Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

[Aeni]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

The whole fiscal issue is a farce created to distract Americans from real issues at hand. Wouldn't matter to me one iota that we get our budget balanced if we're all going to hell in a hand basket anyway.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

The whole fiscal issue is a farce created to distract Americans from real issues at hand.

Uh...what?

[Aeni]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Uh...what?

You're a sheep if you believe in it. And mainstream economists bought the whole deal - farm and all. Historically we've been in worse shit than this and we never keeled over. Mind you, what exactly is money? Do you fully understand what it is? No? Then you better read up on it first and then look at the whole fiscal picture.

[Taskmage]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

You're a sheep if you believe in it. And mainstream economists bought the whole deal - farm and all. Historically we've been in worse shit than this and we never keeled over. Mind you, what exactly is money? Do you fully understand what it is? No? Then you better read up on it first and then look at the whole fiscal picture.

Okay .. what? You're going to have to explain yourself better than that, because you've made a pretty sweeping claim and a prompt like "find out what money is" doesn't exactly provide a discrete starting point for figuring out what you're referring to, especially when you also claim that the traditional experts on the subject of money are apparently unreliable "sheep."

[Raydeus]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

I don't know much about US politics and economy, but aren't fiscal issues one of the reasons why the US is in trouble?

[cidbahamut]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

You're a sheep if you believe in it. And mainstream economists bought the whole deal - farm and all. Historically we've been in worse shit than this and we never keeled over. Mind you, what exactly is money? Do you fully understand what it is? No? Then you better read up on it first and then look at the whole fiscal picture.

Less talking out of your pretentious ass, more being specific and presenting your argument in a coherent manner.

[LeonstrifeLEV]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Money is a thing, that people want. Apparently you use it to ironically buy other things making it it's only purpose and yet it is an awesome purpose because waiting to trade my next sister takes too long between games. Apperently the US owes lots of people this while at the same time, the US wants things. I find this to be a inconvenient position considering I don't know alot of blood sisters of the US.

[DakAttack]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Money is that stuff I give hookers to make me feel good.

[LeonstrifeLEV]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Money is that stuff I give hookers to make me feel good.

SO clearly the US is out of hooker money.

It is on good authority that for some real F'd up reason American citizens hire family men and women to represent them in congress. It is also on good authority that those that have immediate family living with them don't "get some" on a healthy schedule, leaving the task up to entrepreneurs of the night. Yet with the deficit as it is those same representatives cannot afford such retailers worth their salt as well as probably getting torn a new one at home for doing such a poor job at work.

This will lead to not only pent up sexual aggression but poor attitude being brought into the workplace from home while they are deciding on how this country "should" be run, according to their "American vision".

Things could only be bleaker if the original ffxi team was working in the higher echelons of government.

[Malacite]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

So Aeni is a conspiracy theorist? Who knew.


The U.S. is potentially in the worst economic crisis it's ever seen. Again, you can thank Nixon in part for this by taking the dollar off the Gold Standard thus debauching the currency and giving the Federal Reserve (and by proxy the super wealthy) entirely too much power.

As outlined by Fareed Zakaria, one of the major issues with the U.S. economy is that it's too heavily based in consumption.
This is unsustainable and just a poor model in general, which is why the Republicans need to shut the fuck up and learn their history. There needs to be less focus on consumption and much greater money poured into R&D.

Traditionally, it's been a combination of limited but very smart government investment & bright individuals from the private sector that have created the major economic breakthroughs. The superconducter was invented by the DoD thus spawning silicon valley, and the internet was created by DARPA, just to name two examples.


Also, the debt has gotten astronomically out of control. From the article I linked to:

Fareed Zakaria: The first thing we have to do is to stop doing what we've been doing for almost 20 years, which is pretending we don't have a problem. We've been kicking the can down the road, we've blamed other people, blamed other countries for these issues. And most important, we've deluded ourselves that there is no crisis because we've kept the economy going by overconsuming.

From the 1950s, America had a very stable pattern of consumption. Consumer expenditures made up between 60 and 65 percent of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] -- in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, that was the pattern. Then in the early 1980s, that starts going up, and it goes up to 70 percent of GDP by 2001 and it stayed there ever since.

Now this wouldn't be a problem if we actually had that money, but we have been consuming using borrowed money for the last 20 years. So the average American household now has 13 credit cards, 40 percent of which have an outstanding balance. Debt has gone from $700 billion in 1974 to $14 trillion now. This is completely unsustainable. A fundamental way to think about it is that we have to shift this economy from an over-reliance on consumption and move it more toward investment.

If you don't fix the debt soon, it will bury the Country in a hole you can never escape from like it has Japan. Japan's debt as a % of GDP is 200%. If it wasn't for their high tech that Country would be done for.

America has been fairly fortunate thus far, with investors like China willing to prop you up with more borrowed money. But if anything should happen, i.e. investors begin to worry that you can't get your fiscal house in order and decide to pull back and invest elsewhere... which is what the idiots on the right are threatening by not raising the debt ceiling, then what we all just went through will seem like a fond memory. If America defaults on it's debt that's all she wrote. The dollar will be worthless and you will have the hyper inflation that once plagued Germany, possibly even worse.

[hexx]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

You're a sheep if you believe in it. And mainstream economists bought the whole deal - farm and all. Historically we've been in worse shit than this and we never keeled over. Mind you, what exactly is money? Do you fully understand what it is? No? Then you better read up on it first and then look at the whole fiscal picture.

This sounds like something you copied and pasted from some conspiracy theorists website. It's so broad and general a blind man could hit this during target practice.

[Aeni]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

None of you know what money is.

Let me explain.

It's a belief system, just like religion. Money is a type of currency used in transactions to represent a value of an item. Religion is a currency used to represent a value of spirituality.

Money, in our current understanding of that term, does not exist. When a company purchases another company for $50 billion, they don't go to a bank and take that money out and pay whoever it is they're buying the company from. Nor will you see them get $50 billion in gold boullions and fill up dump trucks with them and drive it over to whoever they need to pay. The economy doesn't work that way.

There's some Nobel Prize winning economists that managed to illustrate this principal very beautifully. This was back when Brazil was experiencing hyperinflation during the 80s/90s. The value of their currency was so worthless and out of whack that even in just a few days, an apple that normally would cost 500 units of their Brazillian currency would jump to 15,000 units. And it would jump at that rate every few days so that the apple was then worth millions of units of their currency a few weeks later.

These economists devised a plan to save the economy and the key to that was persuading the citizens to place their trust in the currency once again. They first created a fictiional currency and bit by bit got people to adopt it. In keeping that currency relatively stable, people began to trust money again. After a few months, their experiment worked and they replaced the old currency with this one and now Brazillians are enjoying a prosperous economy.

Money is just that - a belief in the system. The reason why the American dollar is so strong is that people around the world "believe" it to be safe and stable. You remove that sense from the currency and I can guarantee you the world (and not just America) will plunge into hell in a gasoline soaked wicker basket.

In that same measure, there is no "budget crisis". It's a belief that the fear mongers up in Washington is brainwashing every American out there to believe and under that guise, they're ramming some unwelcome and distasteful policies up people's ass a lot more easily than they otherwise would have.

[Taskmage]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Yes, that is how a fiat currency works. It's value is arbitrarily based on what the holder of the currency believes it can buy. It is also true that a fiat currency can be produced essentially out of thin air whenever the government or the federal reserve want. However, whenever they do that it increases the supply of money in circulation, which decreases its demand and reduces its value, causing prices to rise and wages and savings to be worth less. Obviously this can have a major effect on the health of the economy. This is why it is so important for the federal government to get its fiscal house in order, because the more bonds it prints to sell to China to pay for programs they couldn't otherwise afford, the greater the vulnerability to the US and world economy should China lose faith in the value of the dollar and release all that currency into the marketplace.

[Feba]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Aeni, you're an idiot. Yes, money requires a belief that it will be useful in the future. That does not mean that it is imaginary.

Here's how it works: Way back when, people wanted to trade goods and services with each other. The only way to do this was to say "I'll give you my daughter in exchange for this plot of land", or "I'll have sex with you if you feed me."; a system of bartering for every transaction. And this worked for awhile, but sometimes you have an ugly daughter, or you don't feel like carrying a picnic basket around just to get some nookie, so humans invented currency. Money.

Money could be anything; funky looking clams, shiny rocks. As long as people can trade it for goods and services, it has value. It's much easier to give your daughter to one man for a bag of rupees, and then give the bag to another man for his land, than it is to try to find one man who both wants your daughter and has land you want.

For a long time, money was gold; despite gold not being a very useful material at all, people decided that they would use it as a standard of money. Later, Richard Nixon decided to base the dollar off the perceived strength of the dollar as an instrument to buy goods and services, without regard to how much of a certain mineral the government was holding on to to back it up.

But still to this day, that trust you mentioned is important-- if a government gives out money, people have to believe that that is money that they will be able to use to purchase goods and services. When governments print money so they can spend it, it increases the rate of inflation-- simply put, there's more money out there, so it isn't worth as much. This is the cause of hyperinflation in many cases. Even a government cannot spend money it doesn't have. In order to pay laborers and acquire materials, a government must expend money, and simply printing more bills causes more problems. The 'belief' in money is something which only lasts as long as the currency is in fact useful and stable enough to remain useful.

tl;dr:

TODAY WE USE CASH AND SPEND WITH ARDOR
BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE DON'T STILL BARTER
WHEN A FOOTBALL TEAM NEEDS A PULLING GUARD
OR A KID LIKE YOU IS INTO TRADING CARDS

TAKE THIS FOR THAT
THAT FOR THIS
BILLS AND COINS ARE SMARTER
BUT WHEN YOU PAY FOR THAT
REMEMBER THIS
IF YOU MAKE ME GO SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK ON YOU AGAIN I'M GOING TO KICK YOUR IGNORANT PANSY ASS.

[Taskmage]

Re: Successful troll is the goddamn president of the United States.

Here's an infraction and a thank you.