This one is just psycho. WTF is wrong with Republicans?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/herman-cain-video-chickens_n_1419050.html
Another data point provided by Herm Cain
By iwog Follow Wed, 11 Apr 2012, 6:23pm 7,703 views 88 comments
In Lafayette CA 94549
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delurking:
What does my saving my own sweat have to do with robbery?
Buying stocks means my savings and capital can be used to create some business or other. Stocks are not the worthless financial instruments that Citi, B of A, AIG, and others dealt with to make money out of thin air based on bad mortgages.
I buy and hold so I don't feel any guilt over it if the shares rise over time. I have a lot of time to wait.
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Santa Cruz, CA
iWog is correct that inflation hurts more those who have capital already than those who are just working. I saw this myself in Mexico and they had super inflation along with peso devaluation since I left around 82. A guy with a lot of money in 1980 in a Mexican bank would see his money almost evaporate. The guy who has no money saved doesn't really notice his net worth drop, since he has no net worth.
The poor people I knew then are now adults and all have a high standard of living. They are different than the Mexican illegals however: they went to college, which is generally free in Mexico.
In fact, none of the people I knew in 1982 has touched a dish, a mop, a broom, or a pan out of necessity as an adult. They all easily find those who didn't graduate from high school (33% of adults) to do those chores for them.
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iwog says
I recently ran into a YouTube video from Cloud's boyfriend to him.
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Honest Abe says
Inflation has a duel effect. On one hand, it makes wages go down in the short-term, harming the poor. On the other hand, it makes the real value of debt go down in the long-run, helping the poor, who often have large debts.
Our government loves inflation since it runs so much debt.
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I noticed that Iwaog had failed and refused to give what he thinks is the definition of Inflation.
Dan, I completly agree with your post, however I believe you overlooked one important point. I would say what that was, except that would give Iowog the answer to my question to him (What is inflation?).
Hope all is well in Florida, Abe.
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Honest Abe says
I've done it a dozen times before and generally it results in some idiot yelling "INFLATION ISN'T A RISE IN PRICES!!!".
Asking me questions that can be answered by Googling "definition inflation" is really childish and a waste of everyone's time.
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Dan8267 says
Inflation almost always results in an increase in wages. I posted two graphs demonstrating this in history but apparently there's still some doubt.
Workers benefit from inflation because inflation is an increase in demand for products and services. Unemployment in an inflationary economy is generally very low. Hoarders and people on fixed income are hurt by inflation.
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iwog says
agreed ... but, workers don't all get paid in dollars. China workers, for example.
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Santa Cruz, CA
I have never heard savers called hoarders.
Inflation hurts everyone, the poor I was friends with in Mexico felt the pain very much.
The math however is that they never LOST anything really.
There are also several kinds of inflation, depending on: 1. how you want to define inflation 2. the cause and so the "type" of inflation.
The inflation in the USA after WWII was related to rising wages, and this led to house prices rising. That inflation was very different to the energy inflation caused by the Arab oil embargo in the early 70's, entirely unrelated to rising wages. Likewise the Mexican inflation was not caused by rising Mexican wages but their various economic crises related to extreme govt. debt and lowering ability to pay it back (sound familiar?).
So, it's possible to argue about inflation since it's like cancer with several causes.
Rapidly rising prices per se are not good, but depending on how they are caused e.g. rising wages, this isn't as bad as falling value of a currency, etc.
Rising wage inflation is one kind of inflation, the prices follow the higher wages.
Wages rise when demand for workers meets with scarcity of workers, so the millions of illegal workers here drives wages DOWN. This trend cannot stop if they are not stopped from working here.
FYI, I know personally illegals who bought and walked away from a house that went "underwater". Multiply it by thousands of people and you are talking some serious dough lost in those transactions.
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clambo says
You seem to be deluded into thinking that you "make" money. Apparently, you're good a diverting it from the economic stream towards yourself. The real agenda of right wing fanatics is to capitalize on economic externalities to get rich at the expense of others. If you were in favor of a carbon tax to offset the unpaid costs you subject other to, or you were willing to pay enough taxes to educate our youth at the level you received, or you didn't engage in generational exploitation by cutting taxes (and hence increasing the debt our children and their children would have to pay) without cutting government spending, then I'd believe you are true capitalist. As it stands you're simply a opportunist taking advantage of others. You may be a winner in this game, but I don't see a shred of integrity.
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Santa Cruz, CA
I made my money pal. I never got rich at the expense of anyone else. I have 100% integrity because:
1. I do not seek free money from govt. I do not want to steal from taxpayers
2. I do not want to limit someone else's freedom to keep his money
3. I do not want to take from people's savings/capital to feed sloth, failure and other's bad decisions. (e.g. free money for underwater mortgage holders)
4. I don't divert anything, I have simply decided to save money and then I invested it.
5. I don't call names to those who live the way they want to. I do call names to assholes and weirdos who want to take from me to support their own pet charity projects.
Your insane rant is typical for the liberal.
Carbon taxes? How about we just run cars on natural gas and forget it. Besides, I have a very "low carbon" lifestyle. This is part and parcel of my extreme cheapskate lifestyle.
I am not an opportunist. I say that you do not have the right to pickpocket me to pay for the pensions of Washington DC goldbricks, food stamp queens, and other parasites.
You live in Oakland, so how many thousands of Oakland residents are taking free money while they create ruin in your "society" up there?
Your ideas would only create more of them.
Why did you crop out your boyfriend from your profile pic?
Pay to educate someone else's kids? We all do that already with taxation.
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iwog says
that was under the 1950s when WE had very lttle in terms of competition and our goods went to rebuild post war europe.
add to that organized labor, which had a higher membership.
things change, and we dont have inflation, high demand of international markets, or big labor...
we do have many global competing producers and lots of deflation which what is left of US Big Labor has little leverage to demand higher wages.
things today are different...
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God I wish Herman Cain was still running. I'm not sure what the fuck he's actually doing at this point, but the man is an endless font of crazy.
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thomas.wong1986 says
I'm never sure what to make of this rationale.
On the one hand, many free market zealots think Americans are the natural "Master Race" when we are capitalists. That in the "Good Old Days" before EPA and "Big Gubmint" we just naturally mopped the floor with everyone.
Other times they credit our industrial success with this a storyline about "everyone else was bombed back to the Stone Age". Well not everyone was, and in any case is either explanation TRUE?
Anyhow neither of these narratives work for me.
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Americans are not quite the "master race". The USA however was the best incubator for great minds to come here and for other great minds to flourish here.
Steve Jobs as an example would probably have ended up having a shitty life if he were born in London. He wouldn't have rubbed shoulders with people in any kind of high tech industry, and would surely have never met any people who had capital to help him get started.
The vast size of the USA economy, and the almost unique protection of private property from the Constitution encourages innovation. The fact that this was a new place for ambitious people to reloate, and it was a classless society (unlike European societies) allowed people to reach their potential here.
I would not call us the master race, but on the other hand, we may be waiting a while before another country has guys driving on the moon and living there for 3 days, with 23 or so guys visiting the place.
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clambo says
Republicans destroyed this. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan fully intend to make matters much much worse.
This is no longer a classless society. The standards for a regular person to enter an Ivy League University starts with a gpa well over 4.0...........unless you're George Bush, then you get into Harvard with a 2.35
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Vicente says
Good point. I do know that claims that Britain was "Bombed back into the Stone Age" are certainly exaggerated. Manchester was way beyond Me-109 escort range as was most of Britain's industrial heartland. The Battle of Britain - and thus the bombing of Britain - lasted a little more than a month. V2s later on but I don't believe they did much to British Industry. In fact in 1940 the UK was outproducing Germany in fighters.
And of course there were no laser-guided bombs (or GPS) and the capacity of German twin-engine bombers was tiny compared to today's airframes. German bomber groups got lost in the fog and clouds, or were scattered after tumbling with the RAF, so many groups didn't reach their targets, much less hit them. And for the first third of the Battle of Britain, which only lasted a few weeks in it's entirety, the Germans were mostly going after radar and airbases and not industrial or urban targets.
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thunderlips11 says
I've come up with a blended rationale that works for me.
Simply "Germany/Japan bombed" doesn't work really since it implies we got there by dint of being last drunk standing.
In the minds of proponents of America Ascendant, the USA was smart enough to be in the RIGHT POSITION to take advantage of this rebuilding vacuum. I think however dimly they try to reconcile these 2 narratives that's how they'd rationalize it. And of course current reality not agreeing with our "rightful place" as an industrial giant, they attempt to explain away the current situation as being the FAULT of immigrants or Libtards or something.
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iwog says
Don't know those graphs, but certainly in the short term, inflation decreases the real purchasing power of wages, as wage increases always lag. People have to react to rising costs of living and then demand raises from their employers or switch jobs. That takes time.
Now does inflation increase the long-term real purchasing power of wages? I don't know. I haven't heard an argument supporting or detracting from this. The real wages today are less than what they were in 1973 despite the enormous increase in worker productivity brought on by computers and the Internet, although the Internet seems to have improved wages significantly from 1996 to 2003.
Perhaps people don't buy that inflation improves wages because for 30 years, we haven't seen that.
iwog says
Another way to state that is that inflation steals money from savers to subsidize consumer spending. And people spend money less efficiently, when it's someone else's money.
A better mechanism would be to use the savings as investments in capital tools and infrastructure, providing a safe, positive real rate of return for the savers. It doesn't even have to be extravagant. A safe, real rate of return of 3% tax-free would be sufficient to ensure that savings don't hurt the economy, that people can save for major purchases instead of going into debt, and that the long-term economic needs for infrastructure is met.
tclement says
So true. The leaders of the right wing are all about parasitic zero-sum games, and the followers willingly vote against their own economic interest because the leaders keep saying Jesus this and Jesus that.
clambo says
Over the past 400 years, Europe has produce far more great scientists and thinkers than America. There was a small time in the 1920s and 1950s when America was catching up, but since we started the culture of stupidity, that trend has reversed. The typical American looks at book learning and intellectualism as negative qualities. The typical American doesn't want an intelligent president. This is scary.
clambo says
I disagree. Talentless charlatans can make it anywhere. London is no exception.
clambo says
If you ignore the b.s. nominal figures and just concentrate on real production, China is a bigger economy than ours and India is on its way. If the currency exchange rate were left to the free market, China would have more nominal GDP than the U.S. And China, India, and the other BRICS nations are only getting bigger. America, by contrast, is getting smaller. Size won't save us.
As for the protection of private property, there is none in the United States. It doesn't matter what's on paper, even the Constitution as that is violated every day. Think you own your house? The federal, state, or local government can take it away from you without compensation through eminent domain. What about the money in all your bank accounts? It can be seized at the press of a button. What about money in foreign bank accounts? It's illegal not to disclose them to the government, so the government can seize those as well at the drop of a hat.
What about your car? It can be compensated or they could put a tracking device on it. What about your phone? It's already tapped. Everyone's is today. Large computers clusters perform speech-to-text and then store all text in a database so it can be analyzed and mined later.
What about your body? Surely you own that? Not at all. The government can force you to provide fingerprints, DNA samples, blood samples, and any other medical sample even if you have not been charged with a crime, nonetheless convicted. They can strip search you, body cavity search you, force you to undergo radiation, take potent laxatives or other drugs, and well, pretty much do whatever they want to your body including torturing it to death.
So, what property protections do you really have? None. You can't have property protection without human and civil rights protection, including the right to privacy. And you can't have any of those as long as we're fighting the "war on terror".
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thunderlips11 says
Detroit looks like it was bombed back to the Stone Age.
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Dan8267 says
Has this happened? How did the government get around the just compensation rule?
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It happened in Florida to a dozen or so home owners when the EPA decided to take the houses they were living in for decades. The EPA offered them 10% of the market price, back in pre-bubble days, and said if they dared challenge it in the courts, they would get nothing.
The local news covered the story, but didn't follow up. Last I heard, they were being evicted with no compensation.
Basically, the government has complete authority to interpret any of its laws any way it pleases including what constitutes "just compensation". No organization can police itself.
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Too bad Herm is out - he definitely provided entertainment, like Singletary when he was coaching the niners and Ozzie Guillen right now with the marlins.
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tatupu70 says
Lobbyist money.
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Dan8267 says
Link? I find nothing.
Only "eminent domain" cases I can find involve cities wanting to snatch land to sell to developers.
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Dan8267 says
Indeed, a lot of scientists and thinkers came to America fleeing persecution in their birth countries. Thus, it is our multicultural society that has drawn and kept these immigrants in the past. We enticed them with freedom from, or at least, reduced bigotry; could we say that that would be true today?
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Dan8267 says
Neat trick, how does the US government reach into foreign banks and seize accounts? They can ask, but that's about it.
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US dollars say they belong to US Gov right on them. That may be how the Gov gathers them up from places hither and yawn? Totally a guess.
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iwog - the one-percenter landed gentry taking the populist "side" in a one sided war against the middle class. iwog spends copious amounts of time appreaing "democrat" and fighting for the little guy while living like romney on unearned income.
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Mick Russom says
So, in order to fight for the middle and lower classes, you must live in poverty?
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Vicente says
It was on all the local T.V. news in the late 1990s. I'll see if I can find a link, but it might be too old.
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bob2356 says
International anti-money laundering laws and other such international agreements. Our government and big banks have put a lot of pressure on small countries to allow the U.S. to audit and seize any account owned by a U.S. citizen.
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Dan8267 says
bravo sir. you should run for office
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Dan8267 says
That's a long way from you original statement that the government could seize foreign accounts at the "drop of a hat". The US government can't seize anything in other countries. They can ask other countries governments to seize assounts, but it's pretty tough to do and success rates aren't very high. Without evidence, of a crime having been committed the odds of success are pretty much nil. That means real evidence that will stand up in court, not just because I say so evidence that the US government gets away with in the US.
What does "big banks" have pressured small countries mean? That doesn't even make sense. Banks are corporations, why would they care? Why would they spend the time and money to do this. Any actual documentation of this?
It's all a moot point anyway. After all the regulations get up to speed, especially but not only FATCO, foreign banks are going to boot their American account holders anyway. Many have done that already. Despite what people think, there's not all that much American money overseas in individual accounts. Very, very few overseas banks have more than a handful of American accounts. The IRS paperwork will cost more than the accounts make so it's easier to just close them. It's getting almost impossible in many countries to open any kind of account as an American citizen. I don't even bother to use my US passport anywhere outside the US any more for anything.
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Iwog
@unless you're George Bush, then you get into Harvard with a 2.35
Did GW have that good of a GPA? I don't think he would have even gotten into any of the 10 UC schools if he had to truly compete.
Then there are those Americans that think he is brilliant for getting into Yale...sigh.
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ALL of these assholes are legacy admissions (mom or dad or the grands went) or institutional placements (mom or dad or grands made a little donation) and none ever had to compete for shit. The progeny of oligarchs just show up with a silver spoon in their mouths - or if you're George W, show up with Victor Ashe's dick in his ass.
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iwog says
Maybe that's true, but, problem is, we don't have any inflation right now. WE HAVE DEFLATION. While the money supply is growing, the credit market is imploding. The credit market implosion dwarfs the growth in the money supply, resulting in DEFLATION.
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dunnross says
I thought you had me on ignore?
You obviously don't know what deflation means. It doesn't mean a net decrease in the money supply.
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iwog says
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said that deflation means net decrease in the money supply. According to your own definition, if inflation means increase in prices (which is actually just price inflation, but you seem to have a difficulty with distinguishing price inflation from actual inflation - which is just a growth in the money supply), then deflation (or price deflation) would mean a decrease in prices. Well, that's exactly what we are having now is price deflation, because credit is imploding faster than money supply is growing.
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dunnross says
Let me make a small clarification, here. We have price deflation in everything that is tied to the credit market - ie. stocks and real-estate. Gold is free of credit market, so we have price inflation in gold, because the money supply is growing.