You can call me Bobby, I run a little site called Thinksquad. I have an associates degree in industrial design from the Art Institute of Seattle. A bachelors of arts from the University of Washington, and graduated with a double major in philosophy and political science from Rutgers University. I also spent 10 years in the Air Force from 1994-2004, having spent five tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan. I am now a strong advocate of the non-aggression principles, voluntaryism and peaceful parenting.
I believe in anarchism without adjectives, because no one really knows what will work best until we have the chance to try. Local communities should be free to try any non-coercive system, and residents should be able to move somewhere else if they don’t like the way things are going. Through solidarity, competition, and sharing of information eventually a system of social organization would evolve that will be superior to anything that we could imagine today. And even if we were right, we’d only be guessing without going through that process.
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Spending Myth 1: Today’s deficits have taken us to a historically unprecedented, economically catastrophic place.
This myth has had the effect of binding the hands of elected officials and policymakers at every level of government. It has also emboldened those who claim that we must cut government spending as quickly, as radically, as deeply as possible.
In fact, we’ve been here before. In 2009, the federal budget deficit was a whopping 10.1% of the American economy and back in 1943, in the midst of World War II, it was three times that — 30.3%. This fiscal year the deficit will total around 7.6%. Yes, that is big. But in the Congressional Budget Office’s grimmest projections, that figure will fall to 6.3% next year, and 5.8% in fiscal 2014. In 1983, under President Reagan, the deficit hit 6% of the economy, and by 1998, that had turned into a surplus. So, while projected deficits remain large, they’re neither historically unprecedented, nor insurmountable.
More important still, the size of the deficit is no sign that lawmakers should make immediate deep cuts in spending. In fact, history tells us that such reductions are guaranteed to harm, if not cripple, an economy still teetering at the edge of recession.
— Mattea Kramer, Spinning Ourselves Into a Deficit Panic | TomDispatch (via nickturse)THINKSQUAD: Deficit and Debt are two different, but similar things. Deficit being the amount of money you can spend or go into the hole every year, in which you hope you break even with the amount of money coming in. Debt being your over all money you owe. Like you can buy a house, that is $100,000, let’s say, and have a yearly income of let’s say $35,000, your debt is the house you just bought, $100,000, but if you spend more then you make let’s say, $80,000 a year, then you are in a deficit of -$45,000 ($35,000-$80,000=$-45,000) that year. You still have a debt of $100,000 (HOUSE). So if you do make a surplus one year, meaning you did not spend over the $35,000, you still owe, all the previous money.
Sadly, people forget that America, doesn’t MAKE anything anymore, we only make prisoners, and debt. and the only thing we sell is debt, hoping other countries will buy it. So unlike WWII, we make nothing, so expecting us to get out of debt, is impossible. People also forget that when ever we have a surplus in our countries history or any countries history, they use the surplus to borrow more money which adds to the debt. Ask Greece, or Ireland or Spain, or Italy.
Let’s toss out some fun facts:
When World War II ended, the debt equaled 122 percent of GDP (GDP is a measure of the entire economy). In the 1950s and 1960s, the economy grew at an average rate of 4.3 percent a year and the debt gradually declined to 38 percent of GDP in 1970. This year, the Office of Budget and Management expects that the debt will equal nearly 100 percent of GDP.
The U.S. government has to borrow 43 cents of every dollar that it currently spends, four times the rate in 1980.
Our nation began its existence in debt after borrowing money to finance the Revolutionary War. President Andrew Jackson nearly eliminated the debt, calling it a “national curse.” Jackson railed against borrowing, spending and even banks, for that matter, and he tried to eliminate all federal debt. By Jan. 1, 1835, under Jackson, the debt was just $33,733.
How hard is it to spend a trillion dollars? If you spent one dollar every second, you would have spent a million dollars in 12 days. At that same rate, it would take you 32 years to spend a billion dollars. But it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.
The US government now borrows approximately $5 billion every business day.
The debt ceiling is the maximum amount of debt that Congress allows for the government. The current debt ceiling is $16.394 trillion effective Jan. 30, 2012.
(via randomactsofchaos)
