That was a really good post septimus; I also feel like the OP just spewed out a bunch incoherent rambling that makes no cohesive sense. There is a lot of interesting topics for debates here and I echo your call to jerry’smissingfinger to maybe just focus on one topic at a time.
Can I talk about one thing?
The notion that “raising the debt ceiling” somehow raises the debt. No it doesn’t. Spending money raises the debt. That money is spent when Congress passes spending bills.
Not raising the debt ceiling is like getting your credit card statement, and you owe $3000 dollars, and you hit the roof because you only allow yourself to go $2000 in debt. So if you just refuse to raise the debt ceiling to $3000, then you won’t owe the $3000? No, you’ll still owe the $3000. The time to not owe $3000 is gone and past, you should have decided not to owe $3000 last month back when you were on a spending spree at the mall, and back when you were quitting your job so you could make more money. Except you did spend the money, and you are making less money.
So what now? You borrowed the money when you spent the money, it’s no good complaining that you don’t want to be $3000 in debt when you are, in fact, $3000 in debt.
The “debt ceiling” is a ridiculous farce. The debt is determined by the difference between how much the government spends and how much it raises, not how much we say we’re going to borrow. Want to cut the budget? Go ahead and cut the budget. Want to increase revenue? Go ahead and increase revenue. But don’t whine about the debt ceiling and how we shouldn’t raise it. That’s nonsense.
Cite? :dubious:
Provide links to a history book, quoting thaty.
Lemur866: Exactly. What I want to know is why the Republicans don’t reduce spending. They control both the house and the senate and they bitch about it constantly. Why can’t they just pass a bill? I bet they could even get enough Democrats on their side to override a veto if they were a bit balanced in their approach. Hell, even when they controlled the legislature and the Presidency from 2002 to 2006, they increased spending both in real terms and as a percent of GDP. I can only conclude that debt is a problem when a Democrat is president and they need something to make political hay out of.
It’s even worse than that. The Republicans deliberately encourage deficits to increase debt. This serves their “Government is the problem / Liberals are spendthrifts / Starve the Beast / Defund regulation” agenda.
Rational observers might regard tax hikes and deficits as opposite approaches, but, talked down to by the Youtube and FoxNews propagandists, some laymen are ignorant enough to paint the tax cutters as those who are fighting the deficit! :smack: Does OP suffer from this particular pathological thinking? I don’t know: his inchoate rage is too confused to follow.
:dubious:
Nope you got it all:rolleyes:
seems pretty patient
Now it’s your thread
have fun with it:rolleyes:
WTF are you talking about?..Holy shit, can’t you see how off topic you are or are you one of those chicks that just like to bravely interweb argue behind the safety of a key board?
Since you’re so smart go ahead, I’m all ears
Dude, you are the one that couldn’t lay out a cohesive debate topic. I, personally would like to debate the wisdom of QE or the effects of having such low interest rates on society, but you are all over the map in your OP and have brought no data. You suck, not septimus.
Noted
there is plenty of data and links.
I did some of the research and posed a question, i am not going to spoon feed you information. The topic is all over the place because septimus took it that way, I even copied his post so people could see.
The numbers are there for you to research and debate, there is a link, there is date from records I have kept, there are quotes from people involved, I don’t know how much more you want. You disagree fine, tell me why! Don’t be a little bitch.
Oh …Happy New Years all:D
I’ll actually back up jerry on this (even though most of his argument is weak). He slightly mischaracterized it and gave it too much important, of course. I believe the conversation is discussed in Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx. In it he relates a series of letters between Jefferson and Madison while Jefferson is in France and Madison is leading the constitution convention. At one point Jefferson floats the idea that not only should no generation be able to foist debt on the next one (i.e. a balanced budget) but the government should be dissolved every 19(?) years and a new constitution created. This process would include wiping out all debts, public and private.
Madison attempts to steer Jefferson away from this idea–doing so gently according to Ellis–because he realizes this is completely unworkable (if Madison was on Twitter he’d call it insane). Ellis points out that this idea would be attractive to Jefferson because he was perpetually in debt. The idea died with Madison.
I’m working from memory but I’m pretty sure a budget guarantee was never discussed at the convention. So really it’s just an off-hand, fanciful notion by a single (albeit important) member of the revolutionary generation. It should be noted that President Jefferson would later put the government in debt with the Louisiana Purchase so really the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted (or expected) a balanced budget is a non-starter.
Under what circumstances does the nations debt become a tangible problem?
The concept of QE is that inflation has been steadily/rapidly increasing for ‘some time now’; when does that become a tangible problem?
The concept of QE (or creating new money in general), seems reasonable in principle, at least because the fact that population increases over time (if there was an absolute unwavering quantity of money at all given times, and the game of life being ever in commencement, and the population ever growing, we can see how such would lead to problems). So the idea is that a population ever growing, requires an ever growing quantity of jobs along with it, so is the idea that newly printed money is given to job creators to create jobs, something which is more enticing to do when you are not using your own pocket money?
If you want to snarl at other posters, make insulting insinuations, or resort to name calling, take it to The BBQ Pit.
Do not engage in that behavior in this forum (or any forum other than The BBQ Pit).
[ /Moderating ]
Another market bloodbath
China’s CSI 300 halted trading over night after tumbling 7% in 14 minutes for the second time in a week.
S&P down 2.40%
DJIA down 2.33%
Dow Trannies down 23% since last January
Most small caps already in a Bear market.
Feds raising rates while the rest of the world is easing monetary policy.
U.S. stocks are still trading well above their record-setting 2013 levels. European and Pacific stocks, OTOH, are still far from their 2007 highs.
Some analysts are unsure that the U.S. economy is, relatively, a disaster.
At this point, any interest rate hike would not really be a “hike” at all, but rather the Fed cutting back on making their subsidized loans at lower interest rates. It costs a huge amount of money to manipulate market interest rates for prolonged periods of time, and the cost comes out in the form of inflation of the currency. The Fed knows they cannot keep interest rates down for prolonged periods of time, it is not a permanent or sustainable solution.