the crap work at my rapacious, capitalistic sweat shop. You volunteering?

To keep the numbers easy, say you make $100K. Has US GDP tracked France’s GDP over the past 30 years, on average you’d be making $75K. But your company couldn’t fire you, and so you could just slack along at $75K.
Would you make that trade?

In response to the wondering about “something for nothing”, the US Govt has the power to tax you explicitly (e.g. income or estate taxes), or implicitly (grant itself more money, or a greater share of the real claims on (mostly) US assets.

The former (explicit) tax is hard to avoid. You can either leave the country, make less total income, or engage in some fancy tax protection footwork. The latter (share dilution) tax can be avoided with a mere phone call. “Broker, buy Euros (or gold, etc) for dollars.” Wealth stored in non-dollar form. Done.

The US benefits from the world viewing the dollar as the foremost currency to store wealth. But if foreigners see that they’re about to get screwed through the dilution of their shares/dollars, you’ll here them scream “Gangway! I’m outta here!”

He’s saying that the government can print as much money as it needs to do whatever it wants. However, that is pretty much what Germany did in the 1920s, resulting in 100,000% yearly inflation rates (imagine paying $3,000,000 for a loaf of bread). Argentina did it in the 1950s and suffered similarly.

When a government just prints money in this manner, it causes massed inflation, which results in the need to print more money so that it can afford its spending programs. It’s becomes a cycle of print-devalue-print-devalue… It takes decades (and often a complete replacement of the currency) to fix.

Meanwhile, the government is borrowing as much money as it can, restricting the supply of credit. So the government spends, businesses falter, and the whole economy grinds to a halt as the sands of socialism gum up the capitalist grease.

and the market said obama your economic plan ain’t worth the paper it was written on. PERIOD

Francis gets it right, as usual, but misses ancient (like, thirty years ago) history,

Congress is ecstatic to borrow money in the short-term market at 1 or 2% … long-term rates have been down near 3%. Because interest (read__”minimum payment”) is cheap for $trillions in borrowing.

At 1%, the gummint can “borrow” a trillion dollars for only $10 billion per year in “deficit.” That is the short-term market … rates for 3-month to 2-year Treasury notes.

What happened before (Carter-Reagan) is that 30-year bonds yielded as much as 14% ($140 billion cost each year for a $trillion in debt … in 1981-82 dollars!) We only recently returned to selling 30-year bonds.

When you see a headline “Fed buys $6.95 billion in Treasuries, money is being created from nowhere … and separately, the Treasury prints even more.

Buy a wheelbarrow … you’ll need it soon enough for your next trip to Walmart.

Understand: There is no money in the Treasury. It has all been spent.

…Europe’s economy never grew at the rates we experienced in the ’90s.

European standards of living in Western Europe have (long-term) been dropping in comparison to the rest of the world. Eastern Europe (except for the last six months) have been increasing.

“I work to live, I don’t live to work” is a throw-away statement. It is meaningless. Work is irrelevant if it’s not productive. America is the most productive society on Earth. We work more hours, but we also represent 1/4 to 1/3 of the world’s economy. The poorest in this country have standards of living that far and away exceed the “average” of most nations and the “best” of many.

Quite frankly, if my taxes weren’t so freakin’ high, I could make this statement, too!

It all depends on how much Barry & his thugs muck around. My guess is they will try to keep it in check until Nov. 5th 2010…..

No one knows for sure but I would say other world events will make inflation look like a very small problem. Looks like plenty of peanut butter sandwiches are on the menu.