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Out of curiosity, who would they sell federal assets to? State parks barely turn a profit in winter months...
But I guess the Saudis could start buying up land, like they did with seaports and toll highways etc.
Initially Ron Paul appealed to people who were fed up with banksters, and the corporate lobbying. But clearly if they now are in Wall Streets pocket the narrative has changed.
My guess would be private landowners...It's difficult to tell what they would do with them.
We are an autonomus currency issuer with 0.2% inflation......we technically can NEVER be out of money...unless of course if the press breaks down. Inflation is obviously an issue but our inflation rate is so infanticimal right now that it doesn't pose a real problem. Further...given international circumstances theres a hell of a lot more evidence to suggest that spending is helping the economy of will reduce deficits in the long run. Countries that have tried the whole "austerity" thing are in the midst of double and triple dip recessoins (see UK).
I'm all for being a deficit hawk and worrying about the budget....just not when the economy is this fragile.
Agree.
The UK is bordering on disaster right now. Austerity doesnt work.
A third party is what this country needs, one without major corporate control and lobbyists pulling the strings. It would be great if in 2016 the Indeps. put forth a viable candidate. They need to discuss the economy and stay away from media hype, hysteria, and religion.
The fiscal issues are major.
Well... when you're right you're right...I am scared of him and his popularity. His policies are destructive and I don't want to see this country dismantled by an idiot that would prefer the US be reduced to 50 countries.
But, you have no problem with the dismantling that obama has been doing and is continuing to do. hmmmm Can you say hypocrite?
But, you have no problem with the dismantling that obama has been doing and is continuing to do. hmmmm Can you say hypocrite?
What dismantling?
Reckless tax cuts? Starting two foreign wars with nations that hadn't attacked us? Extrajudicial torture? Deregulating the SH*T out of the financial industry?
Reckless tax cuts? Starting two foreign wars with nations that hadn't attacked us? Extrajudicial torture? Deregulating the SH*T out of the financial industry?
Extrajudicial torture...happened for decades...was big during clinton...and obama continues it
they didnt attack us??? do you forget 9/11
deregulate....clinton
reckless taxcuts....giving the poor and middleclass a tax break is wreckless???
-Regarding the DOE....I would argue that it isn't strong enough. We have one of the most decentralized education systems in the world compared to other post-industrial OECD nations. We spend quite a bit more than they do yet have lower results. It seems to me like it would make more sense to look at abolishing the state DOE's in lieu of a most cost effective federal one. We should take tips from the nations that are kicking our asses in the education department....i.e., Finland, Belgium, France, etc.
Charter schools are at least part of the answer and charter schools operate outside of the tangled bureaucracy of the United States. Not all charter schools are a success story, but those that are successes have been able to duplicate their success consistently and have done so in the most impoverished hopeless parts of urban America. KIPP Academies are one of many brilliant success stories. Charter schools are an experiment to see what happens when you let a public school run without a bare minimum of government bureaucracy. The Department of Education (federal and state both) and teachers' unions both have a vested interest in the failure of charter schools, so you call fully expect them to do everything in their power to sour public opinion on charter schools. For the unions, giving schools a free hand to fire teachers who are terrible at doing their jobs and merit pay -- rewarding exceptional teachers for being exceptional -- are all pure heresy. All government bureaucracies will seek to demonize these schools because they make the DOE and other such entities obsolete. Teachers' unions are equally determined to see charter schools fail because they aren't playing by the rules the union worked so hard to establish.
Charter schools are capitalism in action. They can pick and choose who they hire and fire as teachers. They are free to reward outstanding teachers for being outstanding. They have a free hand to try new things and look for ways to improve. The charter schools with the highest rate of success will continue to duplicate their success all over the country. Those that fail will die out. We would be vastly better served by getting behind charter schools instead of constantly tweaking and fiddling with the existing public school system -- hoping and praying that we find the magic cure that makes everything better. And we would spend vastly less on education in the process by eliminating the massive government bureaucracy.
We've thrown so much money and trust into fixing our status quo education system. We've been led to believe that we could make everything better by running everything from the Ivory Tower in Washington DC. The effect has been exactly the opposite. "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
-- Albert Einstein
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-The objective of taxation isn't to facilitate business...it's to facilitate the maintenance of our infrastructure. Currently our personal and corporate income tax rates are exceptionally low compared to their historical average yet our economy is still in the gutter. Also, the verdict is fairly objective that the Bush tax cuts, despite their large size, had a negligible impact on business growth. I just don't see enough evidence to indicate that higher taxes would stifle business as badly as the GOP would like us to think.
The vast majority of taxpayer money isn't spent on infrastructure. Military, Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, Medicaid, all other entitlement/social programs and paying the interest on the federal debt adds up to 87% of the US Federal Budget for 2012 -- which kinda kills your whole point.
As to the pros and cons of taxation, let's start with the obvious and work from there. Let's set individual corporate tax rates at 100%. What happens next? Obviously, it would be disastrous. I think we can agree that taking all money from everyone would be detrimental. Then what about only taking 95%? Or perhaps 85%? It's simple math: The more money you take from individuals and businesses, the more you harm them. Less taxes = less harm done.
There will always be some liberal-biased economic study or another that "proves" that higher taxes makes things better and not worse. If their was any credibility to this idea, then the very best thing we could for America and our economy would be to tax every business and individual in in this nation 100% of their income. After all, if increasing their tax burden somehow functions like pushing down the gas pedal in a car, in light of our dismal economic state, we might as well just floor it! Right?
Simple math tells you everything you need to know: Taking money away from businesses and individuals does not help them. It hurts them.
So why even bother coming out with studies that "prove" the opposite to be true? Simple: Liberals can't figure out how to pay for all the programs they've created. They want more revenue. Lots of it. They have a vested interest in convincing the public that raising taxes is a good thing somehow, because public outrage would ruin them. They have to sell it and make it sound good to voters.
Now imagine if we drastically reduce the military spending and send the social programs back to the states. They can tax their own citizens and run their own programs. They can run Social Security for themselves. They can run their own welfare programs. (They also have a much better chance of providing the right amount of assistance and catching cheaters who are trying to milk the system.) And therein lies the genius of it all: States that find a way to do all of those things effectively and efficiently become more desirable places to live. Low tax to high standard of living = a great place to live. So people will move there. States that are inefficient and overly burdensome to taxpayers will see their populations shrink -- which hopefully motivates them to do it better, smarter, more efficiently, etc. And rather than running all the social programs, the federal government can play policeman. If some states are corrupt or negligent, they actually have someone more powerful than themselves looking over their shoulder.
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-Regulation needs to be lean enough to not hinder growth but it also needs to be thorough enough to guard against the abuses of business. Enron, to me, serves as a posterchild for acts like Sarbes-Oxley to standardize accounting procedures.
The trouble is, the federal government fails to regulate where it's really and truly needed. The housing collapse of 2007/2008 happened because both parties have been systematically dismantling the regulations that were put on banks after the 1929 collapse. And neither party is doing anything that would realistically prevent the same crisis from recurring in some similar fashion. The federal government under the two party system is beholden to nobody. If both parties support any given idea -- like the deregulation of the banks -- voters are powerless to stop it. Those guilty of creating the collapse walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody in our government seems to care. A thus we see the megalithic federal government failing us once again.
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-I disagree here regarding healthcare. I do however detest Obamacare. It will make the problem worse, exponentially. I believe a National Health Service (like that of the UK or Australia) would serve as a better example. They have comparable health statistics and do so at about 1/4 of our cost as a % of GDP. Further...the horror stories you hear about the NHS are categorically false. There are unfortunate outliers that have happened but it certainly isn't the norm.
Obama did several things wrong. His biggest mistake was failing to solve the bigger problem of our escalating health care costs. My wife and I just had a baby and we saw the bill for it prior to our insurance paying for most of it. The price tag: $29,000. How on earth does that happen?? If that's the real price tag of child birth, not many of us would be having babies at hospitals anymore.
Pharmaceutical companies, medical supply companies, hospitals and the entire medical industry in America has gotten used to large entities with deep pockets (health insurance companies, Medicaid, Medicare) footing the bill. A bottle of pills that costs them a less than $1 to manufacture is sold to consumers for well over $100. With such an insane profit margin, research costs are recovered in short order and everything thereafter is pure profit.
Medical malpractice insurance is one more thing driving health care costs upwards. Doctors aren't perfect and some of them will make mistakes sometimes. But when the resulting lawsuit is for millions of dollars, the end result if obvious. Costs go up. The threat of the possibility of medical malpractice lawsuits becomes an excuse for everyone involved to start price-gouging. The insurance companies can charge more. The doctors can charge more. Everyone can charge more.
Obama fixed none of the above. He just cavalierly slammed through socialized medicine. And the truth of the matter is, the Dems won't even think of doing anything about out of control medical malpractice lawsuits. Ambulance chasers are one of the Democratic Party's biggest contributors after all. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Ironically, it was the creation of Medicare and similar programs that marks the beginning of rapid escalation of medical costs in the US.
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-Abolishing the Fed is insane, IMO...so is returning to the gold standard which fortunately Rand (I don't think) advocates anymore. Having a Fiat currency allows us to adjust the monetary supply and manipulate the currency in such a way that we don't have to suffer (as long) in periods of economic turndown.
I'm not entirely sure that the Fed needs to be abolished, but you don't need to get rid of the Fed in order to put us on a gold or silver standard. The Fed has run such currency before and can do it again. The Fed's ability to do it's magician smoke and mirrors tricks is just silly. Increasing or decreasing the flow of paper money into the system only increases or decreases inflation and tricks people into thinking what you want them to think. The impact on the real buying power of the average American almost never gets better because of it and all too often gets worse. The Fed's best tool is setting interest rates, and that tool would remain in place of course.
Ultimately, the whole business with the Fed is not my biggest issue. It's a side issue that probably never gets addressed in my lifetime. Libertarianism is not a one-issue political movement. It's not about, "The Fed must die at all costs!" But it is a mess that needs to be cleaned up.
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-Again...yeah I agree with government waste...there are a lot of instances of it and it needs to be stopped.
Since the federal government is so gigantic, wasteful spending tends to get lost in the mix. Americans know its happening but they don't know what to do to fix it. The biggest problem: The federal government doesn't have anyone policing their actions. They are free to waste money to their hearts content -- but within limits sufficient to win their next election of course. Both parties are guilty of wasteful spending. Americans have come to accept that they only have two choices: Democrat or Republican. Since both are part of the problem, you cannot possibly hope to fix anything at the voting booth if you believe that you only have those two choices. It's a devils bargain. One party throw deficit spending at military. The other takes away from the military and throws deficit spending at practically everything else under the sun. Neither one has any chance of balancing the budget and keeping it balanced.
What America needs is a viable third choice. The big two parties are hopelessly corrupt and useless at this point. Both are content to maintain the status quo, all while bickering over moving the furniture around by a few inches here and a few inches there.
Extrajudicial torture...happened for decades...was big during clinton...and obama continues it
they didnt attack us??? do you forget 9/11
deregulate....clinton
reckless taxcuts....giving the poor and middleclass a tax break is wreckless???
-I never said that I advocated under them either...The person I was responding blamed the dismantling of America SOLELY on Obama.
-Afghanistan and Iraq DIDN'T attack us...did you forget 9/11? Look up the nationality of the attackers.
-Deregulate...Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall but as part of a compromise with Newt for higher revenues.....But don't pretend like you folks on the right have a quarrell with deregulation.
-Yes...we had a surplus that should have been directed towards the debt...not a tax cut that had next to no objectively verifiable economic benefit.
I was not aware that they wanted to deregulate Wall Street as well.
Hopefully they deregulate the Police Force and many laws in this country then at the same, so that citizens can take matters into their own hands against the banksters.
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