Mav88, please check my postings on the following threads, and after reading these two threads you will understand why we need National Health Insurance that covers the entire population in the United States. When you read these two threads you will understand why the urgency in creating a new National Health Care system here in the USA immediately. You and Krugman have rocks in your head, medicare is national healthcare and it is a disaster. You want more of that? Your logic and arguments are severly flawed because clearly you are a banana republic leftist. Please go to Cuba or Venezuela where you belong.
You are confusing the US government welfare program with the entitlement programs. SA, do you understand that the above is a dumb comment? All government handouts derive from spending bills, all of them. The constitution does not grant welfare, SSI, medicare or any other program the status of a right. You claim to be intellectual but you make really dumb assertions. It is quite clear that you are driven by hatred, not by any kind of genuine concern because otherwise you would be right back in South America where the poor are a larger fraction of the population.
Communists are just dumb in the end... truth is defined as whatever will advance the cause of the state. Eventually they are just making assertions and if you don't like it they have guns to back you down... arguing with them is futile since you are speaking two different languages no matter how much your expertise in the common language... The US figured that out, we had proxy wars with commies all over the planet for decades, as many as twenty or thirty at the same time, the world was on fire. There is not that much left of Communism really, the Chinese govt calls itself commie but really, they are going to do whatever it takes to be a part of the world since they can't lock people in anymore... Soros bought an election here recently and installed a commie who installed Wall Street. It should be interesting to see how that works out... for Soros!!! Dang that is weird, a billionaire commie with all the inside news from the White House... I would ride his coattails if I had a large fund to manage...
. May 17, 2009 SouthAmerica: Reply to Mav88 and Eight First, Paul Krugman is among a very short list of economists that I respect and agree with many of his opinions. I know a lot people who uses the Medicare system on a regular basis and everybody is happy with the quality of services that they get from that system. Mav88 said: âSA, do you understand that the above is a dumb comment?â That comment was: âYou are confusing the US government welfare program with the entitlement programs.â The US government has been dismantling Welfare since the mid 1970âs and today we have just a small fraction of the system that we had in the 1970âs. The Clinton administration reduced Welfare in a drastic way during that administration. Itâs a fact that Welfare has been reduced significantly in the last 30 years. If you think Welfare and the other entitlement programs are the same then why you think the politicians are afraid of touching the Social Security and Medicare portion of entitlements? The only piece of entitlements that the politicians have been reducing is Medicaid, because that portion of entitlement is geared to help the poor and destitute. By the way, real communism has been dead since the collapse of the Soviet Union â we still have a few small countries like Cuba that still frozen in a time long gone. China has become a capitalist economy with a supposed communist government â China is in a transition period to something. Second, both of you should change your mindset, otherwise it looks like your mindset is frozen on the past â On your limited view today there is only two economic alternative systems: 1) capitalism and 2) communism. Economic systems have evolved over the centuries and there were many changes during that time â and eventually capitalism and communism had its time in the sun, and now it's time for these economic systems to be put to bed. Economic systems are dynamic in nature and I am sure that today we are going through one of these historic turning points and the old economic system will evolve into something new. The new state-of-the-art internet technologies, all kinds of new technologies in general, combined with Creative Destruction, massive global unemployment, and so on â in time a new economic system will emerge from this chaos that would be better suitable to handle the new global economic environment. You have to think out of the box for you to be able to appreciate the real possibilities that exists for the future â and donât be surprised if 50 years from now you look back and realize that in 2009 you had no idea of the transformation that was taking place and how much the global economic system had changed during that period and in ways that you never could forecast or expect in 2009. Over the years I read a few times each of these 3 books. I suggest that both of you also take the time to read these books. .
. May 17, 2009 SouthAmerica: Here are the 3 books that I recommended on the above posting: By the way, global unemployment in 2009 got a lot worse since Rifkin published his book in 1995. 1) The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. By Jeremy Rifkin Paperback: 361 pages Publisher: published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group ISBN-10: 0874778247 http://www.amazon.com/End-Work-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0874778247 In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agriculture and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail, and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech global economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful. Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed. For the whole of the modern era, people's worth has been measured by the market value of their labour. In the U.S. corporations are eliminating more than 2 million jobs annually. In the U.S. more than 90 million jobs in a labour force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines. Recent studies have exploded the myth that small businesses are powerful engines of job growth in the high-tech era. To reduce unemployment by a single percentage point would require the overnight creation of something like eleven biotech industries. The gap in educational levels between those needing jobs and the kind of high-tech jobs available is so wide that no retraining program could hope to adequately upgrade worker's skills to match those limited high-tech job opportunities. One out of every three adults in the U.S. is functionally, marginally, or completely illiterate. In October 1944 the first mechanical cotton picker was successfully demonstrated in the Mississippi delta. It could pick 1000 pounds of cotton an hour, thereby doing the work of 50 seasoned pickers. In 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically; by 1964 it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines. More than 5 million blacks migrated north in search of work between 1940 and 1970. The fortunes of black workers in the North improved steadily until 1954 and then began a forty-year historical decline. Technology eliminates jobs, not work. You can continue reading - Notes on "The End of Work" by Jeremy Rivkin, 1995 â at the following website: http://www.basicincome.com/basic_rifkin.htm ***** 2) The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State By James Dale Davidson, Rees Mogg, Lord William Rees-Mogg Published: New York : Simon & Schuster, c1997. Description: 416 p. ISBN: 0684810077 http://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-James-Dale-Davidson/dp/B000F7BPFC ***** 3) THE GREAT RECKONING: Protect Yourself in the Coming Depression (second edition) By James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg Simon & Schuster © 1993, Pg. 254. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Reckoning-Protecting-Yourself-Depression/dp/0671885286 ***** Through Sovereign Individual and their two previous books Blood in the Streets (early 1987) and The Great Reckoning (1991, revised 1993), they have amassed an impressive track record of forecasting trends and events. Blood in the Streets successfully forecast the 1987 stock market drop, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Japanese real estate and stock market crash of 1989, the savings and loan crisis in the US, and the structural economics behind the squeeze on blue-collar incomes. The Great Reckoning focuses on the tumultuous changes of the 1990's. It explained why Russia would come to resemble a chaotic Latin American banana republic with hyperinflation, rampant corruption and crime; and how the breakdown of the old Soviet military command structure would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. The book also predicted the Yugoslav civil war, the collapse of African states such as Somalia, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its hostility to the West, the growing fiscal crisis of the Western welfare states and the resultant downsizing of governments and slashing of benefits (just beginning), the rise of domestic terrorism in the US, and the threat of large-scale violence in America's inner cities due to rise of a large criminal culture among the underclass - aided and abetted by the welfare state. We got an early taste of the latter in 1992 with the Rodney King riots. The book's prediction of a major deflationary depression hasn't panned out yet, but the dynamics the authors described to support their contention very much exist. The Sovereign Individual picks up at the year 2000, discussing "millennial madness", and moving on to describe the rise of the Information Revolution and its "cyber-economy". The authors describe how it will be as far-reaching in its impact on society as the Industrial Revolution, but that this time it will happen within a lifetime instead of centuries, and for the first time, on a global scale. It will signal the death or complete restructuring of many familiar large-scale institutions including, governments. One of the strongest points about the work of Davidson and Rees-Mogg is that they are able to present historical patterns and explain their relevance to the dynamics of change in the world of today and the near future. They deal with mega-politics or more specifically, with "the returns to violence" to analyze the rise and fall of institutions. The authors point out that the development of the armored knight on horseback in the 10th century overwhelmed the ability of the impoverished farmers to defend their villages. The early knights looted and murdered with impunity (one chapter subhead calls them "Hell's Angels on Horseback") â a malevolent equivalent of modern motorcycle gangs. According to the "returns to violence" theory, Davidson and Rees-Mogg consider the inventions of gunpowder weapons and the printing press to be the two key elements in the destruction of the structures of the Middle Ages. The rising merchant class allied with monarchs and provided them with the wealth to recruit large armies and build the firearms and cannons that blew down armored knights and castle walls. The power shift enabled kings to expand their control over large territories. The proportionate expansion of the scale of the economy increased the wealth of the merchants, a trend which was accelerated by the discovery of the New World and the technological improvements in ships and navigation which enabled the massive expansion of world trade. This set the stage for the rise of industrial production, which multiplied wealth and enhanced the ability of national governments to amass power both against other nations and internal dissidents. Meanwhile, the printing press destroyed the Church's monopoly on learning and information dissemination. Inexpensive new books enabled the spread of literacy â beginning with the merchant class. The ideas of the classical writers, coupled with attacks on the church and the heretical books on the new science, were widely available, and subverted the dogma of the declining Church. Millions of people deserted the Catholic Church, forming the leaner, meaner Protestant faiths and chapels. The Church reacted viciously with its inquisitions and religious wars, but to no avail. The old Church was eventually forced to clean up its act, downsize its structures, and modernize its doctrine to avoid extinction. Today, the nation-state has run the same course as the medieval Church, becoming corrupt, bloated and a drag on society. New weapons technologies are reducing the returns on violence. An inexpensive Stinger missile can bring down a multi-million dollar jet aircraft. The sprawling centralized systems of government and other industrial-age entities are increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attack using compact explosives, or even chemical, biological or mini-nuclear weapons. Very small groups or even individuals can wreak havoc if they wish. The sledgehammer approach of large industrial-age military forces is becoming obsolete. The authors also point out that pure information warfare within computer systems using "logic bombs" will be a part of future conflict, and they point out that Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation, if they needed to, have far more computing resources for such action than most governments. .
I remember the "Sovereign Individual" guys now. They had newsletters... they were arranging tours of South America to introduce people to opportunities in raw materials as I recall... I think people in the US are recognizing that we are in unsettling times. Ammunition is being bought up to the extent that it has been in short supply ever since it became apparent that a commie was going to be elected POTUS. Gardening is making a real comeback as well... I do believe that the American citizens have long recognized that welfare and gangster culture go hand in hand and they want the ammo to either fight the government or to kill off the gangsters in the case they start rampaging.. a good bit of both most likely... These Democrats are monsters of the first order really. They need the black vote. In order to keep the black voters on the Democrat reservation they sue the private sector and make Blacks unemployable by the private sector because the risk associated with hiring a black worker is ridiculously high. That keeps Blacks in public sector jobs or on welfare. The problem then becomes the reproduction rate of Blacks on welfare with nothing to do but fucking and the drug business. They control that with abortion. 80% of abortions are from Black women and most of the abortion clinics are in black neighborhoods. Democrats also support the notion that men that like to dick each other in their hairy stinking poop chutes and that insist on having the most disease ridden subculture imaginable should have rights and even marriages... they now have flesh eating bacteria outbreaks, if not chronically, in San Francisco... there is a news black out on that subject apparently, it was in the news briefly a while back, and I knew people that had it a few years before that, then no news for many months... Now Wall Street has teamed up with Obama. The current administration is the most Federal Reserve / Wall Street centric one ever in the history of the US. These monsters are continuing their onslaught on the middle class and people with sensibilities and it is hard to tell where it all will end. Serfdom seems to be the goal but is a serf with a small farm and armed up to defend it ever a serf really? This all really could lead to the breakup of the states. At this point not many want that but if the economic situation takes a huge downward turn or the boomers wake up to find that all the largess they voted themselves is vaporized by inflation, that could well be the outcome. Lots of people understand that the Federal government is horribly over it's boundaries per the Constitution. It has lied and bought it's way into too much power to suit a lot of people. A crisis could put their kind of thinking over the threshold and into the mainstream..