Sorry, you’re no longer eligible to vote.
Depending on who measures it, the poverty rate has decreased by at least 20% since 1964 according to the US Cencus Bureau. And as this article states, other researchers have found an even greater reduction in poverty.
By any chance, did you mistake Bill O’Reilly for a government agency?
Herding cats.
Not gonna happen.
Interesting. A’s great-grandson has pure gold, the value of which fluctuates ridiculously. (I know, right?)
B’s U.S. Treasury Bonds, though, those have cashing in deadlines, usually.
(I know there’s bonds that don’t have deadlines, like on that one Andy Griffith episode.)
I have no clue where that wealth has gone, precisely because the Federal Reserve has no transparency whatsoever, and basically gets away with whatever it wants.
http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/09/25-facts-federal-reserve-everyone-know/
It would probably have been a much greater decline were it not for the constant intrusion of Republican wingnuts. Case in point: the significantly more liberal social policies in Canada effected dramatic declines in poverty over the last half century:
According to the Fraser Institute’s Basic Needs Povery Measure, the poverty rate in Canada was nearly 12% in 1974, and less than 5% by 2004.
According to this measure, poverty has declined significantly over the past 60 years and is 4.9% as of 2004 … Some elements that work towards reducing poverty in Canada include Canada’s strong economic growth, government transfers to persons of $164 billion per annum as of 2008, universal medical and public education systems, and minimum wage laws in each of the provinces and territories of Canada.
You mean he’s not? I thought he worked for the Federal Department of Fox News. 
Why shouldn’t it? Every other commodity has its value determined by the market. I thought libertarians liked market forces. Now it’s liberals like me who are extolling the virtues of the free market? Crazy!
We do. The ridiculous amount of fluctuation is a result of an unstable market. Gold supplies in the US, though, are lavish, so why the market for gold is so unstable, I have no clue. Gold has been used as currency for thousands of years. Here, though, we’ve gotten rid of having any relationship between our currency and gold, which is a huge mistake. Gold backing for our currency (hell, I even want a return to gold coins!) has proven to not only stabilize, but bolster our economy. It’s why the period between 1946 and 1973 was the last of the “Golden Eras” as I call them. Nixon destroyed our economy beyond all reason by taking us off the gold standard.
(The '80s looked prosperous, but that was silver with gold’s face.)
I notice you did not answer any of my questions.
The excerpted post may set some record, BTW. I think every single sentence is incorrect.
Rereading this, I see I may sound almost snarky. But harsh words may leave a strong impression, so mine was a sincere attempt at advancing your education. I’m happy if I can help.
Pick one statement from your hodge-podge and defend it, if you wish. I’ll stipulate that the following is trivially true:
though not in the sense you may intend. Forms of fractional-reserve banking came into use in Europe at least five centuries ago and indeed aided the mercantile and industrial progress which accompanied and hastened the end of feudal societies.
It already happened.
Alternatively, one could (barely) imagine a melding of the libertarian left and the libertarian right. We’ve seen this alliance on some issues here and there, like NSA spying, civil liberties, drugs, etc. Not confident in its stability, but they’d probably get along better than the authoritarian left and right.
Why is that, btw? Is it because most of the people posting about politics online are nerdy white middle class suburban males?
Reddit subs
Libertarian: 126k
Conservative: 52k
Progressive: 39k
Liberal: 24k
Ron Paul was a titan…on the internet. He was the Snakes on a Plane of presidential candidates. People still post Doom Paul memes. I wonder if there will still be Trump memes in 8 years.
This summarizes perfectly why I cannot be a Libertarian sensu stricto any more than I can be a High Church Green or Old Believer Marxist. It is so shot through with errors that I can pick out the three factual statements: Yes, you have absolutely no idea why the market for gold is volatile; yes, gold was historically used as a currency for quite a long time; and, yes, I’m sure you do consider the period 1946-1973 to be a “Golden Age”, which term is mercifully undefined.
The rest is founded on a slimy mud of utter philosophical misapprehension about what money even is, let alone the role it plays in an economy. Money is not, and should never be, something with intrinsic value. By that I mean its sole value should be as a medium of exchange. This makes it easier to vary the money supply to keep up with economic growth. Because when an economy grows, it needs more money, which necessarily means inflation, such that people are both incentivized to invest in high-yield instruments, such as loans to small businesses, and to create such instruments, to take advantage of the fact money is cheaper.
The alternative is an economy hamstrung by expensive money, crucified on a cross of gold, and generally frozen rock solid, much like the economy was prior to 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took us off the gold standard and created Federal jobs programs to provide basic Keynesian pump-priming to inject money right where the economy needed it most: The bottom, right to the working and especially the unemployed.
It is uncontroversial among real economists that the countries which went off the gold standard first came out of the Depression soonest, that FDR’s inflationary monetary policies were bringing us out of the depression until the later 1930s, when conservative elements in the Federal government convinced him to cut back on them, plunging us back into recession until the Second World War forced Keynesianism on us, and that the New Deal was having a positive effect on the economy, from the bottom up, in every important measure. This isn’t up for debate: It’s history, it happened, and insisting it didn’t is precisely what I expect you’ll do.
Saying the Second World War ended the Depression verges on the Broken Window Fallacy. It was the jobs programs which the Second World War forced on the country which did it, and the massive damage visited on every other industrial economy which kept us at the top in the Post-War Era.
My point is that Federal spending and the concomitant inflationary monetary policy, when done correctly, shortens and reverses recessions and prevents depressions entirely, and, therefore, taking moral umbrage at the fact the Federal government spends lots and lots of money is akin to demanding that the War On Drugs is a successful policy. In both instances you’re making demands of reality. In no instance is that going to work.
I’m on Reddit. Trump’s a joke on most parts of Reddit. Sanders, on the other hand… I could easily see Sanders still having a following on Reddit eight years from now.
Good catch.
Seriously, it’s the same damn issue with voter fraud.
“This is the voter fraud we’ve caught. It’s negligible. It would still be negligible if there was 100x the recorded rate.”
“Well, we think you just aren’t catching most of it.”
“Okay, how would you demonstrate this?”
“We’re not going to.”
“Do you have any knowledge of how they go about figuring out how and where the fraud was committed?”
crickets
:dubious:
There’s exactly one reason to just assume the figure is far higher than expected: because it’s politically convenient. This has been the case since Reagan’s Welfare Queen nonsense. If your political ideals are based around the government being flawed and full of waste, then finding waste where there is none is a useful idea. But it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and this is one good reason why.
Let’s be clear on something here.
By binding the currency to gold, you lose the ability to administer the amount of currency in the economy. You instead hand this ability over, essentially, to the stock market, allowing investors to have a huge influence on the buying power of your currency by manipulating the value of gold. Considering how wildly gold has fluctuated, this can cause some serious problems. Case in point, this graph:
http://img.goldpriceoz.com/us-dollar-index-and-gold-price.png
That may not seem so bad, until you realize how drastically different the axes of the graph are (with about the same amplitude, gold more than doubles and the dollar loses around 30%). And notice something? In that 8-year span, we would be stuck with near-constant inflation.
Given that multiple people have offered citations that directly contradict this, maybe you should find that government study.
A word on reliable sources. This? This ain’t one. In fact, it’s downright laughable. It buys into the mythmaking over at Shadowstats, the website that claims inflation has been skyrocketing and that the official figures are covering it up, and hasn’t raised its prices in 8 years. It claims that a moderate rate of inflation is somehow inherently problematic, rather than the grease that ensures people don’t just sit on their wealth. It completely confuses correlation with causation in an embarrassing way - yes, the period between the civil war and World War I had incredible growth; you really think this had more to do with the lack of government meddling than, oh, I don’t know, the industrial revolution? And that’s just the problems in the first two points.
Please try to avoid sources like this. A random economics blog run by god knows who with an explicit libertarian bias and a clear penchant for error is not a good source.
Also, on the subject of Shadowstats, seriously. Any website citing that belongs to one of two categories:
A) Uneducated in economics to a frightening degree
B) Incredibly dishonest
Shadowstats is not good people. The concept there is, on its face, somewhat reasonable: they changed the way they calculate CPI, they shouldn’t have done so, let’s use that old methodology. Okay, fair enough, so there’s some disagreement on this issue. This does not mean you should just take the modern CPI measurement and slap an arbitrary constant onto it. Which is the actual methodology favored by Shadowstats.
There’s just so much wrong with the source that it hurts. Shadowstats is kind of the Seralini of economics.
We have a money supply unlike any other on Earth, but we can’t keep printing it forever. That’s literally what the Federal Reserve does and has been doing for 100 years. Our dollar lost value precisely because the Federal Reserve printed money endlessly. Money has to be backed by something of value. Those dollar bills in our wallets are actually just sheets of rag paper that say “Just Trust Me. I have a bridge to sell you.”
Rhodesia (alias “Zimbabwe”) tried to print a bigger supply of money in the 1990s after an economic downturn caused by Robert Mugabe’s stupidity, and it failed so miserably and backfired on them so horribly that they had to ditch their existing currency entirely because it was so completely and utterly worthless. It actually went down in history as the worst hyperinflation of the 20th century.
The Constitution (in case you forgot) explicitly reserves the “power to Coin Money, regulate the value thereof, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.” So, why the hell is the Federal Reserve, who, by its own admission, is NOT a government agency or department, doing what the US Congress should be?
I am mortified that the government spends so wastefully and even brags about their ridiculous spending.
If you need a reference: http://www.gao.gov/
An ENTIRE GOVT OFFICE with one duty: Report on govt. waste, inefficiency and corruption. (Irony is weird that way.)
After the war, the US had an awe-inspiring surplus of consumer goods, not to mention a massive amount of money to spend on those consumer goods thanks to the end of wartime rationing in December of 1945, throw in the war bonds and defense savings from the wartime pay in the factories.
Keynesianism only worked at that time precisely because the Second World War happened. Now, however, it’s an entirely different scenario than it was on December 7, 1941. This is not that. We are in an entirely different political, economic and social situation than we were back then. The Federal Reserve has got to go before they turn us into a Third World socialist hellhole.
(By the way, it wasn’t FDR who ended the gold standard, it was Nixon in '73.)
But… The array of consumer goods available to us today is far, far greater, of much better quality, and tremendously more affordable. It isn’t even debatable.
I. I’m with you. It is much bigger.
II. Quality…that varies based on numerous factors. Like in any place at any time with any product, some are indeed top of the line, others…not so much.
III. Tremendously more affordable. I will concede that. I would like to add that if we had a flat tax, the economic boom that would follow would top the mid-century.
Here’s how:
A. The flat tax and its accompanying eternity clause becomes law.
B. The rate is set at 15% on all income above $70k annually.
C. With a massive influx of money that would otherwise be going down the drain thanks to the DC Dunderheads, the consumer can buy goods and services.
D. The people producing the aforementioned not only make money of their own; they also go out and buy goods and services themselves.
E. With all this money circulating, the economy remains strong long-term. Not just for ten years, twenty or even thirty. It goes for fifty, seventy, even a hundred years.
How much do you want to cut the Federal budget by with that tax rate? And is your proposal including the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, USDA food inspections, veterans benefits, and other programs?
Also, this eternity clause interests me. Are you saying that Congress should never be able to change tax rates? I thought libertarians were generally in favor of the Constitution, what with Art I sec 1 and all. Seems like you want to undo one of the fundamental aspects of the Constitution.
I’m more or less a libertarian, and I voted no, the differences are too great. Yes, gun to my head, in theory a generic Republican candidate is slightly closer to libertarian philosophy than a generic Democratic one, but as I’m wont to say, that’s like choosing between a pile of crap and a pile of crap with sprinkles on it. In practice, the variation in candidates’ platfroms from the generic candidate and differences in experience and character overwhelm any potential theoretical alliance that might exist between libertarians and Republicans.
The fundamental problem, as others have pointed out, is that the whole left-right dynamic generally doesn’t fit well with most libertarians. Yes, there are some libertarians that are pro-life or whatever other things, but as a rule of thumb, most libertarians are going to be in favor of a far more limited government than most Democrats (and even most Republicans). And while Republicans are supposedly more pro free market than Democrats, most libertarians are also against a lot of the corporate well-fare and special interests that seem more common amongst Republicans than Democrats.
Yes, from a limited government perspective, the Tea Party branch of the Republicans aren’t all that far off on limited government and economic issues, the influence of the Religious Right on most Tea Party candidates makes them incompatible with libertarians on most social issues, notably gay marriage and marijuana legalization. MAYBE if the Tea Party could lighten up or at least put them as a lower priority, they might see more libertarian support. The thing is, as a general rule, libertarians can’t budge too much on that stuff since the whole point of libertarianism is limited/minimal government interference in all aspects of life, not just economic ones; it would be hypocritical to let those things slide.
But, frankly, that seems to be the largest problem with the Republican party in terms of demographics anyway: holding onto social issues that are continuing to lose support. Yes, there are some Republicans that are probably more economically inline with Democrats but find certain social issues too important to vote in favor of some particular conservative social issue, but it seems there are far more who feel the opposite, that they may actually be more economically inline with Republicans but can’t vote for a party that holds what they consider to be indefensible social positions.
Speaking for myself and some others I know, unless you’re damn near in exact agreement with me in everything else, I just cannot vote for a candidate that is openly hostile to gay rights, in favor of continuing the drug war, etc. I could potentially vote for someone who, say, finds abortion morally reprehensible in most cases, but if is not actively pursuing legislation limiting it and I believe that promise. Unfortunately, even that sort of Republican seems rare, at least around here, so I usually end up voting third party if that’s an option, or abstaining in certain votes if not.
1- This is very ill-advised. What you would wind up with is a Congress full of political novices who would be malleable putty in the hands of the lobbyists. This would increase the power of the influential and reduce that of the common man.
2- All things being equal, balanced budgets are fine. But things aren’t always equal and it is essential to run deficits at times.
3- A flat tax is a bad idea, eternity clauses are even worse. This proposal would increase the deficit that the OP claims to be concerned about.
4- Presumably this is what happens now. Congress gets input from the departments all the time.
5- The Federal Reserve has been an essential tool in avoiding repeats of the Great Depression. There’s a reason not a single country is on the gold standard- it is nuts.
6- This has been a standard talking point like forever for Republicans. Funny how they can never come up with specific examples.
7- Want to see a disaster? Turn Social Security over to the states. Red states would have to raise their taxes to fund what the feds do now- think that will happen?
8- Partially agree- smoke all the weed you want. Legalize crack?- not so fast my friend.
There really wasn’t a poll option that matched my own thoughts- which are Who Gives A Shit About Libertarians? Libertarians are Republicans who don’t want to live with the consequences of their votes or have any responsibility for actually running anything. There is no libertarian nation on earth, never has been, and never will be. Take the tiny fraction of the population that is libertarian and align them with any party you want, won’t make a damn bit of difference.
