France, Greece choose suicide over solvency; are we next?

BizPacReview.com ^ | May 11, 2012 | Michael Dorstewitz

[cap10mike]

LOL! I’m sure Margaret Thatcher is chuckling over this one.

[cap10mike]

Good point! And assuming we can get him out of office, we’re gonna be spending decades trying to get things back the way they should.

[cap10mike]

Bwahaha! I couldn’t say; it’s all Greek to me!

[cap10mike]

Even John Maynard Keynes said “government stimulus spending” had very limited application.

[cap10mike]

I have to agree with you here. Witness how Paul Ryan is so criticized for his plans to save Social Security and Medicare.

[cap10mike]

I submit that it results in both the banks’ and the country’s suicide. When we don’t pay our debts, the dollar suddenly loses its worth, just as if we had paid the debts off with newly-printed money.

[cap10mike]

Good point.

[cap10mike]

No word for “warrior?” Sacre bleu!

[Vanders9]

Its very curious, but its quite usual for “disciples to go further than their master”. I mean that economists that call themselves “keynesian” are far greater devotees of keynesian economics than John Maynard Keynes was himself! This happens in other spheres of life. Many Calvinists are far more extreme than Calvin ever was.

[Vanders9]

I don’t understand that article at all. It sounds like total double-speak. Even if you accept that deficit spending in itself was not the cause of the current crisis, it can hardly be a good thing to have in the long term.

[Savage Beast]

Two.

Why?

[ichabod1]

The author gets the PIGS thing wrong. First it was Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greese, Spain yielding PIIGS. Now to quote Ichabod1 quoting uh, Ichabod1, it is Portugal, FRANCE, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, for PFIIGS. PFIIGS. That’s what it is.

[ichabod1]

He also said In the long run we’re all dead.

[Owl558]

Why - Demographics. I have 2 kids as well.

As you rightly point out, Europe is in a demographic death-spiral because they aren’t having kids. You need to have at least 3 kids for your population to grow. I was just curious how many you had. For you and I with 2 kids each, the population is holding steady, but not growing.

[Savage Beast]

It was a mistake for me to have only two. If I had it to do over I would have at least three or four. I am a self-made man. I was very poor when I was growing up. My father died when I was 14 years old. I was and still am phobic about poverty. I made lots of money, but I was always afraid that I couldn't take care of as many children as I would like to have had. In retrospect I could have done so easily.

In the generations before our grandparents, it was commonplace for people to have 5 or 10 or more children.

[Savage Beast]

As someone observed here on FR a while back, the people of the West have aborted, birth controlled, and homosexualized themselves into oblivion.

I suspect that the decadent Western Leftists' Islamophilia may be a subconscious desire for the absolutes that Islam promises.

[Nowhere Man]

Kinda makes you wonder if the whole planet has wandered into some kind of “stupid zone” in the Universe.

Maybe we should name our planet Htrae, that's where Bizarro in the Superman comics came from. B-P

[Nowhere Man]

I also agree, I think the only thing we can do is just default and bankruptcy and rebuild from there, that’s how far out of control we are. I know some brought up dire consequences in doing this but IMHO, we are past the point of no return, the red fuel light in the cockpit came on and we just have to fly on to our destination.