Posted on 07/18/2005 12:40:00 PM PDT by datura
Since democracy is the worldwide goal of the Bush Administration, we must face the stunning fact that the integration of different nationalities under a common European Union (EU) Constitution was rejected by decisive democratic votes. President Bush can thank conservative leaders for saving him from the embarrassment of endorsing the EU Constitution, shortly before it was so soundly defeated in France and the Netherlands.
The EU Constitution was defeated, because Western Europeans don't want to be politically, economically, or socially integrated with the culture, economy, lifestyle, or history of Eastern Europe and Muslim countries. Western Europeans recognized in the proposed EU Constitution a loss of national identity and freedom, to a foreign bureaucracy, plus a redistribution of wealth from richer countries to poorer countries.
Will the political and business elites in America hear this message, and stop trying to force CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) on America?
The Senate Republican Policy Committee appears to be tone deaf. Its just-released policy paper argues that CAFTA should be approved, because its purpose is "integrating more closely with 34 hemispheric neighbors - thus furthering the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)," which the 2001 Quebec Declaration declared would bring about "hemispheric integration."
Americans don't want to be "integrated" with the poverty, corruption, socialism, and communism of our hemispheric neighbors, any more than the French want to be integrated with the Turks and Bulgarians.
Just as the French and Dutch were suspicious of the dangers lurking in the 485-page EU Constitution, Americans are wary of the dangers hiding in the 92-page CAFTA legislation, plus the 31 pages that purport to spell out the administrative actions the U.S. must take in compliance. No wonder CAFTA's supporters are bypassing our Constitution's requirement that treaties can be valid only if passed by two-thirds of our Senators.
The Senate Republican policy paper argues that CAFTA "will promote democratic governance." But, there is nothing democratic about CAFTA's many pages of grants of vague authority to foreign tribunals, on which foreign judges could force us to change our domestic laws to be "no more burdensome than necessary" on foreign trade.
We have had enough impertinent interference with our lives and economy from the international tribunals Congress has already locked us into, such as the WTO (World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Americans don't want decisions from another anti-American tribunal any more than the French and Dutch wanted their lives micro-managed by Belgian bureaucrats.
The EU political elite ridiculed the French and the Dutch for not realizing that globalism is on the march, and we should all get on the train before it leaves the station. The French and Dutch woke up to the fact that the engineers of the EU train are bureaucrats in Brussels and judges in Luxembourg, who invent regulations and judge-made laws, without so much as tip of their hats to democracy.
The pro-EU political bosses blamed the "non" vote by the French on worry about losing their jobs to the cheap labor of Eastern Europe and Turkey. But the worry was grounded in reality, and Americans are likewise correct, to worry about how CAFTA will put U.S. jobs in competition with low-wage Central America, where the average factory worker is paid about one dollar an hour.
CAFTA would even prohibit U.S. states from giving preference to American workers when taxpayer-funded contracts are granted.
CAFTA is not about free trade; it's about round-trip trade. That means multi-national corporations sending their raw materials to poor countries, where they can hire very cheap labor and avoid U.S. employment, safety and environmental regulations, and then bringing the finished goods back into the United States duty-free, to undersell U.S. companies that pay decent wages and comply with our laws.
The promise that CAFTA will give us 44 million new customers for U.S. goods is pie in the sky, like the false promise that letting Communist China into the WTO would give us a billion-person market for American agriculture. Or, the false promise that NAFTA would increase our trade surplus with Mexico to $10 billion when, in fact, it nosedived, to a $62 billion deficit.
Knowing that Americans are upset about Central America's chief export to the U.S., which is the incredibly vicious MS-13 Salvadoran gangs, the Senate Republican policy paper assures us that CAFTA will diminish "the incentives for illegal immigration to the United States." That's another fairy tale, like the unfulfilled promise that NAFTA would reduce illegal aliens and illegal drugs entering the U.S. from Mexico.
By stating that CAFTA means the implementation of a "rules-based framework" for trade, investment, and technology, the Senate Republican policy paper confirms that free trade requires world, or at least hemispheric, government. You can't have a single economy, without a single government.
CAFTA may serve the economic interests of the globalists and the multinational corporations, but it makes no sense historically, Constitutionally, or democratically. Americans will never sing "God Bless the Western Hemisphere" instead of "God Bless America."
Thanks for posting the charts. They tell the entire story.
What a hoot! You really have lost your marbles. Oh yeah, let's start giving away the store which is what happened when Xlionton gave away Elk Hills petroleum strategic reserve to Gore's patron saint...Arm&Hammer's Occidental Oil.
And let's take a little comparative examination of your purported...and unsupported...asserted numbers.
Counting the unfunded liabilities, the liability numbers are much worse still than your claimed net worth.. Those liability numbers were based on the official numbers...which do not list off-budget debts or contingent liabilities. An example is the federal government's un-funded contingent liabilities for social security/Medicare estimated at $44 trillion. There also huge additional amounts for numerous other unknown contingencies that were listed in the chart. You disproved none of them. Hence, the numbers actually at least twice as bad, i.e.,:
SUM Government + Private Sector Debt (including Contingent liability items*)
Total Debt $84.1 Trillion Per capita debt= $286,258
$286,258 per head of real debts eclipses your phantasml equity claim which adds up to only $217,300.44. And your phony equity is based on $68,000 drawn out of thin air. Airily assuming that people will spend $10,000 per acre for tundra, desert and swamp of U.S. park land...and just who is going to buy?? Last I heard, China is more interested in buying up our military and industrial technology and core assets that are more fungible...like oil, gas, plus iron and radioactive lanthanide ores. T'sk, t'sk.
BTW, note that Milton Friedman has commended the very site that you are pooh-poohing out of knee-jerk agenda-driven inertia.
Smarter than Which Government? And What market would that be? The same market that is distorted without any corrections whatsoever by the U.S., tilted by the Chinese Communist Government, merrily gaming the vaunted "smart people" in our market system?
Face it, they are successfully Playing our country, the "Main Enemy" for saps. And you are acting like an co-dependant enabler.
Got any Kool-Aid?
So, the government promises to pay $50 trillion to me in 10 years. In 10 years the government raises taxes by $50 trillion to pay me. Or they default and don't pay me. How does either scenario reduce the total wealth of America?
I don't want you to hurt yourself thinking about it, so I'll give you the answer now. It doesn't reduce the wealth of America.
All governments.
And What market would that be?
That'd be the bond market.
The same market that is distorted without any corrections whatsoever by the U.S., tilted by the Chinese Communist Government, merrily gaming the vaunted "smart people" in our market system?
So, the Chinese are tilting the market by receiving 4.2% on 10 year bonds when the inflation rate is 5.7%? And the rest of the market isn't dumping bonds at that rate to buy gold? Or something that won't lose 1.5% a year?
B'zzzt. Wrong again. (Gee, don't you get tired of being wrong?) LOL! You shouldn't have tried to butt into this thread and attack one of our fellow mainline Reagan conservative stalwarts...Phyllis Schlafly.
Don't hurt your brain any further coming up with such lame rebuttals.
I.e, The government just can raise taxes on us... That means, we won't have the wealth, the government takes it...and its distributees will. And those distributees aren't me. And raising taxes will do what to the economy?
So the bottom line is that the wealth we supposedly now enjoy, which you breezily assert has never been better... goes away. And if OUR GOVERNMENT defaults, then the currency we depend upon, the Dollar and its value goes to zero, and we have the same result. The wealth we have now goes away.
And btw the unfunded contingent liabilities aren't all 50 years out. The leading edge of the Baby Boom is heading into retirement in less than 10 years?
So, Thanks, but no thanks. Not drinking your trade-imbalance currency-debauching debt-increasing Kool-Aid.
NO SALE!
The discussion was about household wealth in America. If the government takes money from some households and gives it to my household, that doesn't change the wealth of America. Of course raising taxes hurts the economy. If the government defaults, that also doesn't change the wealth of America.
And if OUR GOVERNMENT defaults, then the currency we depend upon, the Dollar and its value goes to zero, and we have the same result. The wealth we have now goes away.
How does the government defaulting on their promise to me impact the value of the dollar? If the Feds don't pay me my promised Social Security benefit, how does that lower America's wealth? If the Feds do pay me, how does that lower America's wealth? The money goes from one American to another, no net increase or decrease for the nation.
Your economic ignorance is like the North Star!
The economy is booming because of the over inflated housing boom. What until Greenspans kills the golden goose with the interst rate hikes. What constitutes a booming economy anyway?
I, unlike you, do not assume the bond market trade is necessarily all that bright.
Remember what Abraham Lincoln said. You can fool all of the people some of the time. And some of the people all the time. But you can't fool all the people all the time.
The economy shortfalls and damage has been counter-balanced by debt. That can only be sustained so long. I believe we are running out of rope now. If I were to manage the funds, it would all be into energy. Notice that is where China is heading...
Ditch the treasuries. Some of the funds are dumb enough to buy the phony CPI Kool-Aid. After all, you buy into it. And then self-servingly rationalize that because you buy it, that it can't be wrong. I.e., all the rest of your theme is an exemplary display of cognitive dissonance.
If the government takes money from all U.S. households to pay Japan and China, et. al., then we indeed will be poorer. Why do you think the IMF has been sounding alarm bells about U.S. debt imbalances for the last four years?
As for your "casting stones" about relative levels of economic ignorance, I don't think your glass house can survive.
Bright enough not to lose 1.5% a year on a 10 year bond.
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
See, that's why the bond market is smarter than the government.
all the rest of your theme is an exemplary display of cognitive dissonance.
Yeah that whole moving money from one pocket to another is too complicated for you.
Do I have to explain the difference between our external debt and the unfunded liabilities we will owe to other Americans?
Exactly wrong. They are doing precisely that.
See, that's why the bond market is smarter than the government.
No, as per your argument, it's losing 1.5% a year. Maybe, as per Lincoln, eventually, it will wake up. But it has not quite yet.
If your whiney economist were right, and inflation was 5.7% and he was the only one who knew the truth, he'd be worth trillions.
How so? Are you saying the prices are inflated? Are they building too many? Are people buying them? In my opinion there is much more to the economy than the housing market.
What constitutes a booming economy anyway?
The sound. You can hear it. Why, you used the word twice in the first sentence. Hear it?
People working and spending money as they are now. Manufacturers making stuff, trucks and trains transporting stuff, farmers growing stuff and people buying it, people putting money in the bank and the bankers lending it to others, people hiring others and others working, you know,economic stuff just like is happening now.
Paul Ross 293: the bond market is ... ... losing 1.5% a year....
I think what we have here is a failure to communicate-- maybe the hour was late but your posts just don't compute. Let's take this one point at a time; are you disputing the fed's family wealth data? With the bond market, who do you say is loosing money: the bond buyers or the bond sellers?
Donkey? Not exactly the term I was thinking of in my reference to you but since yours is more polite, we can stick with it. You are however, most definitely, an economic Eeyore.
I don't know what's funnier, you claiming that smart people all over the world are losing 1.5% on their bonds, that GDP is flat or negative and that unemployment is 12.5% or, that you enjoy life just fine.
Any rational thinker is going to subscribe to Alan Reynolds' view of calculating inflation over some wild eyed doom and gloomer who thinks the bond market is untrue, that we have negative GDP and that unemployment is really 12.5%. All one has to do is look around them to figure it out. If calculating inflation was as buggered as you claim, Reynolds would surely have addressed it.
Hey expat, thanks for that chart from the Fed. I was looking at Hodges debt page, before I read your post, wondering how his numbers could differ so much from Forbes and the Fed. Well, I guess if I didn't count my assets I'd be in a world of hurt too. LOL!
Now, in response to his obvious oversight, I see that the real debt of America has now gone up to more than $84 trillion. That is one incredible moving target.
Damn right. This isn't free trade, it's managed trade. As long as we allow Americans and American-based businesses to export and import freely, subject to modest tariffs, that should be enough!
Unbelievable. Why the hell SHOULDN'T we prefer Americans to work on American projects, such as the Interstate Highway system???
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