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Author | Topic: Testing The Financial Apologists | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AZPaul3 Member Posts: 8654 From: Phoenix Joined: Member Rating: 6.7
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The handwriting is on the wall, o shaman. read it and weep. We have wept over your lack of thinking, reading, comprehension skills for more than a decade now. This gold standard crap, thoroughly rejected by the economic realities this world is presently in for reasons explained to you but you fail to understand, is just more of your cross-eyed tunnel vision from being too long steeped in the right-wing narrative. Your mind has been poisoned, same as with your religion, to accept fantasies over reality. I can understand your coming to this view. It is another Trump stupidity, from his girl Judy Shelton who he tried to put on the fed but failed. Just like democracy, rule of law and climate change, the Trump view of economics is dangerously outside the reality we face. He is intellectual poison. So are you.“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” -Daniel Dennett Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned!
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9
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Phat writes in Message 669: Forbes Magazine recently had a good article which I will share.
The Signs Are There: The Gold Standard Is Coming Back by Steve Forbes Why are you using the fallacy of argument from authority, that because Steve Forbes (undeserving heir to money and job position) believes something that we should believe it, too? Steve Forbes was only able to have this absurd article published in Forbes because he is editor-in-chief of Forbes. The only reason he is editor-in-chief of Forbes is because is he the son of Malcolm Forbes who in turn was the son of B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes. In other words, he only has this job because he inherited it, just like you only have a condo because you inherited it. They aren't things either of you earned.
It amuses me when the peanut gallery elitists... Why do you keep calling people here names, especially so ridiculous a name as "elitists"? You're the one aligning himself with a multi-billionaire. And why the "peanut gallery" modifier? We make substantive responses to your claims, 95% of which you ignore only to repeat them again later, as you do here with the gold standard despite not replying to almost all the substantive responses to why this is an impossible idea.
...tell me time and time again that I don't know what I am talking about. We tell you over and over that you don't know what you're talking about because you don't know what you're talking about. If you did know what you're talking about then you would phrase your arguments in your own words instead of posting YouTube videos, and then when we finally disabused you of that quoting what others say, as here. I think if I ever saw a post from you explaining the reasoning behind one of your positions that I would faint from astonishment.
Maybe you can write Steve Forbes and tell him the same thing. Steve Forbes is welcome to come here and make the case for the gold standard, something you have not yet even attempted. But Steve Forbes isn't here right now. It's you that's here, you that we're discussing with. Argue for your positions in your own words, not someone else's words.
Forbes: Those are Steve Forbes words, saying the same thing we've been telling you. Why do you think the gold standard is so disparaged?
You maroons don't have any real clue about how the monetary system has historically worked and does work. Not that I will ever get any respect around here! Oh, the irony. You've always given every indication that you don't understand how almost anything works. By the way, Steve Forbes is incorrect that Zimbabwe returned to the gold standard. Their new currency, the Zimbabwean ZiG, is backed by "US$575 million worth of hard assets: foreign currencies, gold, and other precious metals." About the gold standard itself, Wikipedia says, "Since the 1950s, annual gold output growth has...lagged behind world economic growth (an approximately eightfold increase since the 1950s, and fourfold since 1980)." If the size of the world economy were limited by the amount of gold, world economic growth since 1950 would be one eighth what it's been. --Percy
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Taq Member Posts: 10302 Joined: Member Rating: 7.1 |
Phat writes: They largely use dollars of course. What they don't do is store their wealth as dollars. They may buy short term treasuries for liquidity, but the bulk of many of their fortunes is in hard assets like art, land, precious metals, other commodities such as oil and copper, and a few carefully chosen stocks. Of course they don't store their wealth as dollars. That would be stupid. They INVEST their money so it will grow, and that includes low risk investments like treasuries and commodities. Why do they do this? So they can cash those investments in for dollars. They don't buy those things just to have them. They buy them to earn more dollars. Their wealth is determined by the amount of dollars they are worth.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.2
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Of course they don't store their wealth as dollars. That would be stupid. How true. We working class stiffs think of money as a sign of wealth, whereas the wealthy think of non-liquid assets such as properties, stock, commodities, collections, etc. Cash, the thing we crave, is the stupidest thing to accumulate since it only diminishes in value (due to inflation) and is taxable. Plus, even the wealthiest person can only spend so much, which is why sales tax hits the poor and middle-class much harder in terms of percentage of one's income/wealth. Investing cash results in taxable interest income, whereas investing in non-liquid assets allows one to accumulate more non-taxable wealth; the only time you are taxed on that accumulated wealth is when you sell it, which the wealthy are far too smart to do. When they do need cash, instead of selling an asset they use that asset as collateral for a loan, which if done right could also get them a tax exemption. Not only does it take money to make money, but it takes wealth to avoid paying taxes when you use that wealth. And if you can buy a politician then you can get a tax law that creates a special exemption just for you; a CPA friend pointed out a few examples, such as a special exemption for a school that meets certain requirements which it just so happened applies to one and only one school (Nance's Law: Coincidences require a lot of planning). Edited by dwise1, : thing, not think
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Taq Member Posts: 10302 Joined: Member Rating: 7.1 |
dwise1 writes: How true. We working class stiffs think of money as a sign of wealth, whereas the wealthy think of non-liquid assets such as properties, stock, commodities, collections, etc. Cash, the thing we crave, is the stupidest thing to accumulate since it only diminishes in value (due to inflation) and is taxable. I suffer from those biases as well, and I blame it on growing up in the lower middle class and having money struggles for most of my early adult life. Living paycheck to paycheck was absolutely frightening at times. I think that is why I have way too much money in my checking account right now and am reluctant to put it into longer term investments.
Not only does it take money to make money, but it takes wealth to avoid paying taxes when you use that wealth. Yep. As Warren Buffet famously quipped, it should be a crime that he pays less in taxes than his secretary in terms of percentage of earnings.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.2
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I suffer from those biases as well, and I blame it on growing up in the lower middle class and having money struggles for most of my early adult life. Living paycheck to paycheck was absolutely frightening at times. I think that is why I have way too much money in my checking account right now and am reluctant to put it into longer term investments. Yes, we have had to live with a very small financial safety buffer wherein we had to pay almost everything we earned almost as soon as it came in. The common wisdom is that most American households are just two paychecks away from living on the streets and that one unexpected $400 bill can be devastating. And don't even mention what a medical emergency can do; I've heard that the bills from a medical emergency is a frequent cause of family bankruptcy. For example, I've had three big hospitalizations: emergency bowel resection ($64,000), triple angioplasty ($88,000), and ER and 4 days hospitalization from a gastric bleed (post-endoscopic gastric surgery gone bad; I haven't looked at the EOB for that one yet). The first two were covered by medical insurance from work and the third by my military retirement medical benefit, but without that coverage I'd have been back to paying a mortgage. And my cases were minor compared to many. But on a less dire note, when I was on active duty as a married junior enlisted, I was paid twice a month and two or three days before payday I had already spent almost the full paycheck paying the bills (and that was making the minimum payments). We were able to grow out of that, but too many families cannot. In that situation, we had to keep enough in checking to cover expenses and could only put a little away into savings earning far too little interest -- my plan for covering the "balloon payments" of insurance premiums (car and homeowners, etc) and property taxes was to divide those payments by the number of paychecks and put that much into savings so that I could pull that money out when those bills came due. So as a result, we are accustomed to keeping our liquidity in checking as you described. This reminded me of a Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) I had conducted with respect to the Great GOP Tax Scam of 2017. Here is what I wrote in reply to Phat in Message 264 (28-Nov-2018 in The Right Side of the News):
dwise1 writes: Also, agriculture got very busy selling off as much crops as they could before Trump's tariffs and phony trade war started. I retired half-way into January of this year. For decades I have used an Excel spreadsheet to figure out what I need to have withheld for income taxes (both my then-wife and I made about the same salary, but the formulae on the W-4 forms always had me withholding too little (thus threatening me with penalties should that persist) so I had to estimate my taxes in order to ensure that enough was being withheld from my pay. One thing I noticed with the new tax scam was that my federal withholding was less, so my take-home pay was more. Now, I have no idea what my taxes will actually be like this year nor does anybody else, but I'm sure that every working American has looked at their paycheck and has thought that they have gotten a big break -- they have more money! Doesn't anybody remember the Big Tax Break from George Bush I (Dubya's father)? His big tax break was to have less taken out through withholding so everybody's take-home pay would be more, but at the end of the year everybody still owed the same amount of tax. A huge swindle from the guy so out of touch with citizens' reality that he was fascinated by a grocery store's laser scanner, a technology which at that time was already about two decades old. Basically, this entire GOP tax scam is based on trickle-down economics which has never worked and never will work. We saw this in Gov. Brownback's great Kansas experiment in which he created a trickle-down state economy which brought about economic ruin. At the same time, California faced with economic disaster from 2008 took the opposite approach and has emerged economically strong. In my engineering career, I called that the "Jello Test", as in "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." You have possible solutions to a problem. Run them and see what works. We have tried trickle-down and have found that it does not work. We have tried taxing the rich and that does work. Nu? Within the past couple days, I saw (as I recall) a statistic that 65% of the US workforce has to work multiple jobs and still do not qualify as "middle class". Now here's a Gedankenexperiment ("thought experiment") that I have conducted myself. Take the "tax break" and distribute it to amongst the 1% (as has already been done). Each one receives somewhere between $33,000 and $330,000 (the actual amount escapes me at the moment). What do they do with that extra money? Practically nothing, which starves the economy. OK, in order to establish an economic baseline, let's take the opposite approach of looking at what will happen if, instead of dumping all kinds of money into the hands of the rich, the 1%, we were to distribute that same money to everybody else, the 99%. As I recall hearing during the tax scam debates, each of the 1% would be getting $33,000. US population is about 308 million, so 1% of that would be about 3 million and 99% would be about 305 million. $33,000 to each of 3 million people adds up to about $100 billion (109). Now distributing that to each citizen equally, both the 1%-ers and the 99%-ers, and each citizen would receive about $325. What would each person in the 99% do with $325? Spend it! Buy food, clothing, and other goods. What would that do for the economy? Sure, $325 doesn't sound like much, but when 305 million people are all spending $325 each, that adds up to $99 billion being injected into the economy. Now that would really rev up the economy. But if we instead give all that $100 billion to the 3 million of the 1%, what would they do with that extra $33,000? Virtually nothing. All their basics needs (food, shelter, clothing) have already been met, so they don't any necessary expenses to put that money to. Maybe use it to buy a trinket or an expensive toy (the superyacht market is now booming). Or gamble with it (ie, stock market speculation). Or just shove it into a drawer (metaphorically speaking) and forget they even have it. Whatever they do with it, very little of it would find its way into the economy. So instead of revving up the economy, Trump is starving it and trying to smother it. In my forum notes for that Gedankenexperiment, I quoted Dolly Levi from Hello, Dolly:
quote: At the time, I used the "upper 1%" definition for the wealthiest, but later learned that in order to qualify for the "upper 1%" you only needed to earn a measly half million a year. In VOX' YouTube video, Who pays the lowest taxes in the US? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXCGbAv8YPw), they defined that group as the 400 richest households which would amount to the top 0.000120682114 %. The ones we're talking about fall somewhere in between. But the point remains that if you give money to the rich (much less than 1% of the population), then you're pulling that money out of circulation to the detriment of the economy, whereas if you give it to the low and middle class then they're going to spend it immediately on necessities, putting all that money back into circulation to the benefit of the economy.
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Phat Member Posts: 18651 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 4.3 |
Its been awhile, but I wanted to attempt to answer a few of your points and provide some evidence.
Theo writes: There is not money without government. Please define public vs private money. Do governments determine the value of money or do markets?
China's strategic silver takeover: A calculated move to drain the west This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post. I have tried to argue for several years that the Eastern BRICS nations are conducting an economic war against the West and the US Dollar. More sources are now sharing these concerns.
Message 110Theo writes: There is more and more evidence that my initial points were sound, if not founded on data. The data is now coming in. Still waiting for him to show us how well gold and crypto are doing. ABE Seems to be another major crypto crash today. Funny how we don't have to worry about that with fiat currencies. GOLD PRICE in 2022 at the time of Theos message: $ 1,710.00 (Aug average) GOLD PRICE today in August 2024 before the elections: $2,553.40 Silver also gained roughly $10.00 an ounce since that time and is being suppressed to this day.
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Taq Member Posts: 10302 Joined: Member Rating: 7.1
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Phat writes: Do governments determine the value of money or do markets? Markets determine the price which can be manipulated by the central banks of any given country. For example, Russia's central bank has tried to stop the ruble from losing ground to the US dollar by buying up rubles on the open market. I suspect that most central banks do the same to try and stabilize their currency on the open market. This is why they usually have a lot of US dollars in reserves so they can buy back their own currency with the de facto global currency. You might also be interested to learn that China is no longer accepting rubles for payments. This is one BRICS country refusing to accept the currency of another BRICS country. Russia Economy: Nearly All Chinese Banks Refusing to Process Payments - Business Insider
China's strategic silver takeover: A calculated move to drain the west This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post. I have tried to argue for several years that the Eastern BRICS nations are conducting an economic war against the West and the US Dollar. More sources are now sharing these concerns. How does this relate to anything you have been saying?
There is more and more evidence that my initial points were sound, if not founded on data. The data is now coming in. GOLD PRICE in 2022 at the time of Theos message: $ 1,710.00 (Aug average) GOLD PRICE today in August 2024 before the elections: $2,553.40 Silver also gained roughly $10.00 an ounce since that time and is being suppressed to this day. None of us have argued against gold as a viable investment. It's price goes up and down like any other commodity.
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9489 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: Member Rating: 6.1
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Do governments determine the value of money or do markets?
Strawman and irrelevant to my point.We don't argue by link. Tell us what it says and why it is relevant. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts "God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness. If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up, why would you have to lie?
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