If we avoid the fiscal cliff... the U.S. dollar is doomed.

You can’t eat gold, Nick. I’m hoarding Twinkies.

LOL :mrgreen:

If you don’t think we are in debt up to our eyeballs you are dreaming. They all talk about the $16.3 Trillion debt, they don’t talk about the money they took out of SS and Medicare that they replaced with IOU’s. When you add the unfunded liabilities into the equation we are looking at over $80.0 Trillion. Are we in the same position as Greece, no, not if you are looking at over $80 Trillion. We are in worse shape.
Washington doesn’t have a tax problem, it has a spending problem.

Good post Aubrey… and 100% true.

If you are proposing a grand austerity than be ready to take your tin cup for collections, because that’s what it would lead to. There’s no other option as of yet.:-k

Austerity will happen.

Either voluntarily or by force.

We have a choice.

Yes and what that may be?

Mike I think our “Choice” has already been made for us by the dependency class. We have no one in position of power willing, or able to fight it.

Just fasten your seat belt for the next two years, when we can then increase Ohio and Virginia’s unemployment rates by one House member each.

Excellent response Nick. The socialists keep perpetuating the lies knowing the liberals will fall into the thinking that this is actually good for the poor. Unfortunately, liberals think that social justice programs are the mechanism to free the impoverished, when in all actuallity it robs them of any desire to raise themselves out of the circumstance they are living in. If we remove the hardships of poverty, we have taken away the only true motivating factor that causes one to aspire to change.

Society over-rewards cleverness.

InterNACHI pays Chris a lot of money, but not because he works hard.

What this means is that the world is already unfair. People like me, who are not only willing to do hard manual labor, but actually like it (I have the body for it)…can’t make a living at it. The Lord knows… I’ve tried. Now if I can’t survive by simply working hard… I imagine that other hard-working people find difficulty surviving.

Anyway, I know a lot of hard-working people, people who do the physical work in our society… who have trouble putting food on the table. If you wanted to hurt these people, this would be the master plan: Have the government spend like a drunken sailor (right now, the federal government spends 1.3 trillion more than it takes in EACH YEAR!). Then have the Federal Reserve print money, lend it to the big banks at .25% under the agreement (wink, wink) that they lend it back to the government’s at 1.25%.

Sounds brilliant at first: The government can keep spending, the banks make 1% guaranteed for doing nothing, and we don’t have to raise taxes. But everyone can’t win here… who’s getting harmed? The working man is. Although his taxes don’t go up (an in fact, he may pay little in federal taxes)… he’s being taxed to death by devaluing the purchasing power of what little money he earns to begin with. It also disproportionately harms blacks and the elderly.

If I were a Martian eonomist on the planet Mars, looking down at earth through a telescope… I’d declare that the the U.S. is at war with the poor, the working man, blacks, and the elderly.

BTW: If anyone is scratching their head about why I include blacks and the elderly in my list of the groups that are harmed by printing… it is because blacks are disproportionately unable to access capital (borrowing is the ultimate hedge against printing-created inflation) and the elderly are disproportionately on fixed incomes (devaluing the purchasing power of the dollar through printing harms those who can’t increase the number of dollars they live on).

All “savers” are being punished by the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low.

They have little or no opportunity to live off the interest on their principle and are watching their nest eggs diminish or are driven into risky investments that may look good in the short term but potentially could suffer catastrophic losses when everything comes apart at once.

It is difficult to understand why this is not being reported on by our oh so smart media.

Maybe if their guy wasn’t in office they would be singing a different tune.

It would have been worse without current monetary policy. And for the elderly, it’s not easy but at least many have annuities, SS and other benefits.

Imagine a monetary policy reversed; the country would be crying “bloody murder.” Businesses failing left and right. Scarce employment if any.

More likely, America with all her current issues would muddle through, albeit slowly.

The fact that we have not let bad businesses and bad banks fail and instead have instituted a policy of continual bailouts means that instead of a short time of pain and quick rebuilding our leaders haven chosen a protracted and ugly slow death.

Now they won’t admit it but that is what is going on.

We would be well on our way to a robust recovery had it not been for the bailouts and a Fed that continues to degrade the value of our money.

It is the incomplete application of Keynesian economics that has brought us to this point.

I think Keynes is wrong but at least he understood that any debt incurred to “boost” the economy in bad times had to be paid back in good times.

Instead the fools in charge only demand more stimulus while never paying back the debt incurred.

This is a recipe for financial disaster of monumental proportions.

Correct. Our Federal Government is controlled by big bankers. By keeping interest rates at zero and devaluing the purchasing power of savings through printing, The Federal Reserve forces people to take their savings out of the banks and invest it in equities with Goldman Sachs, to try to keep up with inflation. It is an all-out attack on the working man who is trying to earn a little interest on his savings, and the fixed-income elderly who are trying to keep up with inflation.

No doubt it’s baffling to understand how monetary policies work at different stages in this global economy. A helpful first source would be to study “the great depression.”

BTW Keynes work has been the basis of economic successes in the world especially during crisis with rising unemployment.

People should be more concerned with the return of their principal than the return on their *principal, *in this environment.