How to Pay Off the National Debt

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Our credit is bad because of uncertianty.

Like when politicians hold the economy in peril for a ransom of tax breaks for their best buddies.

Why would you think reduced funding leads to a more affordable education? The exact opposite is true. When colleges lose funding, they increase tuition making college less accessible. Add to that a reduction in grants and it's easy to see how student loans are becoming so burdensome.

From: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/break ... dents.html

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Temple University is hiking annual tuition this fall by about 10 percent - or nearly $1,200 - to make up for recently approved deep cuts in state education aid, school officials announced Friday."

This is not unique to PA. This is going on all around the country. Granted Corbett's cuts are a bit more extreme, but he's a bit more evil than most other governors.

I suspect he's talking about private college & university tuition. Which sometimes increases strictly because the market will bear the increase, because the feds will guarantee the student loans.

Diploma mills should be shut down. And their proprietors prosecuted if at all possible.

Whether backed by a variable quantity of paper bills or by a finite quantity of shiny rock, inflation still ensues when more bills are printed. For the ones backed by gold or silver, their value is diminished according to the quantity of mineral divided by their amount. For those bills which back themselves, as they increase in supply they decrease in value also. More of them means that each is worth less, so it is inflation either way. Printing forever more supply of paper money yields an ever decreasing in value form of currency. I have in my wallet an hundred trillion dollar bill from a nation whose economy collapsed due to inflation of this very nature.





Actually, third parties have to reach a 5% popular vote before they receive taxpayer funding for campaigning. And no, we have an either-or system of voting. The ballot system in Australia allows for prioritization rather than a boolean selection.



That would increase the perceived value of degrees, since it would allow for smaller teacher to student ratios, but it would actually need to cost more then too since the cost of college would not be as able to be distributed amongst more students.



I'd rather have the theoretical knowledge than train myself to benefit an industry which may eventually become obsolete and specifically learning skills for a manufacturer. 300 MHz is within radio frequencies, and I could probably rig a system which would allow me to identify frequencies emitted even with the meger electronics equipment I have now. Although my theoretically knowledge in this field only encompasses the Bohr model mathematically, it would still be possible to do some measure of radio spectroscopy without learning quantum mechanics just yet. I'm going to eventually teach myself quantum mechanics though, I just want to finish studying the prerequisite mathematics for it first.



Really?



Okay, so career politicians who are merely taxpayer supported are better than those who have family members who work? I have no idea about the intricate details of this particular situation of the current governor of Florida, but do the laws the benefit his wife's business benefit only her or do they detriment anyone (if you've studied economics you'd realize the question I'm asking.)

Not quite correct. In the case of a fiat currency, you are ignoring the deflationary effect of economic growth. In a normal economic cycle, if the amount of currency is fixed, the value of currency increases with growth in the economy. The goal of monetary policy is to maintain inflation at a level roughly consistent with economic growth so that the actual price of goods and services remains stable within the economy.

Now, I grant you that in the last four years we have seen an abnormal economic cycle in which the private sector's misadventures have created a liquidity crisis that was only unjammed through the issuance of new currency. The result has been the lower value of the US dollar--but there has also been relative stability within the general US marketplace. (The current US inflation rate is approximately 3.5%, not outside the realms of the reasonable, particularly considering the deflationary period in 2009).

With a commoditized currency, however, the value of a fixed amount of currency increases with increases with the price of the commodity. However, if that commodity's price is growing faster than the economy that the currency services, then deflation is the result. Deflation can be enormously detrimental to an economy because it punishes borrowers and diminishes incentives to invest because there is a substantial risk-free rate of return by holding currency in specie. In a shrinking economy, commoditized currencies rise in value even more, creating a deflationary spiral that worsens, rather than mediates the recession.

The issue of collapsing currencies is, I suggest, due primarily to the creditworthiness of the economy underwriting the currency. If you believe the United States to be less credit worthy than Zimbabwe, then by all means, start buying CAD, EUR, GBP, RMB and JPY (all fiat currencies, by the way).

1: T-bills, like everything else, are worth what someone is willing to pay for them.

2: The value of shiny rocks is quite variable. Just ask Glenn Beck.

3: There are not, in fact, enough shiny rocks to go around, if we wanted to base all of our currency on them.



If your chances of getting elected are vanishingly thin, why should you get taxpayer funding?

What you are talking about is instant runoff voting. Which Australia may or may not use - I don't know.

When people say "Australian Ballot" they mean the system the australians worked out where:

1: The polling is funded by the government rather than the parties

2: Ballots are provided by the government which contain all candidates and issues, rather than parties or newspapers or private citizens providing ballots that contain only the issues important to the printer

3: Voting is done in secret instead of in an open, town-hall sort of fashion.

Those ideas were, believe it or not, revolutionary at the time that Australia implemented them.

Instant Runoff Voting is most commonly used in situations where there is unlikely to be a single candidate who gets a simple majority. I have heard that the mayor of London is elected this way - where there may be 5 or more viable candidates and almost nobody gets a simple (<50%) majority of 1st choice votes, but someone generally has a simple majority of 2nd choice votes.

That would be nice to have, but i don't see how you would convince the ruling class to implement it.



First you will need to build an 11-tesla superconducting electromagnet to create the proper magnetic field. You will need to secure a source of liquid helium to properly cool it.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. All the cool kids are identifying their substances with it.



This also relates to what I was saying about manufacturing -- I specified manufacturing for export because legal gymnastics over the last 10 years or more have classified things as manufacturing that are clearly not. If you assemble hamburgers at McDonalds, you count as a manufacturing job these days.

But yes, manufacturing for export is up in the US for the last few years. And employers are starting to complain that they can hire all the kids with bachlors degrees in psychology or political science they could possibly want, but owing to the stark lack of vocational schools in this country, they can't frind the people with vocational training that they need.



Florida has a huge problem with prescription pain killer abuse. The wife of the governor of florida happens to operate a chain of pain management clinics. Oh, and he's made it harder to prosecute pain clinics for sketchy prescribing practices. And made it easier for his wife and her patients to bill the government.

You think maybe they have a joint bank account?

This guy is just one glaring example. Hardly anybody working at the federal level has any problem getting gobs of cash on the side.

Okay, lets get something straight...

As of right now, American credit is as good as it gets BECAUSE the very idea of not paying our bills was unthinkable...

Until the Tea Party thought about it. Now, thanks to Washington, partisan jackassery, our credit rating is headed into the crapper.

AA credit status will be plenty bad; an automatic bankruptcy jubilee would make us economically radioactive.

Economics 101: You don't do business with people who don't pay their bills.

China could kill every man, woman, and child in the US (all 300 million), take 1 for 1 losses AND BE BETTER OFF.

The best we could do in a war against China is play nuclear spoilsport.

And we could nuke 2 billion people to a gas overnight. You don't think we would invade China, do you? We would use lots and lots of H bombs on them.

ruveyn

Yeah, we could play nuclear spoilsport... We nuke china, they nuke us, and so does Russia and India just for wrecking their neighborhood...

So, as I see it, in a war with China we have two options, let them win or destroy the world...

I say let China repo Texas.... They paid for it fair and square.

but make them take oklahoma as part of the deal

Better Idea, we give China California, and make them take the Botox Queen with them. Texas is about the only state doing well economically at the moment.

George Patton once said Americans can't stand a Loser. It looks like we are doomed.

ruveyn

No, it's really not. Texas is just as messed as everyone else, if not more so. From: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/edi ... 71463.html

"How bad is the Texas deficit? Comparing budget crises among states is tricky, for technical reasons. Still, data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggest that the Texas budget gap is worse than New York's, about as bad as California's, but not quite up to New Jersey levels."

Add to that...

"Yet Perry wasn't lying about those "tough conservative decisions": Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It's hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts."

Who is the Botox Queen?

Explains why they get better education results than California...

Furthermore, the cost of living in Texas is a lot lower than it is in California, New York, New Jersey, etc. However, you didn't take that into account, nor did CBPP take that fact into account, because it completely torpedos their narrative.

What does cost of living have to do with budget gaps?

Education rankings: http://education.usnews.rankingsandrevi ... statistics

Texas did better than I thought, #14, but it's still below CA, NY, and NJ (3, 5, and 4 respectively).

And what about their poor health rankings: http://statehealthstats.americashealthr ... te-Ranking

Texas ranks 40th for overall health and 50th (yes, the absolute worst) for lack of health coverage.

I'm still curios what Botox Queen meant.