The possible coming collapse(s)
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, June 26, 2026 17:42
VIEWED: 5665
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Quote:As if this was Trump's fault.
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Thanks, Trump.
Son, Nixon went off the gold standard and created the petrodollar. He was the first American President to visit China.
BushI negotiated NAFTA.
Clinton pushed NAFTA thru, and created a special trade relationship which China to pave the way for accession into the WTO. (he also got rid of Glass Steagall and signed the Commodities Futures Trading Act, which made credit default swaps possible. Oh, the mischief that man created!)
China joined the WTO under BushII.
Obama negotiated the TTP and TTIP ... see where this is going?
Shoving America into the maelstrom has been a two-party project for decades. And you would admit that (to yourself) if you weren't such a doofus.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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I can't think of a solution. The essential conundrum of profit is that the worker can't afford to buy the product they make. (That is the very definition of profit.) Unless there's some way to cycle the profit out of private hands and back into the broad economy, businesses will always be finding cheaper and cheaper labor, while workers/consumers will always need to buy products made by the next rung - or 10 rungs - down in the labor market.
I remember when I was young, people were disdainful about 'cheap Japanese junk'. But Japan, in its effort to turn itself into an industrial export-based economy by exporting low-cost goods, treated large segments of its workers like slaves. Unbeknown to most people, the Japanese economic 'miracle' came at the cost of workers literally starving to death.
Japan became a net importer around 2009. I suspect it was because countries were no longer buying high-end goods after the 2007 crash, the price of oil imports was going up, and of course the major 2011 earthquake and the radioactively smoldering Fukushima site. But economists have been bemoaning the Japanese economic 'doldrums' since 2002.
While there are many ideas about 'what's going wrong', at least some Japanese economists point to these: "The main reason Japanese GDP has a hard time growing is sluggish consumer spending caused by sluggish consumer income" and "... the lack of globally-competitive products in computers, smartphones, etc. (Japan can't compete with Foxconn) to the continued offshoring of Japanese auto production".
Doesn't that sound familiar?
I point to Japan because it's often easier to understand problems when they're not your own.
A country can't be a strong international trading partner (that doesn't starve its people to get there) unless it has a strong internal economy. But an internal economy will shrivel and die if it doesn't return robust value internally. Value needs to be returned whole, so that people can afford to buy 'home-made' goods without going into debt to do it. So that their country doesn't have to turn itself into a net importer and debtor internationally.
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The solution is to get out of the competition. We have to ask ourselves the fundamental question: Is the economy supposed to serve the people, or are people supposed to serve the economy?
Putting people on a treadmill to hell just so that some people can get ultra-wealthy is not "serving the people". That is one of the reasons why I think it's so important for nations to maintain their sovereign powers to direct their own economy. If you can't do that, nations will just be pitted against each other by the transnational elites.
Also, why it's so important for nations to be as self-sufficient as possible, and with a near-neutral balance of trade. It's bad for a nation such as ours to be indebted up to our eyeballs to almost every other nation in the world. We have almost every resource required to intelligently run a modern economy, people who are out of decent jobs, and crying unmet needs. So what's the problem?
OTOH, basing your economy on exports is a problem too ... it distorts your economy to produce for a foreign market, and if that foreign market should dry up then your economy stumbles too: Just look at China in 2008, when they discovered the fatal flaw in their export-to-the-west plan.
It comes down to Shakespeare: "Neither a borrower (trade deficit) nor a lender (trade surplus) be"
*****
The IMF has been planning for the death of the petrodollar for years. They've already set up a system call Special Drawing Rights (SDR) which is to serve as the "new" reserve currency. China fought hard to, and succeeded in getting included in the SDR basket. I think that's a mistake. I look at Russia, which is working hard to isolate itself from whatever chaos may erupt. They've paid down their debts, created an electronic exchange free from SWIFT, signed deals in bilateral currency swaps, and are working towards self-sufficiency. They're battening down the hatches. I think we should too, but nobody will admit that there's even a problem so ...
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Son, Nixon went off the gold standard and created the petrodollar. He was the first American President to visit China.
BushI negotiated NAFTA.
Clinton pushed NAFTA thru, and created a special trade relationship which China to pave the way for accession into the WTO. (he also got rid of Glass Steagall and signed the Commodities Futures Trading Act, which made credit default swaps possible. Oh, the mischief that man created!)
China joined the WTO under BushII.
Obama negotiated the TTP and TTIP ... see where this is going?
Yes, I sure do. Another SIGGY whinging thread, whinging about x or y or z. And who can save us? Who has the answers to all our problems? See where this is going? Again?
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Quote:Shoving America into the maelstrom has been a two-party project for decades. And you would admit that (to yourself) if you weren't such a doofus.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Son, Nixon went off the gold standard and created the petrodollar. He was the first American President to visit China.
BushI negotiated NAFTA.
Clinton pushed NAFTA thru, and created a special trade relationship which China to pave the way for accession into the WTO. (he also got rid of Glass Steagall and signed the Commodities Futures Trading Act, which made credit default swaps possible. Oh, the mischief that man created!)
China joined the WTO under BushII.
Obama negotiated the TTP and TTIP ... see where this is going?
Originally posted by GSTRING:
Yes, I sure do. Another SIGGY whinging thread, whinging about x or y or z. And who can save us? Who has the answers to all our problems? See where this is going? Again?
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:May I suggest that the IRS force Americans to learn about their debts? "According to new estimates by the Internal Revenue Service, tax evasion is a pretty lucrative business, costing the federal government on average $458 billion per year between 2008 through 2010. That’s a slight increase from the previous estimate, issued in 2006, of $450 billion. The feds call that dollar figure the “tax gap” and say the rise is the result of better measurement rather than Americans engaging in more tax evasion."
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Agreed.
Sometimes I imagine that all reasonable people understand that an exorbitant National Debt is not sustainable.Quote:That's not the problem. We have been collectively propagandized into mass consumption, and beguiled into believing that debt doesn't count. It wasn't the schools that did that, but corporate and bank advertising, and the steady erosion of buying power over those decades of economic predation.
But then I observe Election results. The Department of Educamation has done a good job of dumbing down America, removing Math from the collective comprehension.
http://fortune.com/2016/04/29/tax-evasion-cost/
Maybe the IRS could teach them to engage in less tax evasion? It is better to learn that lesson late than not at all.
"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has identified small business and sole proprietorship employees as the largest contributors to the tax gap between what Americans owe in federal taxes and what the federal government receives."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_in_the_United_States
The wikipedia helpfully estimated $3.44 trillion was Lost to Tax Evasion from 2001 to 2010. Getting that money back from the tax evaders would certainly teach them a hard lesson about too much debt, don't you think? Unfortunately, the IRS’s budget has been repeatedly cut since 2011, forcing it to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. The result? I.R.S. Tax Fraud Cases Plummet After Budget Cuts. Obviously, there are lessons not being learned nor being taught, even.
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/economy/irs-tax-fraud-audit.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Taxes are a much different story than general debt.
The majority of Americans are making below the poverty level now. Most of their money isn't taxed on the federal level at all, not including the social security and medicare taxes. There are no tax shelters for these people, legitimate or otherwise. Unless they're being paid under the table, there aren't any ways for them to defraud the government without very easily being found out.
There's no reason to argue what Sigs posted in your quote here. She shouldn't have argued JSF either. It's a combination of the two. Kids don't learn anything about budgeting in school, and then they're forced into a world of keeping up with the Joneses and accumulating massive debt along the way. Even if they managed to avoid the temptation of racking up 10's of thousands of dollars of credit card debt on the side by the time they get their college educations, most of those kids will start off their adult life with no more safe spaces and a college debt that will take them 30 years to pay off... assuming they even manage to find a job making enough to pay all their other bills while making their bare minimum monthly payments with the nearly worthless degrees they got after wasting 4 of the prime years of their life learning nothing of consequence.
This IS what the government wants. Both Democrats and Republicans want this. A country made up of wage slaves. All the better if their slave collars weren't forced on them and they wake up one day realizing they're wearing one after years of poor choices, impulse buying, living beyond their means and no one ever having
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I can't think of a solution. The essential conundrum of profit is that the worker can't afford to buy the product they make. (That is the very definition of profit.)
My joke when I worked at K-Mart was that I worked at K-Mart, but I couldn't afford to shop at a K-Mart.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Selling Real Estate in Russia? Are You Crazy?
Each would need a certificate of sanity from a psychologist. “They will look at our psychological state,” she explained. “If everything is normal, they will give us the document.”
Ms. Kotova, and tens of thousands of other Russians who are required to produce such a document to sell property, have no history of mental illness. The certificate, which must be signed and stamped by a doctor, is a legal defense against a pervasive problem in Moscow real estate deals: rampant fraud and weak courts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/business/moscow-russia-real-estate.
html
Stop your fucking whining. You could live in Russia.
T 
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Who's whining?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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