than "sc--d."
More importantly, you did not talk about capital. You made a nonsensical statement istead about wages vs. consumption. No need to substitute the topic and pretend the conversation was about something else.
" You can't have supply without demand,"
To get out of one nonsense you now produce another. Who on earth told you that one cannot have supply without demand or vice versa? Total nonsense.
"which is exactly where the US economy is today."
I'll stop here. Your remarks sound like those of an undergraduate that just completed one half of an introductory course on economics and misunderstood most of it.
It would be nice if you used more precise terms than "sc--d."I'd say deflation, but that lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.
More importantly, you did not talk about capital. You made a nonsensical statement istead about wages vs. consumption. No need to substitute the topic and pretend the conversation was about something else.Capital was implied mr Pendant.
To get out of one nonsense you now produce another. Who on earth told you that one cannot have supply without demand or vice versa? Total nonsense.Yawn... says someone who lacks the most rudimentary rhetorical skills.I'll stop here. Your remarks sound like those of an undergraduate that just completed one half of an introductory course on economics and misunderstood most of it.
Now, imagine the phrase "you can't have supply without demand" was a rhetorical device used to imply that an overabundance of one or the other was a bad thing.
Are you autistic? That would explain your inability to understand context and the implied aspects of argumentation.
That raises the issue of the “lend-Lease” and all the aid we gave the allies durning the war. Did they pay any of it back?
I believe the only country to pay us back in full was Finland
Well I did some checking at the U.S. Treasury direct website, and
get *this* —
“...Originally issued for a fixed term of 10 years, E bonds were granted interest extensions that brought their interest-bearing lives to 30 or 40 years, dependent upon the issue date of the bond. Millions of Series E bonds continue to earn interest today, although the last E bonds will stop earning interest in 2010. Series E bonds were replaced by the Series EE bond in 1980.”
That’s pretty cool. Savings bonds are nice, for one thing, if they are lost or stolen they can be returned. That’s tough to do with cash. So in that sense they are better than cash in some ways. The trend is towards complete electronic registration of securities, but there’s something to be said for analog money, if it is secure. I personally opened one of the treasury direct accounts a while back so it would be open for business so to speak. But I still keep a stack of good ole US bonds. Interestingly they cannot be sold on the secondary market either...
“If we got rid of Medicaid, Medicare, and disassembled our welfare state, the government would be in good shape in pretty short order.”
I wish this were true... but if you look at the numbers, it is not. The national debt is now $14 trillion. In 2009, medicare and medicaid cost us $676 billion dollars. If the government somehow diverted all of this money to paying off the debt, it would take 20 years. These services are disproportionately used by the elderly, the blind, and the disabled. They also fund the majority of residencies (doctor training programs) in the US. Social Security is also around this size. And the department of defense is even larger. And even if the budgets of these services were cut, it would not fix the root of the problem. We simply spend too much and make to little. It would be a step in the right direction, though.
At some point we’re going to have admit that the Federal Government can’t take care of people and is not supposed to. IF we don’t we’ll be bankrupt and defenseless.
The job of the Federal government is to defend the nation, negotiate with foreign nations, resolve internal issues between the states, and coordinate law enforcement between states for interstate cases. That’s it. We need to return the Federal Government to those functions and let the rest devolve back to the states and the people.
Well, it helped that were last, undamaged industrial nation in the world...
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