In other words, Obama, just like nearly everyone else, had underestimated the damage that Bush had done to the economy.
That is what constitutes an Obama lie in your world.
Dude, Bush was just leaving the economy on cruise control from where Clinton took it. One can argue the chain of events all the way back to nixon with everyone taking responsibility for a key screweup.
Obama is well underway adding his own screwups to that list.
I'd put Nixon on the list as having to d somthing, that something jsut sucked.
Carter was a moron, and probably should have been beaten about the head and neck.
Reagan had a lot of good ideas, and a few major screw ups.
Clinton, I'll put his first term down as well intentioned. Second term... the guy ought to be shot.
Bush... should have had a spine and stuck to his guns on some of the reform he suggested at the start as doggedly as he did many other things. For his role in relaxing the reserve margin, he probably ought to be shot too.
Obama, we'll see how much debt he can cram down our throats. We may never be able to recover form it.
But you really do need to learn another trick other than simply blaming Bush.
AS for the Ron Paulers... metal money failed before, get over it.
...metal money failed before, get over it.
Really? Then could you please explain to me how that could possibly be true when metal money is the single form of currency that has survived for all of human existence in one for or another?
Look, I can go out and procure a confederate dollar too. That doesn't mean it was a success as a currency.
The problem with metla money is the amount of metal vs the ammount of goods and services. You economy tanks if the money supply expands too quickly or fails to expand. In the case of metal money and moving off of the gold and silver standards, there was simply not enough metal to be able to loan enough money to create the rate of growth representative of a healthy economy.
After effectively re-indexing the metal to paper money ratio several times, it was apparant that population growth and modernization were going to outstrip precious metal supplies.
We had effectively run into the EXACT same problem we ran into in the last year or so. The ability of banks to make loans came ot a screeching halt and thus so did the economy.
Take all the gold on the planet, and divide it up, and your annual labor this year is worth about $0.67, and there isn't any gold to represent next years labor.
Unless you are going to keep your working population fixed, you need an expanding money supply. Metal backed currencies can't keep up with the reproduction rate of the human species, nor can it reasonably quantify the value of labor given the current population of the planet.
Has precious metal worked as a storage of value? Yes. That doesn't mean it is capable of embodying all financial transactions in a global economy.
Look, I can go out and procure a confederate dollar too. That doesn't mean it was a success as a currency.
Actually, the fact that a metal coin from the Confederate States still has value inherent to the metal used to make it does mean it is a successful currency.
So to sum up your argument, the whole reason the gold standard is insufficient to use as a currency is due to the fact that their wasn't enough gold to go around? I am going to have to call you out on that number. Give me some even slight bit of proof that the gold properly divided up would result in an individual's annual labor being worth $0.67. You and I both know that it can't be done with anything remotely resembling accuracy, and you pulled that number out of thin air.
Even supposing what you said it true, that implies our prices are actually inflated over their true value. In fact, that is exactly what has happened. The ability of the banks did not come to a "screeching halt" as you claim because of too little paper circulation. That is the bullshit the Federal Reserve and the current and past administrations claimed to justify their unconstitutional bailouts. The banks ran into problems because people could not repay the loans. That is what prevented the banks from giving new loans. The banks made bad investments, they couldn't recoup the losses, and now they owe more than they can pay out.
In turn, those loans should not have been given to those people, because the banks knew that it was unlikely for those people to pay them back. This is due to the inflated prices of real estate in the country. Those prices desperately need to fall. For that to happen, the current set of loans needs to go unpaid, those banks that made the loans need to fail, and those houses need to sit on the market because no one can get loans to buy them. That is necessary for a helpful economy.
Of course, this doesn't need to happen with just houses. It needs to happen across the board. Once the massive inflation has vanished, the gold standard would become viable again. However, the alternative is to let other countries hold our debt as we have others, and watch our country fall. Personally, I would rather deal with the short-term hard times while trying to move back to a gold standard than to watch the country fall as we willfully ignorant to the underlying problem.
IT was a number based on my best recollection of doing the math previously, here in fact, arguing about this same shit.
But I'll do it again because you don't like doing any math. Pay attention.
total gold mined to date is approximately 152,000 metric tons. That is a teensy bit under 4886913.5 troy ounces. Even if we go for gold's peak at, and I'm even going to be super generous and use the intra-month peak of $1200 rather than the monthly average peak which maxes out at $871. That's $5,864,296,200 if we did the conversion at the weakest value of the dollar vs. gold.
Current estimate of world population is over 6.8 billion people.
So $0.86 per person at it's peak. At close of business today, it is $0.658 We'll call it $0.66.
I was off by a penny because I didn't do the math all over again.
The money supply is expanded by fractional reserve banking. In short, by making loans. What bought the banks to a halt was NOT the inability to repay the loans. In fact most of the loans probably will be profitable. What caused the problem was the inability to determine how much a derivative investment vehicle could be trusted. Without the ability to determine if loans would likely be paid back, trust evaporated, and loaning stopped. Little to do with the value of a dollar, LOTS to do with unregulated bundling of debt and questionable acocunting practices. Which can still happen if you conduct fractional reserve accounting with metal money.
Case in point... gold leases. Lots of the big players likely don't even have 5% metal to back their paper. Much less the recommended 15%.
Simply handling a pure gold bar would destroy the value representing 3 or 4 people on the planet. How do you actually plan to manage that?
How do you suppose we make that swing? Carry a scanning tunneling electron microscope around with you so you can pay for groceries with exact change?
And the opposite problem. What do you do when you set up your nice happy gold standard, and someone decides that the smart move is asteroid mining. Eros is close, and if that gets refined, you are tlaking tens of billions of tons of gold added to the market.
A global economy with a population as large as ours is exceeding the ability to be qunatified with rare materials. There is little difference between arbitrarily valued lumps of metal and arbitrarily valued paper in terms of practical function.
Question for you. IF gold was the answer, why did economies crumble and fall even when using a gold standard?
But I'll do it again because you don't like doing any math. Pay attention.
I have a minor in applied math, so I say go fuck yourself, asshole.
Seriously, I want to see where you get your numbers, something I have pointed out previously. All those numbers you named could have come from anyone, including pulled out of your ass. Why don't you supply some evidence to back up your claims?
What is worse, all you have done there is show that our currency is overvalued (which easily explains why its value is dropping on the global market). Furthermore, you fail to do is scale the rest of the economy to match the gold standard, which is the whole point I have been saying. You can't compare the value of gold under our current economic system and imply that its value would be unchanged under a gold standard. This is Econ 101 here. You numbers are meaningless.
The money supply is expanded by fractional reserve banking.
No, the money supply is currently expanded by fractional reserve banking. That was not always the case. Now you are saying that because we have set the system up this way, it is the only way the system can work, which is bullshit. It is a circular argument that is not founded on any facts. If you are so certain of your stance, why can't you cite any real world studies to back up your claims?
Simply handling a pure gold bar would destroy the value representing 3 or 4 people on the planet. How do you actually plan to manage that?
How do you suppose we make that swing? Carry a scanning tunneling electron microscope around with you so you can pay for groceries with exact change?
Its called the gold standard because the is the basis for the value of the money. Certificates such as the dollar bill would still exist, but their value would be tied directly to the amount of gold backing the bill. You either know that and are making an appeal to ridicule, or else are really too stupid to be making any statements about economics. I'll leave you to admit which it is.
And the opposite problem. What do you do when you set up your nice happy gold standard, and someone decides that the smart move is asteroid mining. Eros is close, and if that gets refined, you are taking tens of billions of tons of gold added to the market.
What happens when it becomes feasible to print dollar bills at home, replicas so good even banks can't tell the difference? There are billions of "what if" scenarios that could destroy every economy, including fractional reserve spending, and pointing out a random one like that is again an appeal to ridicule.
A global economy with a population as large as ours is exceeding the ability to be qunatified with rare materials.
Prove it!
There is little difference between arbitrarily valued lumps of metal and arbitrarily valued paper in terms of practical function.
Bullshit. There are tons of differences, namely the fact of rarity. The value is due to the rarity and the functional use of the material in question. Gold, silver, platinum, and diamonds all have value and limited supply, any of which could be used to base an economy on. The same cannot be said for some random paperwork written up by a government.
Question for you. IF gold was the answer, why did economies crumble and fall even when using a gold standard?
The same question could be asked right now. Why did our economy crumble if the current system is perfect? The answer is the same. The basis of the economy is one part of a whole system. When the system becomes fragmented, as ours is, it doesn't work. Going back to the gold standard is not a complete across the board fix, but it does fix some issues, specifically the problems we have with the fractional reserve banking.
The amount of gold is taken from a gold FAQ produced by the museum of natural history. It was the largest number I could find of a number of FAQs on the subject. From straight up geology, gold represents about .05 of one percent of the crust of the earth. Most of it is not feasibly retrievable.
As for scaling the quantity of gold to our current economy, I'm simply using the current value to determine a quantity per individual. The fact that to measure quantities for common transactions would require the ability to make change in picograms is part of why it won't work.
Fractional reserve banking goes back to the days of operating on a frikin metallic standard. It isn't something we invented in the last hundred years. The fractional reserve was done via local banks, and they collapsed often. which lead to the slow but sure development of central banks in the 1800s. It fell apart because it was inelastic enough to deal with the sclae of global wars and the need to pay for massive labor output and massive raw materials output.
The bretton woods system attempted to manage that inelasticity over time and recover form it, and it failed miserably.
Once you start issuing certificates for the gold, you are back to fractional reserve banking. Which BTW was done, with gold, using paper certificates. And we did have inflation, and bank runs, and overextending credit, etc.
As for PROOF. My proof is that the system you ahve described has been the method int he past, and it FAILED. I'm not claiming the current system is perfect, but it was an attempt to imporve on the previous economic systems that failed before it. If you are going to claim something is better, it should probably be something NEW.
Howabout you prove something and go dig up some numbers that rise above the tautology that gold is a good backing mechanism because gold has value.
Money based upon gold & silver has not failed .. it's when there is not backing of the FIAT money that the money fails.
You can print money to your hearts delight but it is just paper with nothing to back it. If you want to exchange paper for some service good luck to that .. and that is why so many countries around the world are getting pissed off at the good ol' USA.
What the Price of Gold Is Telling Us - by Ron Paul
Gold needs to go to $15,000
And when you issue silver certificates that can be revalued by the government, how is that different than a fiat currency?
Quite honestly, if you want a concrete backing, perhaps the calorie is it. As we have managed to expand our food supply with the human population, and if we ever can't keep up, we are pretty much extinct anyway.
But a fixed supply of something is a bad deal.
Lets say I have 100,000 people and 100,000 nuggets of whatever to denominate the economy. Lets say every year I can increase the nugget supply by 5%, but every year I increase the population by 8%. What happens to the economy? You get deflation, becuase there is too much labor, and likely too many goods chasing too few nuggets. However, unless everyone is subsitence farming, there reaches a point where if the price of labor drops any further it simply isn't worth working ot not be able to buy enough food. Sure, the auto worker might become "cheaper", and the cost of the automobile might become "cheaper" too. Except that unless the ability to increase the supply of raw materials outpaces the ability to increase the nugget supply, the price of the car goes up.
Not to mention that even if you do manage to reach that stochasic balance of deflation across the bar, how do you start new businesses? Writing a loan effectively alters the value of the money
supply.
Gold works as a store of value, but it does not allow you to expand the money supply to keep up with population growth. Attaching it to a paper currency by some government declared value does not protect you form bad monitaary policy either.
History has demonstrated both of those things explicitly.
What you're talking about is inflation, greed, expansion of the human race .. more people means more pieces of the pie to to divide ... so let's just make some more pies .. so let's say it's apple pies we're talking about ... the pies are made of something... not just thin air like FIAT money is. Shoot even the flour that makes the pie crust cost's more to produce that printing up some paper script. Some one has to grow those apple trees ... takes time .. flour .. sugar spices. Apple trees become a valuable commodity.
Silver certificates were backed by silver owned and stored in a federal vault. The paper money was backed up by a precious metal.
Granted you can't eat silver or gold, but it is an excellent and time honored exchange mechanism of trade ... kind of hard to say how many apples you need to buy a computer ... is that a Granny apple or a red delicious apple ,, or a pear.
Gold is ultimate store of value for a discredited dollar
How To Create a New World Reserve Currency
Actually, the reason it could hit 14% is that bobo is a clueless dweeb who knows nothing about the economy so he is running it into the ground. By the time he gets done with the economy the Democrats will be so unpopular that it will be legal to hunt them and there will be no bag limit. In fact, you will probably get a reward for each one you shoot.
I would hope all politicians would be added to the season!
catghy
bobo promised that it would not get above 8%
HE LIED!!!