Great words. Govt. must work like a business. Meaning maintaining good balancesheets , no irrational promises, no elitist dishonest liars. Govt must work like a business but with the purpose of well being of the people rather than just profits.
Either you are a keen satirist with the driest of wit since the Irish scoffer Swift, or you are unpossessed by any hint of irony in the ignorance of the multitude of major corporations which have been exposed over just the last fifteen years of fraudulent accounting practices, making outrageously speculative business projections, and conducting themselves in such supercilious and flamboyantly arrogant fashion that would make Kanye West blush in embarrassment of their behavior. Do the words “Enron”, “Tyco”, “Waste Management”, “Worldcom”, “American Investment Group”, or “Leaman Brothers” mean anything to you?
Stranger
Heh. Never worked for a business, have you?
You missed the point my friend. There are great businesses as well. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple…Balance sheets should be good. No unpayable debt. Honest managers.
From my country, there is an FMCG company called patanjali growing at 100% CAGR whose moto is ‘profit for charity’ , I like this tagline. Good for govts. to follow.
There is a point, but not the one I am allegedly missing. You are equating “running a government like a business” with “operating with honesty and competence”. In fact, many businesses are not run with honesty or competence, and there is nothing about the model of a corporation intended to make a gross profit which is particularly suited to a national government, which is interested with providing with the security, health, and general economic well being of its citizenry (including such non-profitable enterprises as maintaining general transportation and electrical infrastructure, regulating product safety, allocating radio frequency bandwidth for the best public use, providing primary and secondary education to ensure literacy, et cetera) as well as looking out for future needs and interests of those people who may not be able to participate in the electoral process but nonetheless need their interests to be represented.
We can agree that government functionaries should be held to a standard of honesty and integrity, finance records should be transparent, and good effort should be made to maintain a positive balance in good economic times and minimize unnecessary deficits during poor times or the perceived need for high spending on questionable agendas (e.g. invading other sovereign nations on transparent premises just because we don’t like their leadership). But “business” is not an infallible or frankly very applicable model for this.
Stranger
Debt growing disproportionately larger than the GDP obviously means that system is unsustainable in the long run.
So let other countries, who have many more poor people than USA and who are net importers, also have the ability to spend on the poor. Let’s work on common currency in the world and let’s have spending on the poor (like food stamps etc), on retirees etc., untied to ‘Govt. debt’ all over the world.
Why should just America and a couple other countries have this privilege?
He has a point, you can get out of debt by inflating it away, jack up inflation rates, print more money, then pay back the original amount in the new worth less dollars. It works and its a valid tactic, if you don’t mind completely trashing your countries reputation and credit rating.
Other countries can get away with this to some degree, but the US can’t because so much of the worlds economiyis priced in US dollars, which everyone needs to be stable. Start deliberately inflating the US economy to get out of debt and the US dollar will be quickly be replaced by something else in the global markets, Euro or Yuan or whatever.
Also, I guess negative interest rates sound kind of similar to what Trump is saying:
If you lend 1 dollar at -0.1% for 30 years, you will get 0.999 raised to power 30 = 97 cents after 30 years
If you lend 1 dollar at -1% for 30 years, you will get 0.99 raised to power 30 = 73.9 cents after 30 years
That’s also kind of an admission that things were not managed well I guess.
Gotta hand it to Trump; he almost makes the old Republican plan for balancing the budget (cutting taxes and increasing spending) look reasonable.
Republicans, for all their bathter about fiscal responsibility, seem almost pathologically unable to muster the discipline to actually face the issues of the deficit and debt. Like the sovereign citizen movement they think there’s some secret word, some incantation, some trick that will make it all go away. They’ll do anything, anything, anything except find a way to pay the nation’s bills.
Yes, that’s what I remember too. I specifically remember hearing on television that the inflation rate had hit 18% and interest rates were over 21%.
I just took a look at Jimmy Carter’s Wikipedia page and it agrees with the figures I was sure I remembered from those days:
Re inflation:
And in regard to the interest rate:
[all boldings mine]
So at least Wiki agrees with my recollection. We may both be wrong but I don’t think so.
Jimmy Carter was President in December 1980. Amusing that the fact-based Wikipedia refutes the meme of fiction-based Republicans: that it was Reagan’s Administration that led the recovery from stagflation.
You miss the key point. Republican blather is nothing but pandering and gibberish. They favor increased deficits and debt not to make the already-rich elite even richer, but because U.S. Government financial woe fits their agenda. They want Americans to hate government so it will “wither away.” Everything that humiliates the government is good.
Much ado about nothing.
He is not going to re-do the national debt finance system and you all know it. You’re just seizing on some not well thought out comment and making a fuss on it.
Obama made plenty of gaffes and idiotic comments in his elections runs. Hillary already has and will do more in hers, and I’m sure we will all see Trump make a few more also.
I think we all agree (or at least hope) that, like a dog walking in a city, a President Trump would be followed around with a pooper scooper to clean up his worst messes. This thread is mostly just recreational outrage that Americn politics have sunk so low.
So … do you have a cite for Obama or Hillary “gaffes” in the same league as Trump’s?
“She’s wrong, but at least she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
-P.J. O’Rourke, last week’s* Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!*
Just to be clear;
When you say “Govt” you mostly mean the governments of first world wealthy nations, the United States in particular,
and,
When you say “the people” you mean all the people on the planet,
is that correct?
CMC fnord!
Let’s see.
3 left.
One is a narcissistic wacko with delusions of grandeur and a defective connection between his brain and his mouth.
One is Lenin’s half brother with pre-dementia and no real chance of making it, let alone staying up long enough to see the evening news.
The last wins by default.
Let me help you out. truthseeker2 is not an American citizen, or a resident of the U.S. He makes no secret of his opposition to what he sees as American global economic hegemony. He is fully aware that the policies of a putative Trump administration would, if carried out, result in economic calamity for the United States.
It is his belief that economic calamity for the United States is a necessary precondition for the development of a just global economy; therefore, he supports the election of Donald Trump, and the implementation of Trump’s insane policies.
truthseeker2, do feel free to correct any substantive errors in the above paragraphs. 
They want the government to run up huge bills and then disappear; the grand Republican strategy of the last three decades is dine-and-dash?
Glad you pointed it out. Recreational Outrage
No point whatsoever to give a cite. What is outrageous to one is a yawn to another. Google is your friend here.