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The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

  • Thread starter Thread starter Priceless
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Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

walrus said:
Somehow my TV is never stops at Fox, just like it never stops at MSNBC
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Personalized channel tuning rules. Our TVs simply skip over FNC, home shopping channels, and the televangelists (which are the same thing).
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Almington said:
Gates is right, do they need to decide if they want to spend the money and remain a important factor in the world of if they want to cede that power to developing nations? The ability to project military power is a very important aspect of diplomacy, lacking that ability significantly impairs your diplomatic options and importance. It isn't about having a fleet of tanks able to roll across nations it's about the ability to tell third world leaders that they can't just have their opposition or whole minority groups disappear or put down public demonstrations with military force. Britain learned this lesson the hard way when they were slowly demobilizing the traditional surface forces of the Royal Navy in favor of submarines and other cold war focused components in the 80's when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Had the invasion been 6 months to a year later and the British would not have had the ability to respond militarily.

The UN isn't going to be the solution to anything, national sovereignty isn't going to be willingly sacrificed to an organization that large. Not withstanding that as formed, the UN resolutions only have as much force as the member nations are willing to back those resolutions with military force.
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Nobody is technically wrong here. Its all about cost/benefit and priorities. I understand Gates...his interests are US military power and that's it. Americans have a bit more diverse set of interests.

It comes down to what matters...and what should matter is the economic battlefield. If US businesses lose out to foriegn business it costs us in ways we can't even identify. For US business it matters whether we can beat competition internationally as well as domestically, for US middle/lower income folks its jobs, for US entreprenuers it makes far more difference to wealth than taxes, for our currency its whether the US dollar matters and if we can import any of the products we buy at Target, for the US govt it has a large say as to whether we can get back to a balanced budget. Its everything for the US standard of living.

Military power just saps our strength (use the British analogy if you want), drives the deficit through the roof and alienates international public opinion which hurts us, yes, on the economic battlefield. And the benefits? Iraq was the most monetizable use of military power and the whole adventure netted us...I'll round here...nothing.

Many are focused on whether we should encourage Namibia to behave...and meanwhile the US economy is getting torched.
 
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Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

NPR had a thing on Cyber warfare the other day. There was some guy saying it couldn't be war. No bullets. (Thankfully the other guy was not that dense) My immediate thought was if it disrupts things you can't dismiss it because it isn't bullets. Your post goes right along with that.
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Kepler said:
The European countries and Japan are probably the only ones where the number actually matters (everybody pretty much expects everybody else to default). The Beeb and The Economist say Greece is at something like 160% and everybody knows they are going to default, which will be OK as long as they don't take "real" economies with them.

The EU is going to have to either do fiscal union (translation: Germany finally does conquer Europe, 75 years behind schedule) or end monetary union.

The numbers also look worse than the reality because economies are in a slow-down. The denominators got smaller so the ratios look bigger. That's one reason all countries seem to "suddenly" be in trouble. But if we can use the panic to drive deficit reduction, so much the better.

Here's a table of comparative external debt as of 2010. Don't be Luxembourg. It's Wikipedia so caveat lector.
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Liechtenstein FTW.
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Another $6.6 billion just up and vanished into thin air in Iraq. That'll help the deficit.

Any time they want to "lose" a pallet of money in my backyard would be fine.
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Priceless said:
Another $6.6 billion just up and vanished into thin air in Iraq. That'll help the deficit.

Any time they want to "lose" a pallet of money in my backyard would be fine.
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Were Jimmy Conway or Henry Hill in country recently???
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Bakunin said:
I bet the Iraqis just took fractions of a penny from the tray, and they did it a couple trillion times.
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They don't even have white collar prisons there. They're all of the federal PMITA variety.
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Priceless said:
Another $6.6 billion just up and vanished into thin air in Iraq.
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Where by "vanished into thin air" we mean "bribed everybody from the minister of defense down to the falafel truck guy." Next time we want to control a country, let's skip the killing soldiers and civilians part and just send Helicopter Ben.

helicopter-dropping-money.jpg
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Kepler said:
Where by "vanished into thin air" we mean "bribed everybody from the minister of defense down to the falafel truck guy." Next time we want to control a country, let's skip the killing soldiers and civilians part and just send Helicopter Ben.

helicopter-dropping-money.jpg
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Agreed. But then again I posted the same thing last week.
 
Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition

Saw this today and loved it.

"Just what is "maldistribution" of wealth?" (person asked this about this article http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/123780004.html)

It's the last part of a game of Monopoly, where nobody but one can play. In other words, it's where America finds itself today. You can argue "fair" or "unfair" all you want, but if nobody can afford your products, you got no customers. Even the vicious misanthrope and Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford realized that.
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The American Economy in a nutshell.
 
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