The Dollar's Demise is NOT Inevitable (A lot of people have difficulty understanding public debt)

American Thinker ^ | 05/14/2010 | Jon N Hall

[Popman]

One major difference is Greece has no control over her currency as she has effectively ceded her monetary policy to Brussels. Hence Greece cannot depreciate or print money. The US can.

Printing dollars will save us, only "saving us" will mean high inflation, a long term jobless recovery and eroded buying power: in effect a much lower standard of living............hey, but we are "saved"

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

He misses the obvious. That is, for the congress to get its house in order means that they have to cancel Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In short, congress, no matter who runs it, cannot do this.

But the individual States can do this, in a constitutional convention.

Even before the convention was to meet, called by 34 States, 38 States would have to agree to erase all US federal debts and obligations. Then add a balanced budget amendment, a line item veto amendment, replace the Income Tax with a different, limited means of raising federal revenue, and prohibit future federal largess to individuals.

Once these 38 States were in agreement, they would call a convention, sign the new constitution, have the 38 State legislatures vote to affirm, with the convention remaining seated until the changes were carried out.

This would relieve the crushing political weight from the shoulders of congress and the president, created by three dozen congresses before them.

[Silver Sabre]

This is an excellent forum for reading about gold and the dollar.

http://goldismoney2.com/forum.php/forums/

[kabar]

When the debt servicing costs wipe out the federal budget or most of it.

[expatpat]

So now the infamous SS lock-box has been down-graded to only ‘soft debt’.

[bruinbirdman]

"Entitlement spending contains a hidden trap for inflation induced debt control. "

A supposed big part of welfare reform under Newt and Klinton was "welfare to work". Payments were reduced and term limited, training and job placement were emphasized.

I see that in California "welfare to work" is eliminated under Schwartzies budget as too expensive.

Not sure how exactly that is proposed. Perhaps the payments continue and the social/civil service workers administering it are eliminated, cause the work/training part sure isn't working.

yitbos

[Lockbox]

one world religion which incorporated beliefs from all major religions

Does that mean keeping the burga & beheadings and forget about that gay marriage thing?

[ml/nj]

And the soft debt consists of government "trust funds," like the social security trust fund. The soft debt is money we "owe" ourselves, not Japan and China.

This peabrain needs to understand the that "money we owe ourselves" is money that effectively has been printed by the Federal Reserve. (The Federal Reserve gets I-O-Me's in return.) And that is the dangerous stuff. Someone who actually purchased debt with his own money, whether Chinese or not, cannot purchase anything with that debt until he is paid back and so does not compete for goods and services with other "dollar" holders.

ML/NJ

[Jack Hydrazine]

And how far along are we now to doing that?

[bert]

There is another course, the course.

The US$ is not going to die, it will merely be placed on a devaluation curve with a controlled slope. That slope will gradually increase to the maximum tolerable value. That point will be sustained, or leveled until the threat of insolvency is past. At that point the debt will exist as some miraculously acceptable percentage of GDP.

It will be pretty much world wide and the value of all the currencies in the world will be measured by the increasing price of gold and silver and other such hard assets..... including real estate.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

So, the hard debt matters and the soft debt doesn’t. I can prove the false idiocy here in one line.

Let’s move all the hard debt to soft debt, and then the entire $13 trillion won’t matter.

See how easy it is to expose the lies of the cheerleaders?

[Jack Hydrazine]

Hasn’t the dollar been devalued since it was taken off of gold and silver?

[kabar]

It depends. Check the chart below:

If you total the portions of the budget for entitlement programs--Medicare, SS, and Medicaid--you will see that when combined with the debt servicing costs, they are over 50% of the budget. The entitlement programs will continue to grow as the baby boomer generation retires to the tune of 10,000 a day for the next 20 years. By 2030, one in five residents of this country will be 65 or older or twice what it is today. Check out the article below and notice that approximatly $2.2 trillion of the $3.55 trillion dollar federal budget is so-called mandatatory spending. Defense spending is mandatory.

2010 United States federal budget

[bert]

I think it has.

Gold is nearly $1200. Gas is flirting with $3.00 the Dow is flirting again with 11,000, home prices in many places are stable and rising.

The real inflation is hidden by China and low prices. There is no basis of calculation of so many items because the Chinese goods cover it up. People complain and rant about Chinese imports, but without them we would be destitute.

Actually it began to deflate before we went off. The spot price of Gold in London was around $40 and rising and Nixon had no choice but sever the position between the $35 dollar or all the US gold would have been bought up in a heart beat.

[Persevero]

“There is PRETEND debt!”

That’s right, and we pay it off with pretend money ;)

[gitmo]

A lot of entitlements are going to need to be rolled back or a lot of people are going to have to die in order for that to happen!

Change the word "or" to "then" and you've got it.

[gitmo]

Oh!!!!! Now I get it!!!!! There is PRETEND debt!

It's just like these people who walk away from their mortgage just because the house is worth less than they owe. The only difference is we were forced into our side of the agreement at gunpoint, and we hold no collateral.

[adorno]

You might tell hundreds of millions of voters that the soft debt is not real. Voters will reject any meaningful entitlement reform until a catastrophe occurs. Even then, it is not clear if a catastrophe will prompt reform. The Democrats plan for reform involves soaking the rich and taking away entitlement benefits from the rich. Not much will be gained from eliminating entitlement benefits from the rich. Confiscatory tax rates will backfire leading to economic decline and lower tax revenues.

Entitlement spending contains a hidden trap for inflation induced debt control. Entitlement spending will grow with inflation so we cannot inflate our way out of debt.

The Democrat fall back provision is stealth of private retirement accounts. Democrats know that real money is locked in these accounts. As John Dillinger once said, rob the banks because that is where the real money is stored.

The fact is that, most of your sentences above will be over the head of most voters, especially democrats.

To at least half the population, though they may understand the words "debt" and "deficit", they aren't equipped with enough understanding or knowledge to understand how the government debt and deficits relate to their lives. And to a lot of them, the dollar just represents a piece of paper with which they can go to the store and purchase things. They're not equipped to understand that the dollar can lose or gain in value when taken in context with other currencies. To most voters, the dollar has a predefined value and even if the government prints more of it, the value remains the same.

It's very hard to argue against the willfully ignorant and against those that refuse to learn. When money grows on trees, the people could not care less about government deficits and debts.

[PLMerite]

We may get to the point that our entire economy collapses and we will be carrying our money around in 30-round magazines...

Fixed it. :)

[Eva]

Interestingly, I was on another web site and some “libtard” was trying to compare Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers to the John Birch society for seeing a communist behind every tree. The guy said that the John Birch Society even accused Dwight Eisenhower of willingly co-operating with the communists. So, I decided to look it up. It turns out that the John Birch Society was warning against the UN agenda of a one world government which would inevitably lead to one world communism and that Eisenhower was supporting the UN. So, while they may not have accused Eisenhower of being a communist, they did claim that he supported the Progressive agenda. It seems to me that the New World Order and the One world government predates the Post Modernist thought and revisionist history. Post Modernism is just the means to the end goal of a One World Government.