The only Federal Reserve Bank I have seen them at is in San Fran. WTF?!?!? They should be at every FED in the country if they really want to “change” things. They are sitting in parks?!?!? They are clueless.
End fractional reserve lending, let deflation take it’s course, shrink go-mint and get the money out of government as well. Chilling in a park with 1001 different signs isn’t going to get anything done. The Fed is a big piece but that along isn’t the answer.
Washington fucking us again…you can thank Grover Norquist and his band of idiot minions.
^Yeah it is all his fault.:fail: If only they could take more of our money things would be just swell. After all that is the problem, we get to keep some scraps for ourselves. lol The ultimate would be if they just gave us a block of cheese and kept all of the money.
You and I at times agree and at times butt heads Joe. What would you propose here, I’m curious?
My 2 cents is the Trillion in bailout money should have either went to the people defaulting or to banks with the understanding that they cannot sit on the money nor gamble with it and they need to loosen lending requirements. Of course this assumes the bailouts were a requirement. I don’t agree with bailouts or infrastructure spending unless there is a surplus, near surplus or the debt will lead to fundamental growth. We won’t see fundamental growth for along time in the US thanks to their can kicking game and propping up bubble after bubble. My 2 cents anyhow.
We need to tax and spend more so we can be as successful as Europe… errrr, bad example.
You and I agree on most stuff. I’m also curious what you propose, especially as a business owner and employer.
Very, VERY, simple, go back to 2000 spending. (For a start)
A picture is worth a thousand words…
So how would you like it if your company had a huge budget deficit, and some outsider hijacked your board (if you had one) and any plan you came up with to close the deficit COULD NOT end up with you taking in any more money, any way you sliced it, and HAD to result in your biggest customers paying LESS? Good luck with that.
As for the bailouts, it’s obvious now that they had way too little accountability built in. I was admittedly for them at the time, but I figured in those hundreds of pages there was something to say that the money the banks were required to lend out had to actually be, you know, lent out. Granted, money is fungible so any dollar they lent out would be listed as “bailout money”, but at least someone would be getting credit. Needless to say, Congress caved to the big banks, but what’s done is done now. Government almost broke even on them so it wasn’t too big of a deal.
If I was trying to manage this deficit, first thing that would go is the Bush tax cuts on those making $250k and higher. The right calls them “job creators.” We lowered their taxes and they repaid us by being “job eliminators” and “job outsourcers.” Fuck them, they had their chance. Even Reagan believed in raising taxes on this bracket. All of them really need to go if we are serious about closing the gap, but we can start with the highest first since they benefitted the most. Next up is military spending. We spend so much more than any other military of the world that the law of diminishing returns applies. The first billion goes a lot farther than the 500th. Finish up in Iraq and Afghanistan and finish GTFO’ing, don’t make it a permanent commitment like Korea, Germany, etc. Infrastructure spending is important because it’s an investment in our future and because it puts people to work in a time of need doing stuff that’s going to need to be done sooner or later anyway. A lot of our infrastructure is still from the New Deal era and we need another (obviously smaller) round of updates. I would leave SS alone, but some domestic programs would have to be cut as well.
Really good article about Norquist and Cheney and how the Republican party has gone away from their historical role recently to cater to these special-interests. Here’s where a good portion of your budget deficit came from.
I just came into this thread to make sure Joe was giving the right Dem talking points while blaming the rich 
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Also I see no one discussing base-line budgeting in reference to these “cuts” they’ve been trying to make.
Read the article I posted. It quotes all Republicans. (Paul O’Neill, Mitch Daniels, George Voinovich, Lincoln Chafee, Alan Simpson)
You are taking Obama’s bait and making this a Rep vs. Dem/class envy issue. People making money is not the problem, spending is the problem. This so simple I will not accept the fact that you don’t get it.
As far as slashing $1.2 trillion goes, conveniently on Sept 10, 2001 Rumsfeld made a huge announcement that $2.3 trillion was missing from defense/Pentagon. Coincidentally the very next day we had a giant distraction to make us forget about $2.3TRILLION MISSING!!! Find that $2.3 trillion and you have almost double what they want to cut right now.
The point is I am so frustrated at people still buying this left/right thing. The criminals have taken over our country and I don’t give a rat’s ass if they have a D or an R by their name. You think more money should be given to the thieves. Preposterous!
I’d expect nothing less! Carry on 
That’s military spending, and I believe it. The military has had a blank checkbook in this country for far too long, sometimes throwing money around to contractors and such so fast they can’t even see where it lands. No one questions it, because they like being alive.
Alot of that surplus was fabricated and/or bubble induced. Clinton and his group did a number on CPI calcs and what not. I guess I’m saying that surplus isn’t real. 8/
We’ve been a debtor nation since what, the early-mid 80’s right?
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MEHHH. The banks propped the market up and sold for profit. They paid the go-mint back with market profits…but at what expense? That money was paid back from our 401k and IRA’s nominal value.
Sure the go-mint broke even and the banks produced “record profits” but the working class didn’t break even or profit.
I do agree with the tax issue though I’m for a flat tax and of course we need the go-mint to “right size” first. The “job creators” are a farse and they need to GTFO with their outsourcing and games. Also I’m with you on military spending but the majority believe it’s our “freedom” being fought for. 8/
Oh…as for SS, what about the population decline issue? The boomers retiring causes a HUGE issue as I see it. SS requires the same or greater numbers paying into the system and/or profit & growth through investing. We will have less people paying in and inflation robbing any investment gains…in nominal terms. No?
For me it all comes down to the lack of fundamental and nominal value in our economy.
Oh yeah, didn’t Clinton even remove medicare from the budget? Insane.
Don’t forget the govt regulations, etc make it attractive to outsource. We all want to live in our perfect little fairy world at the same time the govt looks the other way when other countries importing here pollute the world and use child slave labor. This little game will only last so long.
Outsourcing is not so much attractive but almost a necessity. Thanks to inflation our wages in the US have become pretty damn high and because the government and citizens are so far in debt we have little to no disposable income. That drives the need for goods to be dirt cheap but that’s a catch 22 when your domestic workers command a large wage. It all boils down to inflation as I see it.
Did Clinton remove medicare from the budget numbers? I hadn’t heard that, but know he played alot of games. It makes me snicker and sick at the same time, when people talk about how great he and Greenspan were for the economy. Our current suffering can be attributed to them, at least to a fairly large extent.
It’s not a repub or dem thing because Bush and Obama BOTH have merely reacted to the damage caused by a flawed system and past indiscretions as I see it.
I understand the chaos deflation would cause, I still choose deflation and defaulting on debt (as other countries will as well). The only other solution is hyper inflation or moving to a new currency which still would require re-valuing or defaulting on past debt. We need to take a few steps back if we’re to step forward again with any confidence.
How do you feel about tariffs? If we’re going to default on our debt and piss China off anyway, why not just tariff the hell out of foreign goods and rebuild our manufacturing sector? Sure, everyone would be paying $2000 for their flat screens instead of $800, but the money would be staying in the US and recirculating and generating growth. Everyone would tariff our stuff too, but right now we don’t make much anyway…US manufacturers would boom if they could compete on price in the US again, and then you’d see some real “trickle down” because companies would see enough demand to hire and the playing field would tilt closer to even for the labor side.
Trying to compete with the 3rd world on product prices is causing our employers to try to compete with them on labor prices. We need to get out of the race to the bottom.
I have mixed emotions because consumers would pay 30% more (or whatever) and the govt would be getting the money. That just does not sit well with me because you are in affect just taxing consumers. Just level the playing field and don’t make me try to compete with China while my hands are tied behind my back.
How else can we let you compete with China evenly though? We can’t realistically let you hire kids, pay a quarter an hour, steal ideas from whoever, and/or pollute at will. Also, the government would only be getting the money if they still buy the Chinese crap. If they bought yours, you’d be keeping it.