You would be suprised who I've supported in the past, I've voted republican and democrat and haven't voted before because I didn't think it mattered. I'm what you call an independent thinker bugs. You're just talking shit you hear on talk radio. And really you do not know if the protesters are punks and you don't know what they think. As far as thoughts go all any of us know for sure is what our own thoughts are and even then it can get confusing.
Anyone do business with a State? What are you going to do, write it off? Sell your recievable to a credit collector, hmnnn. I wonder what they pay on uncollected accounts. These are real people who had expenses to supply the state with services. The go'vt wants to provide jobs and on the other hand putting people out of buisness. Bunch of dopes. Deadbeat state: Illinois owes billions in unpaid bills "The unpaid bills range from a few pennies to nearly $25 million. In early September, for example, Illinois owed $55,000 to a small-town farm supply business for gasoline, $1,000 to a charity that provides used clothing to the poor, $810,000 to a child-nutrition program. Even death involves delays in Illinois. Funeral homes were waiting for $2.8 million in overdue reimbursement for burying indigent people. Leigh Ann Stephens wrote a letter in August âasking, pleadingâ for $50,000 the state owed to the DuPage Center for Independent Living, where she is executive director. It was the third time in two years that she had sent a hardship letter warning the center, which helps people with disabilities live outside of costly nursing homes, would close if it wasnât paid." cont on link.. http://www.timesnews.net/article/9037092/deadbeat-state-illinois-owes-billions-in-unpaid-bills
The dead give away of you not being an independent thinker is to respond with the "talk radio" bullshit. What about FOX? Or is talk radio the new hip thing to write off to? If you agree, put your hands up and 'twinkles'. If you disagree, give me the 'down twinkes'.
QUESTION: "Let's turn to a subject that's on the minds of many these days, as the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads: reining in the banks. You talk about how banking is an "intermediary good," like trucking, but the sector has become hugely bloated. What is the impact of that on the economy, and how might we "rein them in"? ANSWER ": There are two issues here. The first is that the financial sector can actively distort the economy insofar as it ends up financing speculative bubbles, as was the case with the housing bubble. In this situation, money that could have gone to productive uses instead was diverted into housing speculation. We had hundreds of thousands of housing units built that probably made no economic sense. Many of these are still sitting empty -- new developments at the outskirts of places like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Of course the run-up of house prices led to even larger distortions, causing people to spend based on the bubble-generated wealth in their homes. When this wealth proved to be ephemeral, homeowners found themselves heavily in debt and the economy lost the bubble-driven consumption, which had been a major engine of growth. The other issue is simply that the sector itself consumes a vast amount of resources. The share of the private sector devoted to the narrowly constructed financial sector (investment banking and securities and commodities trading) has quintupled over the last three decades. This means that we're paying five times as much for their services relative to the size of the economy. It is not clear how the productive economy is being better served by this sector now than it was in the '50s and '60s. Remember, this sector exists to allocate capital from savers to those who want to borrow and invest. It seems hard to contend that capital is being better directed to its best uses in 2011 than in 1961. Nor does it seem credible to claim that we are more secure in our savings than was true 40 or 50 years ago. To take the trucking analogy, this would be as though the share of the workforce employed in trucking had quintupled, but goods were not getting from point A to point B any quicker or more reliably. If this were the case, any serious person would be asking what is wrong with our trucking sector. Similarly, we should be asking what is wrong with our financial sector. There are several obvious steps that should be taken to rein in the sector. One is to break up "too big too fail" banks. These have no economic justification. The logic is that these banks can borrow at lower costs because everyone assumes that the government will come to their rescue if they get into trouble. This encourages excessive risk-taking and in effect is a taxpayer subsidy to the shareholders and top executives of these banks. It also make sense to restore the separation between investment banking and commercial banking from Glass-Steagall. The logic here is that the government is insuring the deposits of commercial banks. If a bank wants government insurance, then it should not be taking big risks with the money that is insured. Commercial banks were restricted to a relatively narrow set of loans --business loans, home mortgages, credit card debt -- in principle these could be easily monitored and the risks controlled. By contrast, investment banking means underwriting stock and bonds issues and other activities that are inherently risky. Government insured deposits should not be tied up in more risky activities that can be less easily monitored. The third and perhaps most important mechanism for containing the financial sector is a modest financial speculation tax. The idea is that a modest tax on financial transactions -- sales of stocks, bonds, credit default swaps and other derivatives -- would discourage excessive trading in these assets. In a paper I wrote with my friend Bob Pollin, we suggested a rate of 0.25 percent on each side of a stock trade and 0.005 percent on each side of most derivative trades. This would have almost no impact on people who are buying these assets for productive purposes. However, this tax would make the sort of short-term trading that dominates markets today much more risky, since there would be a much larger cost hurdle to overcome. This tax could also raise a vast amount of revenue, close to $150 billion a year, or 1.0 percent of GDP. The great aspect to this is that the money would come almost entirely from eliminating the waste in the financial sector. Our tax rates were intended to roughly double the cost of financial transactions. There is a far bit of research on how trading volume responds to changes in the cost and most find that it is fairly responsive, implying that if trading costs double, then the volume of trades will be reduced by roughly 50 percent. If we assume that this will be the response to our set of financial speculation taxes, the implication would be that people would be paying twice as much for each trade, but they would cut their trading volume in half, so that they would be paying no more in total for their trades than they were before the tax. So the stock portfolio in our 401(k)s may flip over less frequently, but we would be paying no more for the churning of stock then we did before the tax was put in place. If this turns out to be the case, then the full amount of the money raised through the tax effectively comes out of the hide of the financial sector. We will see fewer transactions, and therefore fewer resources, devoted to the sector. This is a great way to make the sector more efficient, eliminating a vast amount of waste in the sector. There is also the possibility that this tax will make the sort of speculative bubbles that have distorted the economy in the last three decades less likely. The evidence on this point is inconclusive. All we know for sure is that it a financial speculation tax will raise a huge amount of revenue directly from the hide of the financial industry." http://www.alternet.org/books/15272...e_can_make_the_'free_market'_work_for_the_99/
"...most important mechanism for containing the financial sector is a modest financial speculation tax." Why is the solution of every problem in this country end with the word tax? Will a modest tax solve the problem? Perhaps a draconian tax would really solve a problem quicker and once and for all.
Not everyone Lucrum. It isn't my fault I was born on the right side of the bell curve. And there are also those who disagree with me who also have a high IQ, so it doesn't necessarily make a person right.
Given enough time and destruction, Illinois would be held up as the model for America. Alot of headline gloss with unions and their cronies getting exorbitant pensions, a deeply embedded crony network of politicians and a black hole of finances that almost never sees the light of day. Those few examples of how bad that state's finances are is just the tip of the iceberg. I've read about numerous small businesses that have shut down due to cash flow problems that resulted from two plus years of delays in refunding tax overpayments.