“I stand corrected....my point is the info about it we receive is bu!!$!(T!!!”
Not only is in a complete fabrication (admissions made AFTER the election was over), but this was known prior to the election.
Almost all of the important numbers the world used to depend on are cooked. Libor? Unemployment? Inflation?
They are all either manipulated or cooked.
This is why Buffett’s manipulation of bond ratings is no big deal. Triple ZZZ worthy mortgages were backing AAA rated mortgage backed securities as early as 2003. Moody’s was the ‘gold standard’ of those ratings agencies, and AIG would take a look at their price chart for insurance on AAA rated securities and sell it to you cheap.
They should have had a clue when everyone and their mother was buying it, but from their desk, it looked like it was raining money.
It’s why nobody at AIG was implicated in anything criminal after it was all over. There were plenty that thought AIG was stupid after the fact, but can you imagine AIG raising their rates on AAA rated bond insurance to JUNK rates?
I’m sure that somewhere there was a discussion about doing exactly that, and I’m sure that somewhere there’s a mid-level ex-AIG guy that tells stories about that to his buddies that don’t care, but think it is an amazing story.
I know a lot of ex-Enron and Dynegy guys that do that too.
The biggest danger hidden in automated trading models is that they depend upon all of these completely fabricated numbers.
Funny how the stock market tanked as soon as the year began. It’s like it was an agreement, but it really wasn’t. Everyone has run the numbers and Obamacare is going to gut it all. All of it.
Obamacare was SUPPOSED to fail. It was DESIGNED to do that, so that single-payer could ride in and save the day. At the end of it, the left will say, “It was ugly, but now everyone has healthcare - no harm, no foul.”
The stock market was propelled by the easiest money ever printed - period. Everything that was hooked into government business did well, and the stock went up.
Medium and small business - blood bath. If you are a big company, getting a loan is literally as easy as fogging a mirror - companies are taking out loans to pay bonuses, just because it is so cheap that you’d be crazy not to.
Medium and small business loans? Virtually non-existent. Where do 3/4 of all jobs come from? Small and medium business. Why do we use an unemployment rate that ONLY measures the number of people taking unemployment benefits?
Because it purposefully ignores a)companies that lay people off that can’t afford to pay unemployment, and thus it isn’t available to those laid off, and b) because if you only measure those taking benefits, it conveniently leaves those who have been out of work so long that their benefits have expired.
There’s a reason why the USG bought all the guns and ammo it could get its hands on - it is planning for a civil war. Those that are dependent on the government vs those paying for it.
The number you are interested in are the number of people privately employed in the United States.
Anyone on a government payroll doesn’t count as employed, if what you are interested in is finding the number of people upon whom the fisc of government depends.
I’m not trying to be harsh on folks employed by the government - it’s just math.
A government employee makes $50K, say. He pays, on the generous side, 50% of that in taxes to all government players (local, county, state, and federal). To fully fund “Mr. $50K”, it takes EIGHT guys the government doesn’t pay in order to ensure Mr. $50K’s salary isn’t paid with printed money.
It’s why the conversation about what the proper role, and our proper expectations as citizens, of the government is so crucial. It’s not a civics class lesson.
Every new power you give to government, every new mandate, every new piece of infrastructure, and every new protection requires revenue.
One thing Limbaugh is fond of saying is that there is no unifying set of beliefs in progressivism. For conservatives, there is (or was) - small government is the best government and rugged individualism and capitalism is what fueled the early American experiment (up until about 1930 or so).
He’s incorrect about progressives not having a unifying principle on their side. That principle is simple, and so seemingly innocuous, that as soon as you hear it, you understand why it is that your in-laws - god fearing, generally good people - end up voting for democrats without engaging their headgear.
The principle behind progressivism is - they believe, at bottom, that government can be, and largely still is, a force for good.
This is what they took away from Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin. They created the United States, and the US has done so much good, so quad era demonstratum.
They completely sailed over the bits about how this go around they were going to do the very best they could to guarantee that government would be permanently marginalized. In fact, the Constitution was their second choice - the Articles of Confederation preceded that, so deep was their distrust of strong central government.
‘Only what was necessary - only these 9 rights’, was the idea behind putting pen to paper and spelling out, specifically, the rights held by the government. Then they added the 10th amendment, which said, specifically, ‘if it isn’t spelled out in the first nine, then it is up to each state, individually.’
What brings together abortionists and child educators, union construction people and environmentalists, homosexuals and African-Americans is the idea that, at base, government, especially the US Government, is the best thing ever to happen to civilization.
The US government put a man on the moon. Won two world wars, and the Cold War. Killed bin Laden. Created the interstate highway system, and the internet. For anyone wondering why Jews all vote D? They also liberated the death camps when nobody in Europe would lift a finger, and then went the extra mile and carved out Israel for them in 1948. Nobody, in history, ever did as much for Jews as the US Government.
Today, the boomers, especially and ironically the boomers, don’t want to think of the government in any other way than as beneficent. They used to stick it to the man, and now they are the man, and without the man, they are going to die horribly sick, and poor.
So, lest any conservative get a better night’s sleep thinking that progressives are a basically divided, petty, and disorganized lot, they aren’t.
They, unlike we, all believe in EXACTLY the same thing - that government, especially the US Government, is one of the best things ever, in history, ever. They will die defending it, because in the end, none of the groups that make up progressivism believe they can live without it.
Reagan was an outlier. He was skilled at communicating why government was the problem.
Progressives aren’t stupid, so they created problems so big ONLY government could fix them. They bailed out Wall Street - twice. Everyone forgets the first ‘Too big to fail’ crisis - Long Term Capital Management in 1998. That was the first time the Federal Reserve stepped in to avert a bankruptcy that could potentially bring all the banks down.
As we speak they are planning the bailout of the medical insurance industry, which is going to make bailing out AIG look like a booger.
Create problems that require ‘Manhattan Project’ sized solutions and people will continue to crap nickels, literally, until the next big scary problem comes along that only gargantuan government can fix.
