American Budget Cuts

Yes.Do you just find graphs really hard to read, or something? Here's the relevant information again:

That's a terrible way to talk about your grandmother! But, you're right. Eventually "those who are productive" age past their productivity and become the "leeches, and it's up to a new generation of "productives" to support them, with the social understand that they'll be taken care of when they reach a certain age. Of course, in this country we have people like you, who want to pull the ladder up after them and demolish that social contract (not for current retirees, of course, who not-so-coincidentally are the primary demographic for this political movement.) Like your family and mine? Seems like it was pretty successful in those cases. Or did you simply fall out of your mother's vagina and into a full-time job? Luckily, I've never taken even a single one.

No, inefficient. Indeed the incentive is to increase a very specific kind of inefficiency - the kind that makes people rich. To the extent that there's an incentive against other inefficiencies, the incentive is simply to transform the inefficiency into profit-inefficiency, not actually eliminate it. We've agreed, after all, that perfect efficiency doesn't make anybody any money. The exact same thing that would happen to an inefficiency - somebody pockets it. Aggregate spending equals aggregate income, by definition. Since the ultimate result of the two things is the same, that's how I know profit is an inefficiency. Right, but only the government's incentives are actually working against lawbreaking. That's why the government is able to deliver certain services more efficiently, like Social Security. Sure, there could not be profit, if nobody was able to buy the insurance. How can you make profits off of something nobody will buy? (Don't answer; you've already admitted that you can't.)I'm actually Crash, by the way, not Taq. Right. So, how are insurance companies going to make a profit off of people who can't afford to buy their insurance? (Don't answer; you've already admitted that they can't.) I have no desire to steal from people who earned their wealth fairly. My desire is to return wealth to the people who fairly earned it. Doctors who perform life-saving medical interventions certainly deserve to be paid.

Who said anything about stealing? Not me, I have no desire to steal from anyone. In fact what I would like to do is force thieves to return what they stole, or, barring that, pay restitution for what they stole and can't now return. Sure. It's a joke. Everybody knows that.Oh. Oh. Did you take it seriously? Um, wow. Do you want to think a little harder before you spin me a fable about Galt's Gultch? Right, like Wall Street bond traders and corporate CEO's are going to "withhold their productivity" and take up farming. As if the rest of us would even notice. Do you think there's ever going to be a shortage of flim-flam artists to convince Bear Sterns they need to be paid millions to destroy the corporations that pay them?The truth is, Coyote, I wish people like you would "withhold your productivity." Every day a libertarian goes to work, the world is worse off as a result.

Sure, and that reason is that they can now contribute to the family in a greater way by being employed and independent."From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is socialism, and it's precisely the reason that when I was 14, my dad and I got to eat the same amount at dinner, but he had to teach students for 8-9 hours a day and all I had to do was clean my room and mow the lawn.Like I said, socialism, the "economic system that has never worked" is at work in every single American family. It's capitalism that you never see in American households - not even the houses of capitalists! Oh, I see. When an argument is made you can't respond to, you just move the goalposts.

Right. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer because, after 1979, wealth was distributed from the poor to the rich.Like I said - do you just have problems reading graphs?

No, it reduces the incentive to pay employees and investors, since those are inefficiencies. Obviously - that's why laying off workers is considered "more efficient." I'm simply using it as it applies to economics:

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An economic system is said to be more efficient than another (in relative terms) if it can provide more goods and services for society without using more resources.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_efficiencyWhen the CEO is paid 10 million a year instead of 5, that's 5 million dollars being lost to the company instead of being used for production of the goods and services the company provides. They wouldn't have to make any more money (resources) to pay the CEO 5 million instead of 10 and recoup that extra 5 mil, so it's clearly an inefficiency.Profits are always inefficient, which is why competition drives them down. But the profit motive drives profits up - because the profit motive is defined as people wanting more profits - which means its driving a specific inefficiency up.Profits are inefficient. ...No, it's not. That's not what "aggregate" means.What you've said makes no sense at all because you don't know what I meant by "aggregate spending" and "aggregate income." Your spending is my income, it's not your income. You can't spend and make the same dollar at the same time! Sure they are, they're for sure going to waste some of it. The human profit motive all but ensures it. That's where overinflated CEO salaries come from - it's waste created by the human profit motive. It's a direct refutation of your position that the market will bear the price of health insurance for high-risk pools. It won't, which is why no one is in that business.People who need health care can hardly be blamed for lacking what no business is prepared to sell them. But they do need it. The failure of the market to sell it necessitates government intervention, since the role of government is to intervene where the free market fails. I was talking about doctors, actually, since that's what we're talking about - paying doctors for providing health care. Again - doctors deserve to be paid when they provide life-saving services. You appear to believe that doctors don't deserve to be paid unless they've saved the life of someone affluent.I don't believe that the life of an affluent person is somehow more worthy of medical care than the life of someone not. Can you elaborate on your view that it is? Don't be absurd. Certainly you can! Sustainability is not a condition of employment; how else would miners be able to earn a wage? Since miners get paid, we know that people who perform unsustainable actions - there won't be ore to mine forever - can and do expect to get paid for it.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Sure. Any time you pay more for something than you have to, that's inefficiency from your perspective.Clearly the profit motive is an inefficiency, because it's more expensive to employ someone earning a wage than an unpaid volunteer. Inefficiencies can't always be eliminated, of course, but many can. Well, if you prioritize profits over other things, there are certainly things you can do to increase profits. You could steal labor instead of purchasing it. You could steal resources instead of purchasing them. You could influence politicians to grant you a regulatory monopoly. You could sell things that cost less to produce - like "nothing" - to people who think they're buying something expensive.For instance, you could charge them for the Brooklyn Bridge but sell them nothing. Your salary and your portion of the profits. Employing you instead of employing someone just like you who works for less is an inefficiency, and the only reason you don't rectify that inefficiency is your own profit motive - you want to keep getting paid. I'm sure you have some self-serving story about how you're the best person for the job, but the UK has plenty of IT service/supply companies that make just as much money as yours but their CEO's (or whatever you are there) make less money than you. No, the larger the profit. The more you get paid, the more you profit, obviously. Businesses don't have profit motive because businesses don't have any motives. They're organizations, not organisms! Profit motive is experienced by humans, not by businesses, and the result is to reduce business profits to increase personal profits. Most businesses employ someone who's job is to prevent all but a very small number of people at the top from being able to do this, however; they're usually called the "CFO" or some such.

To be fair, all along I've been talking about profit motive - you can go back and confirm this - and clearly, profit motive is something that only people can experience; businesses are organizations not organisms and therefore can have no motives of their own.It would make no more sense to suggest that businesses were motivated to make profits than to say that letters were motivated to be in alphabetical order. No, corporate profits would be an inefficiency of my interactions (buying, selling) with the company. When I buy a widget from WidgetCo, the profit WidgetCo makes on the widget is an inefficiency in the transaction of buying a widget. I want that transaction to be as efficient as possible, which means I'd like WidgetCo's profits to be as low as possible, because WidgetCo's profits are an inefficiency in this transaction. If they took lower profits I could buy more widgets (production) for the same amount of money (resources), by definition more efficient. I don't recall saying that they were a "bad thing"; I'm simply saying they're an inefficiency, which they are, and that therefore it's inaccurate to say that the profit motive causes reductions in inefficiency. That's not the case because the profit motive is the desire to have larger profits, which are inefficiencies. To the extent that there's a profit motive to reduce any inefficiency it's only a function of the profit motive creating a desire to exchange one kind of inefficiency - say, underproductive labor - for another, specifically profits.If someone at your business figures out a way to reduce an inefficiency in your business, he's going to want to be rewarded for it. Specifically he wants the inefficiency he's discovered and corrected to be replaced by as large a personal profit for himself as possible, and the limit of that is obviously the entire value of the reduced inefficiency (since you would not reward someone 100 dollars for saving you 99), which means his personal profit motive has led him to do nothing at all but exchange one inefficiency for another: increased profits for himself.

For resale. Because they're gambling, like most stock market activity. Maybe you could complain about it by articulating a difference. A gambler, i.e. most participants in the stock market.

For money, stupid. What else? Perceptions of the value of owning shares in various companies. Yes, it is. In any stock market, somebody is selling and somebody is buying. The sellers are selling to the buyers. Since trading stocks doesn't create value, trading stocks is a zero-sum game. If a given stock transaction would wind up making you money (say, you sell the stock for $10 more than you paid for it), then someone else must have lost the exact same amount of money.So, in net, there's no money to be made on the stock market - only money to be passed around. The gamble is that you'll be one of the winners instead of the losers, but the available evidence is that there's no reliable heuristic to guarantee this.Of course almost all activity on the stock market is a gamble. How could you have worked on the stock market and not have realized this? Yeah, I know. You didn't even know that the stock market is gambling!

One of the ways that you can recognize when someone is lying about their qualifications is when they can't get the details of the lie right. Liars typically get caught up on the little things:

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City fury over terms of Barclays bailout

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Barclays faces the possibility of an investor revolt after announcing it is taking cash from Middle-Eastern investors, at a hefty cost, as an alternative to accepting the UK government bailout which its rivals HBOS, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland...The resulting transaction will leave Middle-Eastern investors with a substantial chunk of Barclays. Under the plan, the bank is paying 14 per cent interest for 10 years on some of the preferred-like shares being used. That is the highest rate yet being charged for bank capital, and all the more when compared to the 11-12 per cent the Government is asking from other banks in cash.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/...barclays-bailout-982269.htmlDon't really get the sense, there, that any magic "risk mechanisms" saved Barclays from financial ruin; they just seem like they'd prefer to cut deals with Middle Eastern loan sharks than take money from the government. Presumably that's a decision made by the top executives, so that they don't have to give up multi-million-pound bonuses like the guys at Lloyd's had to.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

There's no evidence that Lloyd's wasn't similarly viewed; they simply found it cheaper to take the government's 10% loans than the 14% loans demanded by these Middle East investors, such that Barclays will probably be forced to pay more for capital, and for longer, than its competitors. (Good job morons!)Indeed, the rest of the Barclays investors apparently found these terms so usurious they were prepared to abandon the company completely. I don't know if they ever did. But it's clear that this is just another example of CEO parasitism - the only conceivable reason for Barclays executives to take the dramatically more expensive, longer-term capital was because of dividend and bonus requirements that, in the UK, went along with the cheaper government loans. Taking the government money meant that the top guys couldn't make mad bank as their company folded around them. No, they were investing without regard to risk, so that major UK banks wouldn't have to close. The same thing happened here in the US - banks that were "too big to fail", i.e. such a major and central part of the US finance system that if they went bankrupt, no American corporation could get access to the short-term paper needed to make payroll.Ultimately, just like in the US, the government of the UK actually made money by bailing out the banks:

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Taxpayer to make 27 billion profit from bank bailouts

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The government could make a profit of as much as 27 billion from the bailed out banks Lloyds and RBS over the next five years, according to new analysis.

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Trade magazine The Banker said the taxpayer could make a 19 billion return on its investment as share prices advance, 2 billion in fees for guaranteeing bank bonds, 5 billion from fees for the Asset Protection Scheme (APS) and 1 billion in loan fees.

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The accuracy of the forecast depends on when the government decides to sell and on the pace of economic growth but the magazine's editor Brian Caplen said the outlook is strong 'even if you take a fairly conservative view of the share prices.'

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http://citywire.co.uk/...n-profit-from-bank-bailouts/a426930You're right, you do. So why is it that you don't even spend two minutes Googling before you try to flim-flam me on this? I'm honestly not that smart. You could probably genuinely hoodwink me if the things you tried to say weren't easily contradicted by thirty seconds of research. Did someone break your Googling fingers?

I assure you, stocks are bought and sold for money.Open up a newspaper if you don't believe me. There's all the prices of stocks, in money! That the stock could be sold for a different value than what it was purchased for.The point of buying stocks isn't for the paltry one-tenth of one cent dividends per stock you earn. That's nothing more than an irritant when you have to file your taxes. Nobody owns Google for the dividends - because Google pays no dividends. The point in owning Google stock is speculation. That's why their stock trades at a whopping 600 dollars per share.You seem dictionary-challenged so let me inform you - speculation is a word that means "gambling." No. Are you even reading my posts?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Not at the usurious terms being offered. Lloyds and RBC could certainly have gotten private capital at the same terms Barclays had to, they just opted to save money and take the government loans.At Barclays' executives prized personal compensation practices over business recovery and profitability, with the result that they're paying far more for the same amount of money.When you pass by the student loan office and pay triple the principle at the local payday loan sharks, that's not a "point in favor" of your credit-worthiness. That's prizing the evasion of government regulation at the expense of long-term profitability.