North American Union to Replace USA
POSTED BY: piratenews
UPDATED: Saturday, July 8, 2006 03:31
VIEWED: 10071
PAGE 5 of 7
You mean Canada isn't a broad slab of permafrost inhabited only by polar bears and Eskimos???
Damn, you've shattered my world view PN.
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
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"The only difference is that "Tax and Spend" liberals tax the rich and poor to help those that need it.
"Spend and Cut" conservatives tax the poor so they can afford a cut for the rich, that need the money more, obviously, to afford an engorged millitary.
At least thats how it works over here."
This comment is so ignortant and economically false that I hardly know where to begin. But you might begin with Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom."
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Quote:
Originally posted by darwinshandmaiden:
Advantages to having a North American Union from a Canadian perspective:
1) Canadian money would be the legal tender because it's so pretty
2) Starbucks would have competition in the form of Tim Horton's
3)Canadian rock group "Rush" would sing the national anthem (whatever that would be) at all baseball, hockey and other national sport games. Beauty, eh?
4) Beavers would replace the eagle as the national symbol - we would train them to damn rivers for electricity.
5) Toques would become high fashion
I picks them up, I drops them off.
I think "If I had a million dollars" by Barenaked ladies should be your national anthem, there Canadian right?
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Barenaked Ladies are indeed Canadian - but we would have to update the song to "If I had a Trillion Dollars" in order to pay off the American national debt.
I picks them up, I drops them off.
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Howard79:
Or maybe you can enlighten me, rather than saying I should make your point for you, since what I said is exactly how it works.
You’re the ignorant one, since you ignore reality because it doesn't fit your world view.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
"I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: 'No good in a bed, but fine against a wall'." -- Eleanor Roosevelt.
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So Wayward99,
I read The Road to Serfdom. Did you? If not, it's here: http://www.mises.org/TRTS.htm
Some of the more interesting quotes are:
Quote:Hmmm ...... sounds like Bush's kleptocracy to me. Could BUSH be putting the US on the road to serfdom? Just a thought.
To permit mobilization of your country's economy, you gladly surrender many freedoms. You know regimentation was forced by your country's enemies.
Quote:Well, certainly the PNAC established 'think' tanks, honed their word-smithing, and framed the debate for roughly the past three decades. Not sayin' that they consider themselves the 'planners' or anything, just sayin' it looks like it.
In an unsuccessful plan to educate people to uniform views, "planners" establish a giant propaganda machine -which the coming dictator will find handy
Quote:Just a thought, there.
The gullible do find agreement ....
Quote:As does an unofficial but never ending 'war on terror' and a bogeyman like ObL allowed to escape for all these five years.
A negative aim welds party unity.
Quote:
No one opposes the plan ... It would be suicide; new secret police are ruthless
Hayden is confirmed, it's OK to spy on 1 in every 10 Americans, secretly wiretap without ever getting a court order, police which books are checked out of libraries.
After all, if you have nothing to hide, why should you be worried, right?
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Taxation policy is extremely simple. The government needs money to fund its programs and it can get this money one of three ways.
1) It can raise it with taxation.
2) It can borrow it
3) It can print it.
Generally most people agree that 3) is a bad option since you risk inflation, destruction of wealth and other nastiness. So in the end you have two finacing choices and the decision is which to use to finance government spending.
1) If you tax more then people have less money to spend on investment and purchase less goods. This has a bad knock on effect to the real economy and can cause an economic slowdown.
2) Borrowing money locally reduces the amout of free capital in your system. Laws of supply and demand operate and the result is that within your local capital markets interest rates rise as private concerns vie to access the reduced amount of free capital. This effects local investment, morgage rates etc and ultimately has bad knock on effects to the real economy. What the US has been doing is borrowing heavily from abroad which mean that government needs have been satisfied while keeping enough free capital in the US system to keep low interest rates. This is great if you can do it. The problem is that these loans will be repariated sooner or later and the people that hold them will probably try to convert them into US currency hard assets -- like oil or US companies.
Now if you decide to raise taxes to fund the government the only question becomes who do you take it from? Do you flat tax and charge the guy that sweeps the floor the same rate as the CEO of the company? Do you have a sliding scale that lets the little guy keep comparatively more than the big guy? Do you do away with taxes on income all together and tax only consumption?
You'll find advocates for all of these solutions but in the end it comes down to which system benefits THEM. Of course the rich want a flat tax or a comsumption tax it moves the burden from them to someone else. Of course the little guy thinks taxing the rich is fair, why wouldnt he? So for all the tooing and froing about tax it comes down to this, we all want some form of government and we all want someone else to pay for most of it.
Of course there is another solution which is to reduce the government budget to a more acceptable level. This is what should have been done after the Bush "tax cut" but they didn't. Instead spending actually went up and was only offset by extra borrowing. The reason that government tends to grow rather than shrink is that once a government is involved in something cutting funding will hurt someone and come with a political cost. Politicians don't like paying the piper so bridges to nowhere and other weirdness tends to continue until the government simply cannot afford to keep feeding itself and fails.
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And yet - when Clinton raised tax on the relatively wealthy, the economy soared and the budget became balanced. In fact it ran a surplus. All boats floated.
In your schema, these should never have happened. How do you account (literally) for this?
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Government raised taxes both for income and capital gains. During Clintons era three things happened.
1) Government spending stagnated -- a byproduct of having Republicans in the Congress and a Democrat in the Whitehouse, in real terms Gov spending didn't rise.
2) The government got a cut of the increased market activity associated with the internet bubble. Taxation of capital gains and then the income those gains generated were both taxed and went into government funds.
3) There was really no international competition for the US. German was still in the doldrums paying for reunification and that kept most of Europe down, the Asian market collapse effected the pacific rim and China wasn't as big a player. It's easy to win the game if you are the only team playing.
Governments can create conditions that favour a strong economy but unless they own the industries they can't force the economy to work. That's why some of the claims about tax policy is so funny. Tax cut advocates like to think of tax cuts like a shot of addrenalin that can restart a dying economy. Nice medical metaphore but Adrenalin shots dont always revive patients, sometimes they just die. Borrowing money to finance a tax cut has the same impact as borrowing money and building a dam or other public works with it, it puts money to work in the economy and that muliplies out and creates demand. It's a question of political dogma to decide if that money has more effect being spent by tax payers or the government.
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FLETCH:
If I may assume for a moment.
You’re saying that everyone wants a government but on the whole everyone wants someone else to pay for it.
This I agree with.
I'm someone who can be considered rich; I have a very high disposable income.
What I can't countenance is someone how wishes to live in society without paying for the responsibilities, i.e. defending and looking after those who are weaker than oneself.
If we were to live in a survival of the fittest world the human race would have died out by now. We are a species through our intelligence have circumnavigated survival of the fittest, so when someone wishes to return to survival of the fittest because they believe it will improve their position all I can say is “fine, we’ll drop you in the Amazon, see you again… if you survive…”
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
"I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: 'No good in a bed, but fine against a wall'." -- Eleanor Roosevelt.
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