They're going down, down, down, down....
They're going down, down, down, down....
So true....and their tactics aren't working very well either. My mother exemplifies the typical Bush hater, but will now add that while she hates Bush most of all, the democrats have nothing. She may vote green again, as she did in 2000.
There are still more trillions of dollars being promised in Social Security pensions and Medicare payments, for which there is not enough money in the till. It is like writing checks without enough money in the bank to redeem them.
Present members of Congress win votes by promising such goodies. That leaves it up to future members of Congress to figure out how to welsh on those promises, which could not be met without jacking up tax rates to unprecedented levels.
Even that probably wouldn't provide enough money, since confiscatory tax rates confiscate the incentives needed to keep the economy going. An alternative political ploy would be to pay people the amount of money that was promised but in dollars so inflated that they won't buy anything close to what dollars bought when they were paid into the Social Security system. ~ Dr. Thomas Sowell in part one of a three part editorial, Jan 24, 2006
Financing government spending by increasing the quantity of money looks like magic, like getting something for nothing. To take a simple example, the government builds a road, paying for it in newly printed Federal Reserve notes. It looks as if everyone is better off. The workers who built the road to get their pay and can buy food, clothing, and now a road where there was none before. Who has really paid for it?
The answer is that all holders of money have paid for the road. The extra money that is printed raises prices when it is used to induce the workers to build the road instead of engage in some other productive activity. Those higher prices are maintained as the extra money circulates in the spending stream from the workers to the sellers of what they buy, from those sellers to others, and so on...
Inflation may also yield revenue indirectly by automatically raising effective tax rates. Until 1985, as personal dollar incomes went up with inflation, the income was pushed into higher and higher brackets and was taxed at higher rates
A third way that inflation yields revenue to the government is by paying off or repudiating, if you will part of the governments debt. Government borrows in dollars and pays back in dollars. However, thanks to inflation, the dollars it pays back buys less than the dollars it borrowed do. That would not be a net gain to the government if it the interim it had paid a high enough interest rate on the debt to compensate the lender for inflation. For the most part, it has not done so. Savings bonds are the clearest example. Suppose you had bought a savings bond in December 1968, had held it until December 1978, and then had cashed it in. You would have paid $37.50 in 1968 for a ten-year bond with a face value of $50 and would have received $64.74 in 1978, when you cashed it in (because the government raised the interest rate in the interim to make some allowances for inflation). But by 1978 it took $70 to buy as much as $37.50 would have bought back in 1968. Yet not only would you have gotten back only $64.74; you would have also have had to pay the income tax on the $27.24 difference between what you received and what you paid in effect, you would have ended up paying for the dubious privilege of lending your money to the government. ~ Dr. Milton Friedman from Chapter Eight of his 1992 book titled Money Mischief
Time to take a substantial position...in commodities!
WOW! That is them in a nutshell. GREAT phrase
pingaroo
And that will be the Clinton's Legacy