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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Corruption of America |
| 2011-12-23 |
| The essay below is excerpted from the December 2011 issue of StansberryÂ’s Investment Advisory.Its author, Porter Stansberry, examines the question of whether America is growing richer or poorer based on an analysis of its per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). Said simply, is our economy growing faster than our population? As individuals, are we becoming more affluent? Or is the economic pie, measured on a per-person basis, growing smaller? ItÂ’s a hard question to answer, and this article provides Porter StansberryÂ’s insight. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #9 I don't understand what's the problem regarding picture ID. Does not nearly everyone has a DL? And those that don't can get a state pic ID. How that has a disproportionate effect on blacks is beyond my comprehension. Can anyone enlighten me? |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2011-12-23 22:54 |
| #8 I don't even have confidence in the election process. It has become corrupted. Eric "Place" Holder has read your mind, and come in right on cue, late on a Friday afternoon just before the Christmas holiday: WSJ: WASHINGTON—The Justice Department blocked South Carolina's new voter identification law, citing concerns about the law's disproportionate effect on African-American voters and setting up a new conflict between the Obama administration and Republican-led state governments. The South Carolina proposal would require voters to provide state-issued or military photo identification in order to cast a ballot. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-12-23 16:59 |
| #7 "You need to discount the increase in debt from GDP" That too. |
| Posted by: newc 2011-12-23 16:26 |
| #6 I'm not particularly optimistic about these changes that are needed either. About the only way to bring about such change is the vote out the current crop of Congresscritters and keep voting them out until they start to get it right. This whole social security two month tax holiday extension is just total bull$hit. The Congresscritters are sticking their fingers in the dike--just kicking the can down the road. We need some fundamental changes that along the magnitude of what our founding fathers did. I shouldn't demonize the Democrats only for this mess although they seem to be the most culpable. I also fault the progressive Republicans for what we are in. Currently we have a bunch of gutless wonders who are only interested in re-election. Those that we put in the last election cycle are limited by the burden of the existing structure. I would not mind someone like an Alan West for Speaker of the House. Reid is one of the bottlenecks in the Senate although there are others. He was up for re-election last time and does not come up again for awhile. I don't even have confidence in the election process. It has become corrupted. Maybe that is just me on this particular day and reflects a dismal and dark mood. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-12-23 11:46 |
| #5 His two recommended cures - personal fiduciary responsibility for representatives and senators, personal financial and criminal exposure for CEOs and board directors of corporations - seem unlikely to be enacted by a political process as corrupted as he suggests is the case. The combination of this, the Iraq implosion, and the ongoing SOPA mess has got me in a pretty damned pessimistic place this morning. |
| Posted by: Mitch H. 2011-12-23 10:29 |
| #4 Thanks g(r)omgoru for the post. Our political leaders, our business leaders, and our cultural leaders have made a series of catastrophic choices. The result has been a long decline in AmericaÂ’s standard of living. For decades, we have papered over these problems with massive amounts of borrowing. But now, our debts total close to 400% of GDP, and America is the worldÂ’s largest borrower (after being the worldÂ’s largest creditor only 40 years ago)Â…And the holes in our society can no longer be hiddenÂ… The article is a good summary of why we are in the mess we are in. Now I know why the Democrats (= socialists) want to try to circumvent the 2nd Amendment and control guns. They are afraid the citizenry might decide to use them on out-of-control Federal and local governments. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-12-23 10:23 |
| #3 You need to discount the increase in debt from GDP. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2011-12-23 09:16 |
| #2 The answer is simple, remove all government spending from GDP and then you will have a more pure GDP projection. Who was the idiot that included government expenditures in the first place (a net loss to GDP)? Probably some of those Keynesian economist idiots. |
| Posted by: newc 2011-12-23 08:41 |
| #1 Excerpts: ---- Even today, our government’s nominal GDP figures are greatly influenced by inflation. The influence of inflation is particularly pernicious in GDP studies. You see, inflation, which actually reduces our standard of living, drives up the amount of nominal GDP. So it creates the appearance of a wealthier country…while the nation is actually getting poorer. The only real way to accurately measure per-capita GDP is to build our own model. The need to build our own tools tells you something important – the government doesn’t want anyone to know the answer to this question. It could easily publish data far more accurate than the indexes it puts out. But government doesn’t want anyone to know. And it wants to be able to say “those aren’t the real data” when studies like ours produce bad news. --- a few days later [July 2008]… what did [then-SecTreas] Paulson tell those hedge-fund managers? He told them the same thing I had written in my [June 2008] newsletter. He told them the opposite of what he’d said publicly to Congress. He told these billionaire investors that Fannie and Freddie were a disaster… They would require an enormous, multibillion-dollar bailout… The U.S. government would have to take them over… And their shareholders would be completely wiped out. Here you had a high-government official, explicitly lying to Congress (and by extension, the general public), while giving the real facts to a group of people who represented the financial interests of the world’s wealthiest folks. The story didn’t come to the public’s attention for two years. This was the most outrageous example of graft and corruption I have ever seen.... The Bloomberg story… about a crooked Treasury secretary handing a room full of crooked billionaires inside information worth billions of dollars… hardly caused a ripple. As far as I know, no actions are being planned against Henry Paulson or any of the hedge-fund managers involved. No other major media outlet picked up the story. I saw nothing about it from the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission.... It seems like everyone in our country has lost his moral bearing, from the highest government officials and senior corporate leaders all the way down to schoolteachers and local community leaders... Nope, that is not the case. It does seem to be true that people who are have a strong moral bearing & the ability to articulate and carry out same, are not allowed anywhere near the reins of power or influence. One of the strongest complicating factors is the degradation of public discourse (which became obvious to me in the early 1990's) which was predicted by George Orwell decades earlier. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-12-23 08:10 |