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really? Jazz hands? You are going to make fun of the deaf now?
And do they know what the govt spends every month on things like en lements? And do they know what percent of Americans pay for that?
Jazz hands
really? Jazz hands? You are going to make fun of the deaf now?
I'll just go ahead and get this out of the way now:
Thanks in advance TB
I know FuzzyLumpkins will love this article. Dovetails with my OP.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...st+Articles%29
Blame the Baby Boomers
The Wall Street protesters blame Big Business for our economic problems. But Niall Ferguson claims they should direct their fury at the profligate spending of the baby boomers.
After years when young Americans yearned only to be occupied on Wall Street, suddenly they have taken to occupying it. It’s easy to scoff at this phenomenon. I know, because I have.
This is certainly not America’s answer to the Arab Spring—the Bobo Fall perhaps, unmistakably both bohemian and bourgeois. But it’s still worth taking seriously. What is it that makes evidently educated young people yearn to adopt leftist positions that are eerily reminiscent of the ones their parents adopted in 1968?
Check out the protesters’ website, which on Monday featured a speech by Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj ˇi˛ek. At first I thought this must be some kind of parody, but no, he really exists—red T-shirt, Krugman beard, and all: “The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.”
Yeah, man. Property is theft. Ne travaillez jamais. And all that.
There are three possible explanations for this retrogression to the language of ’68.
1.Increasing inequality exemplified by Wall Street is worth protesting against.
2.So is the fact that only a handful of bankers have been prosecuted for their part in the financial crisis.
3.Demonstrating is way cool.
Yet if I were a young American today, occupying Wall St. would not be my objective. Just reflect for a minute on the unbridled economic mayhem that would ensue if the protesters actually succeeded. The headline “Goldman Sachs Under Control of Hip Teenage Revolutionaries” would be the last straw for an already fragile economic recovery.
Now ask yourself what the financial crisis really means for today's 15- to 24-year-olds. Not only has it raised the probability that they will be unemployed after graduation. More seriously, it has massively increased the debt that they will have to service when they do get jobs.
Never in the history of intergenerational transfers has one generation left such a mountain of IOUs to another as the baby boomers are leaving to their grandchildren.
When you do the math, there is only one logical political home for today’s teens and 20-somethings ... and that is the Tea Party. For who else is promising to slash Medicare and Social Security and keep the tax burden at its historical average?
Let’s just remind ourselves of the report of the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds back in 2007, which projected a rise in the cost of these two programs from 7.3 percent of gross domestic product to 17.5 percent by 2030. The trustees warned that to achieve actuarial balance—in other words, solvency—for these two programs would require (for Social Security) an increase of 16 percent in payroll tax revenues or an immediate reduction in benefits of 13 percent. For Medicare we are talking a 122 percent increase in payroll taxes or a 51 percent cut in spending.
As Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns pointed out in The Coming Generational Storm, by 2030 there will be twice as many retirees as there are today but only 18 percent more workers. Unless there is really radical reform of en lement programs—especially Medicare—the next generation of American workers will be paying roughly double the taxes their parents and grandparents paid. This is what Kotlikoff and Burns mean by “fiscal child abuse.”
Of these harsh realities the occupiers of Wall Street seem blissfully unaware. Fixated on the idea that they somehow represent the 99 percent of people who scrape by on 80 percent of total income, they fail to see that the real distributional conflict of our time is not between percentiles, much less classes, but between generations. And no generation has a keener interest in slashing future spending on en lements than today’s teens and 20-somethings.
So occupying Wall Street is not the answer to this generation’s problems. The answer is to occupy the Tea Party—and wrest it from the grumpy old men who currently run it.
Call it the Iced Tea Party.
Way cool.
More importantly, do they know how bad the new dishwashers are at removing my soap s ?
Wow. Good stuff. How are my tax dollars treating you?
Crofl.
Pretty decently. I'm getting ready to head overseas for a rotation soon; should be quite interesting. What's up with your Jets?
how is your patent treating your master?
Pretty decently. I'm getting ready to head overseas for a rotation soon; should be quite interesting. What's up with your Jets?
Good luck to you. Jets suck, but the Pats D is still horrid.
Do they know about the upcoming LED light bulb scam?
Not one well-reasoned thought on the OP?
I'm not surprised.
Trust me, I curse at their D every week. Thanks for the well wishes. Sending the wife and kids back to San Antonio while I'm gone, so I'll actually be down there next week or so.
Focusing on the cost of the TARP minimizes the true extent of the bailout. Darrin fails at delivery. Again.
What is the true extent of the bailout?
Probably a lot cheaper than staying in Hawaii.
I don't know the exact figure, but I'm pretty sure this one doesn't include the $16T in secret Fed loans.
Hmmm. Well, I don't know how you get from 300 billion to that figure.
Well, if she stayed in Hawaii, we'd get BAh for here (basic allowance for housing). But I'd rather she have family to help raise the two kids. Plus, the in-laws rarely get to see the kids so they're happy about it.
Last edited by Winehole23; 10-12-2011 at 11:24 AM.
Does Darrin know how much TARP cost?
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