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Sparky speaks

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Posts posted by Sparky speaks

  1. Just got power back at 4:30 this afternoon. Outside of a few minutes of computer time at school, which was closed but had power, no internet, phone or TV since Monday evening. Luckily, I could get all the ice I needed from the ice machine in the school cafe. Parts of town were devastated near the coast here in Milford, CT. Went out Monday night to watch the high tide roll in down on Melba Street which is a low lying area along the beach which always gets destroyed in these storms. The water reached the bottom of the street signs and washed the beach side walls of many homes away. One of my friends who is still rebuilding from Irene, was lucky this time. His new house is being built on five foot high concrete stilts reinforced by steel girders. The water rushed under his home and did no damage to the structure itself. There must have been over 100 people standing on the hill overlooking the area while wind gusts of about 60 mph blew the waves into the low lying neighborhood. The tide started to recede around midnight. The next day was some sight. We walked the concrete patios that link most the houses on the beach side. Some homes were destroyed and some had only minor damage. The waves hit at angles this time sparing some homes from complete destruction. During Irene the waves crashed head on and did more damage to the homes in this section of town. On the west side of town the people weren't so lucky. The beach juts out into the sound more and the waves hit at more of a direct angle. Several homes crashed into the ocean. One person actually jumped off a pier to go swimming Monday afternoon and drowned. He was the son of a guy I went to high school with. Most of the city was without power until early this morning due to falling trees ripping down power lines. Managed to survive the loss of civilization for a few days. Going to bed when it gets dark and waking up when it gets light has its' advantages but the novelty was wearing off. Tough to read with a flashlight balancing on your shoulder. It was starting to get colder last night and this afternoon so it is nice to get the heat back on.

  2. Went out for my walk around 6:30 this morning. Wind was a steady 20 mph in your face when you walked directly East. The waves were pretty regular for a normal high tide but it should have been low tide at that time. Some white caps but not anything dangerous. Walked along the sea-wall and didn't get splashed. I had to journey out on I-95 about an hour ago. Some gusts that moved the car a bit but nothing different than one usually encounters on a blustery day.The winds have picked up a bit in the last half-hour. My son who travels all day in his car is still out on the road. I checked in with him a few minutes ago and said things aren't bad yet. I'm going to journey out to see the waves in a few minutes. I'll check back in later.

  3. High tide is at 11:30 tomorrow morning here on Long Island Sound in Southern CT. I'll probably go for my daily walk down to the beach if it's not raining too hard yet to watch the waves crash on to the beach. If it's too rainy a drive in the car is always an adventure during these storms. Last year for Irene most of the locals who didn't actually have a house right on the water strolled around on the roads leading to the beach to see the raging surf. Pretty awesome actually. Unfortunately several friends of mine have just rebuilt their homes from that last storm and are preparing for the worst again. I'm about a mile from the coast. Just have to worry about trees falling down once the winds pick up which is supposed to happen after 3PM. Tomorrow night will be something if what they say is going to happen actually happens. We'll see. School already been cancelled for the next two days. Once the power lines go down I could be off from work for a week. I know it's a tough job but someone has to do it. Stay safe out there.

  4. Man, I'm flattered by all the attention my views get from you guys. You sure waste a lot of your time replying to my posts. My thoughts get more analysis here than anything Romney or Obama have to say. I would have stopped back on page two or three of this thread if I were you. It's pretty funny actually. I kind of enjoy reading what you all come up with next. What snide remarks can we make today about the guy who doesn't agree with the leaders and policies that have gotten us into this mess. At least I put some ideas on the table so you could bat them around. Someone else would have given up along time ago or been kicked off the forum for responding to your slings and arrows in a less deferential manner. Lou, I'm sorry I haven't gotten around to your NAFTA question. Been busy with all that unimportant Federal Reserve crazy batshit stuff. I know you are anxiously awaiting my opinion on the matter. But you always seem to know what I am going to say next so maybe I don't need to. Like I said in an earlier post, if you don't like what I have to say, don't respond, you only encourage the bastard. You've broken your pledge to stop responding to me more times than Clinton gets blowjobs. :peace

     

    Fortunately, in two more weeks you guys will get your new savior or old one for that matter and the bitching will begin anew about how he isn't living up to his promises or how he has let the left or the right down. The economy will continue to get worse, there will be more bailouts and new countries to bomb and invade. More folks will go on food stamps, prices will continue to go up, more jobs will be shipped overseas, medical and college costs will continue to rise, yada yada yada, and in four years we will get to argue all these same issues again hoping that if we just tweak the the same failed policies it will get better. Enjoy the illusion of having a choice when voting. But remember, it only encourages the bastards. :wave

  5. You can beleive what you wish. I find liberals an interesting group. They like to act as if there is no such thing as a Constitution that establishes a Federal System that places limits on the powers of the federal government and grants the rest to the states. So be it.

    Your Great Depression story is just that, a story. Much more complicated than that. But I'm not going to argue with you about it. If that's what you believe, fine.

     

    What exactly do you all believe? You sure have a fine time diagnosing my philosophy. Let's hear your solutions if you have any.

  6.  

    Note that Sparky never talks about social issues hardly (choice, gay rights, etc.)

     

    LouieB

     

    Those are issues that are not the business of the federal government. Marriage laws are the left up to the states according to the Constitution as are murder laws. It is a waste of time to discuss them every presidential election cycle. As a libertarian and a constitutionalist I believe people should be free to do what they want in their personal life as long as you don't harm or threaten another person's life or destroy their property. You could interpret that to mean decriminalizing victimless crimes as well.

     

    10th Amendment:

     

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

  7. Trying to steal your vote???

     

    Romney family buys voting machines through Bain Capital investment

     

    "Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

    In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House."

     

    http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/13221476-romney-family-buys-voting-machines-through-bain-capital-investment

  8. March out of the Middle East. Lower taxes. Let the interest rate find its' natural level. Stop the financial bailouts and stimulus injections. Stop printing money for the banks to sit on. They are not too big to fail. Their good assets will be purchased by better performing institutions during the bankruptcy process. Stop creating financial bubbles with cheap money. Begin the cuts in defense. Roll back government subsidizing of college loans to reduce the costs of college. Provide social services for the very needy. Begin a means assessment for everyone else. Cut back on or eliminate foreign aid. Stop the Fed bailing out bankrupt foreign governments. Stop the Fed, period. I'm sure I left a few things out. Do we see any of this being seriously being considered by either candidate? Unfortunately, no. They both claim to have a better government plan to get us out the mess caused by government planning in the first place. It doesn't work. What they don't say is part of the election process as much as what they do say even though some might not think so. Anyone else got a plan?

  9. Lowering taxes or getting rid of them altogether gives the people their money back to spend or invest it as they choose. That is good. The less the taxes are the better. That is a significant aspect of libertarianism. The government actually did the right thing in allowing people to keep their money. Look what they did with it. You call that government intervention? Those taxes which were raised by government in the first place should have been lower. They realized the harm in keeping them so high and made the proper correction. When did I ever advocate higher taxes?

     

    Lou, I was a Liberal at one time but I grew out of it. :thumbup I address you because you address me. I'm only trying to be polite.

     

    In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

  10. The Fed did nothing. There was no stimulus. Taxes were reduced and the debt was slashed by a third. And people went back to work in a very short period of time. The depression ended. Did I miss something?

     

    The federal government did not do what Keynesian economists ever since have urged it to do: run unbalanced budgets and prime the pump through increased expenditures. Rather, there prevailed the old-fashioned view that government should keep taxation and spending low and reduce the public debt.

     

    I know its' hard to accept anything I post here. You have all gotten so used to attacking everything I bring to the table but your knee-jerk reaction indicates you didn't even read the article or at least grasp what it was saying. It is very relevant to a solution for today's problems. Unfortunately, the injections of monetary stimulus, the Fed. intervention and manipulation of the interest rate and money supply are beyond anything that has ever been seen in world history. I don't think even what I am calling for will work at this point. It's too late in the game IMO. The inevitable fall will be very severe indeed. Time will tell.

     

    Kind of presidential related news. One of my old liberal heroes bits the dust...

     

    George McGovern dies; lost 1972 presidential bid

     

    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_MCGOVERN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-10-21-08-20-23

  11. That's just alot of bullshit and exactly the answer I was expecting.

     

    LouieB

     

    I actually thought you would give this some serious consideration. This explanation and the interview about how the Fed funds war as well as the 12 year old girl video pretty much says it all. It is pretty simple really and makes perfect sense. Stimulus is a temporary fix that takes money out of productive pursuits...

     

    "Stimulus" Spending Doesn't Work — Or Make Sense

    On a more basic level, the jobs that government creates are unprofitable — that is, they consume more resources than they produce. If that weren't true, then the profit-seeking private sector would be funding them already. In fact, it's impossible for government to know whether it is engaged in profitable, productive activity, since it lacks a profit-and-loss mechanism whereby it can calculate whether it is making efficient use of resources. "Stimulus" packages therefore drain the productive economy of resources in order to subsidize money-losing ventures. Because these money-losing ventures get resources shifted to them, fewer resources are available for use by the productive economy; and since the government sector uses resources less efficiently than the private sector, the net result is a decline in wealth — a fact no magical "multiplier" effect can overcome.

    The more sophisticated Keynesians will come back with the argument that government stimulus can kick-start "idle resources" that weren't being employed in any production process anyway. But how can it do that? Our idle resources include, for instance, some of our automobile production capacity, some construction capacity, some of our financial services sector, and the like, as well as a wide variety of types of labor. Now Obama's stimulus package includes (for example) money to weatherize 2 million American homes. How can weatherizing homes put these and only these idle resources to work? It can't, of course. And are there enough unemployed weatherizers to take these jobs, or will we be drawing labor from its current uses in the private sector? The question answers itself. In other words, the weatherizing job will have to draw from already employed factors of production, thus redirecting them to a less urgently demanded use than the one the market was already employing them for. That does not create "stimulus." It destroys value and wealth. And if the claim is that the money spent on weatherizing homes will eventually trickle down, somehow, to the unemployed workers in these other fields, it is hard to take such a crude mechanism seriously.

    If we did happen to have enough unemployed weatherizers to weatherize people's homes, then why would we need Obama's stimulus package to force laborers and customers together? If prices were allowed to adjust freely, people wanting their homes weatherized would find the weatherizers on their own, and thus the effort to "stimulate" these transactions would become superfluous.

     

     

    What Should Be Done vs. What Will Be Done

     

    For the sake of American prosperity, Obama should consider the one path the political establishment has not considered: allowing the free market to allocate capital and labor, to price assets, and to choose winners and losers. The recovery would be swift in coming, as it always is when the market is allowed to operate. And economic success would once again be the product of hard work and entrepreneurial skill, not cultivating political connections in Washington.

    As usual, the politicians have other ideas: bail everyone out, try to reinflate the bubble, squander more resources on arbitrary projects, reward borrowing and debt, and create lots of new money. Every one of these measures props up bubble activities and undermines genuine wealth-generating activities. The bailouts allocate capital away from the prudent and competent and toward the imprudent and incompetent, from the wealth creators to the wealth destroyers. The "fiscal stimulus" fritters away scarce resources on money-losing (that is, value-destroying) projects. Making debt more attractive encourages more of the behavior that brought us to this unhappy impasse, thereby guaranteeing a worse bust in the future. Printing up new money does not magically create new real resources in the economy. It merely redistributes the existing pool of resources into a configuration that does not correspond to real consumer demand. It diverts resources into artificial activities with which genuinely wealth-generating activities are then forced to compete.

    In short, the president's program aggravates every existing problem in the American economy, and will make genuine recovery all the longer in coming. Whether we measure these policies against history or sound economic theory, the verdict is the same: the president has chosen a path that is guaranteed to fail. We were already on that path before his election. Only if President Obama genuinely changes course, and allows the free economy to restore the prosperity that so much previous intervention served to undermine, would we really have change we can believe in.

     

    The fact that we have spent billions upon billions and we still have a crisis that is worse than it was four years ago proves throwing more money at the problem isn't going to work. Government does not create jobs. The private sector does. The best the government can do is expropriate wealth from the private sector and redistribute it.

     

    Oklahoma model wins in clash of economic visions

     

    The report found Oklahoma state government has slashed the number of its full-time workers by more than 2,000 and reduced monthly payroll by $4.2 million. Yet Oklahoma's July unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, among the lowest in the nation.

    If Obama's view of economic growth were correct, then Oklahoma should be in the job-creation cellar by now. It's not. In fact, even though Oklahoma's July jobless rate increased for the first time in nearly a year, the state's rate of employment growth over the past year topped 3 percent. Lynn Gray, chief economist for the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission, notes that Oklahoma hasn't experienced an annual rate of employment growth that strong since 1984.

    Those statistics must bewilder Obama. Much of his focus in office has been on boosting the number of government employees and protecting their jobs rather than unleashing the private economy. A huge share of stimulus money sent to the states was to prevent state worker layoffs, yet the national unemployment rate remains above 8 percent. On the other hand, Obama's tax and regulatory policies hinder private business growth and job creation.

    Oklahoma policymakers responded to the recession by right-sizing government and reducing the burden on the private sector. The results suggest that economic approach is superior to Obama's theories.

     

     

    Look, I can go on for ever about this. I once believed what you guys hope is true, that the government can spend its' way out of debt. It ain't gonna happen. They are running out of fixes and their efforts to kick the can down the road will result in a greater crisis than if the leaders with their failed economic policies you guys all seem to give blind allegiance to, faced the issues and made the hard choices. Look up the Depression of 1920 and see how we got out of that one. There are lessons to be learned from it. I bet you never heard of it. I wonder why?

     

     

    The Forgotten Depression of 1920

     

    Not surprisingly, many modern economists who have studied the depression of 1920–1921 have been unable to explain how the recovery could have been so swift and sweeping even though the federal government and the Federal Reserve refrained from employing any of the macroeconomic tools — public works spending, government deficits, and inflationary monetary policy — that conventional wisdom now recommends as the solution to economic slowdowns. The Keynesian economist Robert A. Gordon admitted that "government policy to moderate the depression and speed recovery was minimal. The Federal Reserve authorities were largely passive.… Despite the absence of a stimulative government policy, however, recovery was not long delayed."

     

  12. Lets see. Communism lost, capitalism won. I don't see how we don't live in a free market economy. You can make anything you want and sell it. Aside from not being able to sell shit that is obviously bad for someone (or even if it is) or not foul the environment (or even if it is), I don't see the free market as not being in effect. Once again Sparky you are deluded.

     

    LouieB

     

    Lou, we have no free market as long as we have constant government created central bank intervention through the manipulation of money and credit every time there are signs of a slumping economy. This intervention gives rise to the boom-bust cycle which plagues us constantly and has lead to the current economic crisis we have been experiencing for over four years. How does it do this? Here's and explanation that should help you see what I am talking about...

     

    Government-established central banks can artificially lower interest rates by increasing the supply of money (and thus the funds banks have available to lend) through the banking system. This is supposed to stimulate the economy. What it actually does is mislead investors into embarking on an investment boom that the artificially low rates seem to validate but that in fact cannot be sustained under existing economic conditions. Investments that would have correctly been assessed as unprofitable are falsely appraised as profitable, and over time the result is the squandering of countless resources in lines of investment that should never have been begun.

     

    If lower interest rates are the result of increased saving by the public, this increase in saved resources provides the material wherewithal to see the additional investment through to completion. The situation is very different when the lower interest rates result from the Fed's creation of new money out of thin air. In that case, the lower rates do not reflect an increase in the pool of savings from which investors can draw. Fed tinkering, in other words, does not increase the real stuff in the economy. The additional investment that the lower rates encourage therefore leads the economy down a path that is not sustainable in the long run. Investment decisions are made that quantitatively and qualitatively diverge from what the economy can support. The bust must come, no matter how much new money the central bank creates in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable day of reckoning.

     

    The recession or depression is the necessary, if unfortunate, correction process by which the malinvestments of the boom period, having at last been brought to light, are finally liquidated. The diversion of resources into unsustainable investments out of conformity with consumer desires and resource availability comes to an end, with businesses failing and investment projects abandoned. Although painful for many people, the recession/depression phase of the cycle is not where the damage is done. The bust is the period in which the economy sloughs off the malinvestments and the capital misallocation, re-establishes the structure of production along sustainable lines, and restores itself to health. The damage is done during the boom phase, the period of false prosperity that precedes the bust. It is then that the artificial lowering of interest rates causes the squandering of capital and the initiation of unsustainable investments. It is then that resources that would genuinely have satisfied consumer demand are diverted into projects that make sense only in light of the temporary and artificial conditions of the boom.

     

    When things do go bad, pumping more money into the banking system, thereby lowering interest rates once again, only exacerbates the problem, because it encourages the continued wasteful deployment of capital in unsustainable lines that will eventually have to be abandoned anyway, and it forces healthy, wealth-generating firms to have to go on competing with bubble firms for labor and capital. When interest rates are made artificially low, they encourage the kind of investment that would normally occur only if more saved resources existed to fund them than actually do. Continuing to force interest rates down only perpetuates the allocation of capital into outlets that the economy's current resource base cannot sustain.

     

    Fiscal stimulus, meanwhile, merely diverts resources from the productive sector in order to fund money-losing enterprises arbitrarily chosen by government. These artificial expenditures, moreover, interfere with the market's attempt to sort out genuine demand from bubble demand. “Stimulus” spending can in fact keep firms (construction companies, for example) in business that for the sake of genuine economic health need to be liquidated so their resources can be more sensibly employed in more urgently demanded lines of production.

     

    F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for his work showing how the central bank's intervention into the economy gives rise to the boom-bust cycle, making us feel prosperous until we suffer the inevitable crash. Most Americans know nothing about Hayek's theory (known as the Austrian theory of the business cycle), and are therefore easy prey for the quacks who blame the market for problems caused by the manipulation of money and credit. The artificial booms the Fed provokes, wrote economist Henry Hazlitt decades ago, must end “in a crisis and a slump, and…worse than the slump itself may be the public delusion that the slump has been caused, not by the previous inflation, but by the inherent defects of 'capitalism.'”

     

    http://www.tomwoods.com/articles/

     

    So you see, the free market is not free. I know this is not something most people understand or are aware of because we are taught nothing of the Federal Reserve and the consequences of its' actions in school other than it was a part of the Progressive Era and it was supposed to be good for us. It wasn't. The people were sold a bill of goods at the time by the banking establishment through their allies in Congress. I've posted plenty here that explains this. I hope this helps you understand what I am talking about in regards to the free market not being free. It goes beyond the idea that you can make and sell anything. It has to do with the artificial stimulus forced upon the markets by central bank intervention in times of downturn that creates a false prosperity that causes the booms and the inevitable busts that follow. Until that stops nothing will change.

  13. I just downloaded their remake album of some of their better known songs "All You Want". Like them all. They played two new ones on Sunday that sounded like they haven't missed a beat in 17 years. I would like to see the Gin Blossoms as well. Very similar in style. Missed them in August at Infinity Hall. On vacation.

     

    http://www.amazon.com/All-You-Want-Toad-Sprocket/dp/B00526W4MY/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1350688041&sr=8-4&keywords=toad+the+wet+sprocket

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