It’s the End of the World As We Know It

[girl gone mad]

I'm going to go post in the stock market watch thread today. It's too quiet in here lately. :)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4470413

From http://www.philstockworld.com/2010/07/17/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/">Phil's Stock World:

It’s the End of the World As We Know It
What are 308,367,109 Americans supposed to do?

First of all, despite clamping down on immigration, our population grew by 2.6M people last year. Unfortunately, not only did we not create jobs for those 2.6M new people but we lost about 4M jobs so what are these new people going to do? Not only that, but nobody is talking about the another major job issue: People aren’t retiring! They can’t afford to because the economy is bad - that means there are even less job openings… The pimply-faced kid can’t get a job delivering pizza because his grandpa’s doing it.

There are some brilliant pundits who believe cutting retirement benefits will fix our economy. How will that work exactly? Pay old people less money, don’t cover their medical care and what happens? Then they need money. If they need money, they need to work and if they need to work they increase the supply of labor, which reduces wages and leaves all 308,367,109 of us with less money. Oh sorry, not ALL 308,367,109 - just 308,337,109 - the top 30,000 (0.01%) own the business the other 308,337,109 work at and they will be raking it in because labor is roughly 1/3 of the cost of doing business in America and our great and powerful capitalists have already cut their manufacturing costs by shipping all those jobs overseas, where they pay as little as $1 a day for a human life so now, in order to increase their profits (because profits MUST be increased) they have now turned inward to see what they can shave off in America.

How does one decrease the cost of labor in America? Well first, you have to bust the unions. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-walmart-low-wages-unions/Content?oid=2043233">Check. Then you have to create a pressing need for people to work - perhaps give them easy access to credit and then get them to go so deeply into debt that they will have to work until they die to pay them off. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-75-trillion-fright-fest-8-megahorror-debts-chilling-the-us">Check. It also helps if you push up the cost of living by manipulating commodity prices. http://case.tm/pubs/commodities.pdf">Check(pdf). Then, take away people’s retirement savings. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703358.html">Check. Lower interest rates to make savings futile and interest income inadequate. Check. And finally, threaten to take away the 12% a year that people have been saving for retirement by labeling Social Security an "entitlement" program - as if it wasn’t money Americans worked their whole lives to save and gave to the government in good faith. http://www.mutualfundreporter.com/articles/2009_issues/interestRates20090309.com">Check.

As Allen Smith says: "Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Essentially, Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!"

http://www.philstockworld.com/2010/07/17/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it">more...

[enough]

1. Great article. Should be posted in GD where more people will see it.

another snip>

That is how the largest theft in the history of the world was carried out. 300M people worked and saved their whole lives to set aside $2.5Tn into a retirement system that, if it were paying a fair compounding rate of 5% interest over 40 years of labor (assuming an even $62Bn a year was contributed), would be worth $8.4Tn today - enough money to give 100M workers $84,000 each in cash! The looting of FICA hid the massive deficits of the last 30 years in the Unified Budget. Presidents and Congresses were able to reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans without complaint from the deficit hawks, because they benefited. The money went directly from the pockets of average Americans into the pockets of the rich.

Now that it is time to repay those special bonds in the Trust Fund, we are inundated in opinion pieces in the leading newspapers and magazines complaining about Social Security and its horrible impact on the budget. Government finances have been trashed by foolish tax cuts, unpaid wars, tax loopholes for corporations and the very wealthy, the failures of economists, the greedy search for greater returns in financial markets and the collapse of moral values in giant businesses but Social Security is supposed to be the problem that needs fixing…

Social Security is not "broken" the money is in the Trust Fund. But the people who manage the finances of the United States don’t want to repay the bonds held by the Trust Fund. They want to default selectively against average people, their fellow citizens, who paid their taxes expecting to be protected in their retirement. Refusing to repay the $2.54 trillion dollars in bonds held by the Social Security Trust makes the US look like Greece, just another nation unable to govern itself coherently. The people who manage US finances come from the financial elites, the best that Wall Street and enormous corporations have to offer. Selective default exposes them as charlatans. The claims of the economics profession to expertise are puffery. Their theories about the benefits of tax cuts are proven false. Their mathematical proofs about free markets collapse in the real world.

more

[fasttense]

2. Selective default.

All those right-wing nut jobs want the government to default on the bonds held by Social Security. Well how about defaulting on the bonds held by every American citizen. Wont that help the budget deficit? If selective defaulting is good for the US, then expanding the pool of selective defaulting bonds will be even better for the US. And if we only default on bonds held by US citizens then it's merely the US defaulting on itself.

So, here's to defaulting on all US bonds held by all US citizens. Maybe it will catch the tigers tail.

[dkf]

3. The social security surplus was the biggest scam perpetrated on the average joe.

We will never get those funds back from those who shirked their share of tax obligations. Sickening.

[glitch]

4. For their sake, I hope the looters are prepared to leave this country.

They won't be safe here, no matter how many Blackwater(/wannabe) thugs they hire.

[jtuck004]

5. Naw, they're ok.

People here get mad at all the wrong things. And even if they get mad you just give them a few thousand or a crappy job and they will just pee all over themselves with happiness, then thank you profusely.

And what this post talks about? They would have to peel themselves away from prime time (or, hell, even afternoon talkshows) and read a 1 page synopsis, and the recliner-hugging activists won't even to that.

The thieves are safe. And they know it.

[glitch]

6. Things may change when the people can no longer afford cable. Or catfood.

We aren't there yet and some of the thieves are already buying private security teams.

[Warpy]

7. I wish I could recommend this multiple times, it really needs to be seen

because it explains in such readable detail exactly why Republican economic dogma has not worked, does not work, and will never work.

When the consumer economy is collapsing because consumers no longer have money to spend, there are two options: first, encourage them to go into debt to support the economy (check), and then when they have taken on as much debt as they possibly can, try government spending on social programs and infrastructure improvement to keep them going. It's the second step the GOP is balking over. It seems they'd prefer to see the economy collapse completely than ding plutocrats for the 10% chump change it would take to get this economy jump started and growing again.

[abelenkpe]

8. This is the type of article

that should be printed up and plastered all over the neighborhood on telephone poles, bus benches anywhere people might see it. Great article, sums it all up and does so with out all the expletives I'd be tempted to use.

[and-con]

9. But the sad thing is

So many people are still buying it, I still hear people begging for another Ronald Reagan. I on the other hand want nothing more that another FDR. Actually I almost got hit for saying I would rather see the navy have a bake sale for their next carrier, then deny any American Social Security, Unemployment, and Health care.