Socialism

You can't honestly believe that the USA would fall into the category of NK or Cuba... FFS we have everything we need in resources... those two examples of failed socialism are depleted of almost every natural resource known on Earth. Instead of the US government collecting on oil, they allow the land owners to profit, or the natural gas, they allow private companies to reap the rewards instead of making it National Revenue. The Wealth of this country in resources is what makes us so POWERFUL and allows us the ability to spend 700 billion annually on military to protect our wealth.

Comparing USA to any other Countries economic system is a waste of time, and will never yield the results you expect. Originally Posted by bf0082

Give me a break. FFS (For Fuck's Sake), what's controversial about what I said in what you quoted? Can you point to any other country in the world that still practices socialism as it's classically defined, in its pure form? That means the state controls the means of production, distribution and exchange. Yeah, Vietnam and China still have lots of state owned enterprises, but private businesses are the engines that enabled them to escape poverty and achieve enviable economic growth.

The idea that looking at what has worked in other countries is a waste of time is plain wrong. We can learn lots from other countries' successes and failures, although we're usually too arrogant to do that.

As to the wealth of our oil and gas resources, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party would immediately lock those in the ground and throw away the key. Biden on the other hand would more slowly make these off limits.

Your belief that U.S. oil and gas resources should be exploited by a national, government-owned oil company, and that oil beneath private lands should be owned by the government, is faulty too. Why is the USA the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, even though other countries have larger reserves? Why are our independents head and shoulders above everyone else in the world in exploiting shale resources, horizontal drilling and fracking? Why are our service companies the best in the world? Because private mineral owners, not the government, own the lions share of the rights to the oil and gas. And privately owned companies, not a national oil company, exploit the oil and gas resources.

In a true and fair society, socialism removed... the costs of K-12 education would move to the parents, Taxes would need to be increased for females, since they require the most social services, police protection and allow the births of fatherless children (signed birth certificates, unknown father).

The economic downfall and cause of a two worker household is direct results of women being educated and entering the workforce, rather than being traded off by their family's into marriage and cementing their place as a home maker. They work for less salary, do not request (demand) raises, they increased the workforce by 40 million since 1970 and can work any entry level jobs from fast food cashier to assembly line manufacturing.

Manipulated inflation controls only exist to maintain the wealth of America's Oligarchs. It allows them to profit their wealth with no risk. inflation doesn't affect the poor, they have nothing that depreciates, like cash. Losing 9% of your wealth annually to inflation would drive the wealthy to invest in high risk investments like new businesses or improving the efficiency of current businesses. It would increase wages and provide an even playing field for all, not just who can spend the most lobbying Washington D.C

The evil are the wealthy, they control CNN and Fox News, and they use division of the poor to distract the uneducated. Both R's and D's are useless pawns of the Corporate Socialists.

privately owned companies, not a national oil company, exploit the oil and gas resources. Originally Posted by Tiny

Wealthiest country in the world is run this way,
Norway's $1.3 trillion wealth fund, the world's largest, has for the first time pulled investments from companies because of their tax policies, the fund's CEO told Reuters, adding more such moves were likely in future.

Set up in 1990, the fund owns around 1 percent of the world’s stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston, making the Nordic nation an exception when others are struggling under a mountain of debts.

A preliminary counter on the website of the central bank, which manages the fund, rose to 5.11 trillion crowns ($828.66 billion), fractionally more than a million times Norway’s most recent official population estimate of 5,096,300.

It was the first time it reached the equivalent of a million crowns each, central bank spokesman Thomas Sevang said.

Not that Norwegians will be able to access or spend the money, squirreled away for a rainy day for them and future generations. Norway has resisted the temptation to splurge all the windfall since striking oil in the North Sea in 1969

Government is number one employer by far in this country. millions and millions of people are paid in collected taxes, including our military.

A huge far distant #2 is walmart with 2 million employees....

We are corporate socialists, we allow corporations to deplete our resources while moving their profits into other countries while contributing nothing back in taxes, they are disgusting vile slugs who need to be broken apart and allowed fair competition by small business. Originally Posted by bf0082

The Ryan/Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 imposed a tax on "GILTI" (Global Intangible Low Tax Income) that ended corporations' ability to move profits to other countries and avoid tax.

The government has been subsidizing corporations minimum wage with food stamps and medicaid for decades, trickle down isn't real. 4 Trillion spent giving companies money to pay their employees during this pandemic and almost no economic growth, trickle down is absolute garbage.

4 trillion spent by giving it to the people, $50,000 to every American who paid income taxes in 2019, would be 90 million people and cost $4.5T

The economic boom would have been the greatest boost to the economy ever, smart people would invest in small business and those too stupid to run a business would be consumers and buy the products we consume. Originally Posted by bf0082

That's just nuts. $50,000 to every American who paid income taxes when we're already looking at increasing our national debt by 25% of GDP because of existing Covid spending. These gentlemen describe why more eloquently than I could:

The Risks of Too Much ‘Stimulus’

Disposable real per capita income rose 5.5% in 2020, the highest rate since 1984, due largely to transfer payments.

Even among economists who strongly support President Biden, a consensus is growing that the economy emerged from last year set for a robust recovery. That view has been espoused by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Barack Obama’s former top economist Jason Furman. Both have expressed concern that the economy may overheat.

The most encouraging sign that recovery will be strong as the vaccines take hold is not that real gross domestic product rose 7.5% in the third quarter, offsetting 83% of the economic collapse produced by the shutdown in the preceding quarter. Nor is it that 16 million of the 22 million jobs lost have been restored. The most encouraging sign is how much the total purchasing power of American families has expanded during the crisis, reaching record highs.

To be sure, many Americans have taken a serious hit: Commerce Department data show total employee compensation in the second and third quarters of 2020 was down by $215 billion compared with the first quarter. Yet government personal transfers were up $893 billion—four times the compensation lost. In the second quarter alone, real per capita disposable income was up 10.5% compared with the first quarter—25 times as fast as the average quarterly income growth in the prior two years.

This surge in personal income was driven by government stimulus equal to $2.6 trillion, more than all the private wages and salaries paid in the first quarter of 2020. While preliminary fourth-quarter figures show that personal income declined from the previous quarter, real per capita disposable income in 2020 grew 5.5%—the highest growth rate since 1984, the peak of the Reagan recovery. All of this occurred before the $900 billion December stimulus took effect.

So what happened to all that money? As transfer payments surged in the second quarter and the shutdown curtailed personal-consumption expenditures, pent-up purchasing power spiked. Quarterly savings rose by almost $800 billion. The historical savings rate of 7% to 8% of income reached an astonishing 26% in the second quarter. Preliminary data for 2020 show total savings for 2020 was $1.6 trillion higher than in 2019. And that was before the $900 billion stimulus.

President Biden now wants another $1.9 trillion bill, which would further swell potential purchasing power and impede production by more than doubling the minimum wage and paying more than half of unemployed people more than they make working. Assuming this new spending occurs by September, when the vaccination process should be largely complete and the economy largely open, the Biden plan and the December stimulus would add another $311 billion a month in purchasing power into the fall.

The monetary-stimulus machinery is also beginning to smoke. Since January 2020, Federal Reserve assets have risen 78%; in dollar terms, the Fed has acquired more assets in one year than in the six years after quantitative easing began in 2008. But unlike then, Fed asset purchases are adding to the money supply rather than only being parked as excess reserves in the banking system.

Though economic activity remains depressed in the new shutdown and low monetary velocity is now muting its effect, M2 money supply is still up by 28.3% over the past 12 months. And that’s before the Fed monetizes the next wave of stimulus. For comparison, money-supply growth peaked at 13.8% in the high-inflation era of the 1970s. It may sound old-fashioned in the brave new world of “Modern Monetary Theory,” but is there not the need for some caution here?

Despite recent shutdowns, vigor is evident across the economy. Housing sales are at a 14-year high, private business investment is up 25%, the IHS manufacturing index hit a six-year high, and agricultural prices are at an eight-year high. The Fed projects 4.2% growth in 2021, and the International Monetary Fund raised its U.S. growth estimate to 5.1%. Even the negative December jobs report showed underlying strength. While the leisure-and-hospitality industries lost 498,000 jobs as a result of renewed shutdowns, the rest of the economy added 358,000 jobs.

What about Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s claim that a new stimulus is needed to “help families at risk of going hungry or losing the roof over their heads”? Last year the average household in the bottom quintile of earners received more than $45,000 of government transfer payments from any combination of more than 100 programs and credits, and 22.6 million households received food stamps. The evidence of hunger comes from the advocacy group Feeding America, which defines respondents as “at risk of hunger” if they say they’ve worried about food security on at least one day of the preceding year.

Researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health have found that concerns about food security expressed in surveys don’t decline when food aid increases. As for losing a roof over their heads—with income and savings up, most people who chose not to pay their rent or mortgage did so because government eliminated the consequences of not paying. In the process it ripped off retirees who own many of the nation’s rental properties and finance countless mortgage loans through their pension funds and insurance policies.


Rising vaccinations may restore consumer demand in leisure and hospitality even before venues are able to ramp up their capacity. Damaged supply chains are causing some of the longest delays in a quarter-century. International shipping challenges are driving up global freight rates.

Policy makers are acting as if running up the national debt and printing money doesn’t matter. Yet all the factors are present to generate rising prices and eventually higher interest rates: excess fiscal stimulus, excessive money-supply growth, impaired domestic production capacity, and impaired international production and transportation capacity. To this volatile mix, Mr. Biden is promising to add regulatory assaults on energy, finance, small businesses, labor and health care.

Perhaps the resulting impairment of economic capacity will prove manageable, but given that such action is occurring at the very moment of excessive fiscal stimulus on top of a tinderbox of monetary expansion, it is putting the nation at risk. Unless members of Congress are willing to spend no matter what the consequence, a new stimulus bill now is probably a risk not worth taking.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ris...much-stimulus-

Wealthiest country in the world is run this way,
Norway's $1.3 trillion wealth fund, the world's largest, has for the first time pulled investments from companies because of their tax policies, the fund's CEO told Reuters, adding more such moves were likely in future.

Set up in 1990, the fund owns around 1 percent of the world’s stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston, making the Nordic nation an exception when others are struggling under a mountain of debts.

A preliminary counter on the website of the central bank, which manages the fund, rose to 5.11 trillion crowns ($828.66 billion), fractionally more than a million times Norway’s most recent official population estimate of 5,096,300.

It was the first time it reached the equivalent of a million crowns each, central bank spokesman Thomas Sevang said.

Not that Norwegians will be able to access or spend the money, squirreled away for a rainy day for them and future generations. Norway has resisted the temptation to splurge all the windfall since striking oil in the North Sea in 1969 Originally Posted by bf0082

Norway is a petro state. It's like Kuwait or Abu Dhabi. Oil and gas companies in the USA account for only 2% of the total market capitalization of all publicly traded American companies. We can't do what they do, because we don't have the resources.

In a true and fair society, socialism removed... the costs of K-12 education would move to the parents, Taxes would need to be increased for females, since they require the most social services, police protection and allow the births of fatherless children (signed birth certificates, unknown father).

The economic downfall and cause of a two worker household is direct results of women being educated and entering the workforce, rather than being traded off by their family's into marriage and cementing their place as a home maker. They work for less salary, do not request (demand) raises, they increased the workforce by 40 million since 1970 and can work any entry level jobs from fast food cashier to assembly line manufacturing.

Manipulated inflation controls only exist to maintain the wealth of America's Oligarchs. It allows them to profit their wealth with no risk. inflation doesn't affect the poor, they have nothing that depreciates, like cash. Losing 9% of your wealth annually to inflation would drive the wealthy to invest in high risk investments like new businesses or improving the efficiency of current businesses. It would increase wages and provide an even playing field for all, not just who can spend the most lobbying Washington D.C

The evil are the wealthy, they control CNN and Fox News, and they use division of the poor to distract the uneducated. Both R's and D's are useless pawns of the Corporate Socialists. Originally Posted by bf0082

Exactly who is arguing to do away with public education and tax females at higher rate than men?

The corporations and other businesses have created great prosperity for all.

As to inflation and two worker households, I don't understand what you're trying to get at.

Wealthiest country in the world is run this way,
Norway's $1.3 trillion wealth fund, the world's largest, has for the first time pulled investments from companies because of their tax policies, the fund's CEO told Reuters, adding more such moves were likely in future.

Set up in 1990, the fund owns around 1 percent of the world’s stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston, making the Nordic nation an exception when others are struggling under a mountain of debts.

A preliminary counter on the website of the central bank, which manages the fund, rose to 5.11 trillion crowns ($828.66 billion), fractionally more than a million times Norway’s most recent official population estimate of 5,096,300.

It was the first time it reached the equivalent of a million crowns each, central bank spokesman Thomas Sevang said.

Not that Norwegians will be able to access or spend the money, squirreled away for a rainy day for them and future generations. Norway has resisted the temptation to splurge all the windfall since striking oil in the North Sea in 1969 Originally Posted by bf0082

Norway has a great deal of offshore oil production, as I'm sure you are aware.

You do realize that Norway's population is no more than about one-sixtieth of ours, do you not?

Do you think the US has remotely close to sixty times the oil production capacity of Norway?

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Norway has a great deal of offshore oil production, as I'm sure you are aware.

You do realize that Norway's population is no more than about one-sixtieth of ours, do you not?

Do you think the US has remotely close to sixty times the oil production capacity of Norway? Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

My example has nothing to do with actual oil.....

It's to show that when the government controls their resources, that there is enormous wealth.

oil, gold, silver, platinum, rare earths, fresh water. Our Country is full of resources and would benefit everyone, not just the top 0.01%

In a true and fair society, socialism removed... the costs of K-12 education would move to the parents, Taxes would need to be increased for females, since they require the most social services, police protection and allow the births of fatherless children (signed birth certificates, unknown father).

The economic downfall and cause of a two worker household is direct results of women being educated and entering the workforce, rather than being traded off by their family's into marriage and cementing their place as a home maker. They work for less salary, do not request (demand) raises, they increased the workforce by 40 million since 1970 and can work any entry level jobs from fast food cashier to assembly line manufacturing.

Manipulated inflation controls only exist to maintain the wealth of America's Oligarchs. It allows them to profit their wealth with no risk. inflation doesn't affect the poor, they have nothing that depreciates, like cash. Losing 9% of your wealth annually to inflation would drive the wealthy to invest in high risk investments like new businesses or improving the efficiency of current businesses. It would increase wages and provide an even playing field for all, not just who can spend the most lobbying Washington D.C

The evil are the wealthy, they control CNN and Fox News, and they use division of the poor to distract the uneducated. Both R's and D's are useless pawns of the Corporate Socialists. Originally Posted by bf0082

Wealthy people are not inherently evil. It's evil people who use their wealth nefariously, George Soros comes to mind in that regard.

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My example has nothing to do with actual oil.....

It doesn't? Where do you think Norway got the resources with which to establish and build its sovereign wealth fund? From the Tooth Fairy?

It's to show that when the government controls their resources, that there is enormous wealth.

Yes, because throughout history, government control of resources has always worked out so well.

oil, gold, silver, platinum, rare earths, fresh water. Our Country is full of resources and would benefit everyone, not just the top 0.01%

I'm sure the editorial staff at the Jacobin magazine would fully concur!
Originally Posted by bf0082

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Wealthy people are not inherently evil. It's evil people who use their wealth nefariously, George Soros comes to mind in that regard. Originally Posted by Levianon17

When the wealthy are the super minority and are the one's writing the rules, you will never get what you expect to be fair, they will write the rules that benefits them and preserves their wealth

When the wealthy are the super minority and are the one's writing the rules, you will never get what you expect to be fair, they will write the rules that benefits them and preserves their wealth Originally Posted by bf0082

Yes....we are moving to crony capitalism

You truly don’t understand what it means. I though you were being obtuse intentionally but instead maybe on this you really are just obtuse. Let me once more give you an example.

PersonA “hey Biden is passing legislation with no republicans, that’s not very bipartisan” - the implication of the statement is thatBiden is being a partisan.

Person Bs response instead of discussing whether Biden is in fact being a partisan responds making making an unrelated equivalency by saying “well, Trump passed legislation without democrats” - the implication being that Biden’s behavior is OK because Trump did it. As in but whatabout Trumps actions instead of Discussing Biden’s action.

Now that differs greatly from making a comparison
Person A - “during the Trump years unemployment dropped 1.7%”
Person B - “during Obama’s term unemployment dropped 5%”.
That’s a simple comparison. Not a Whataboutism. I can’t help you more than I’ve tried.

You Whataboutism over and over because you can’t help it.
Person A “Hey people tried to overthrow the capital and killed 5 people.”
You - “people ran rampant in Portland and 15 people died during a riot”. Nothing to do with one another but YOU try to equivocate the events in a Whataboutism. Rather than discussing the merits of what occurred at the Capitol somehow in your mind those things need to be discussed together.

One day you’ll grow beyond the limitations of your argument style. One day. Originally Posted by 1blackman1

1b1- please gaze into a mirror, and repeat your post until one understands the Hypocrisy.

Exactly who is arguing to do away with public education and tax females at higher rate than men?

The corporations and other businesses have created great prosperity for all.

As to inflation and two worker households, I don't understand what you're trying to get at. Originally Posted by Tiny

changes you mandate to create an equal and fair system, eliminating socialistic norms we are accustom to. Those are a handful of things that need to happen to promote equality and self accountability.

Also need to remove tax incentives to start families, since thats redistribution of wealth and a big no no in your view of how the USA should operate.... but what you are really saying is as long as socialism is helping me and not the brown people, then its ok. As soon as my TAXES go to helping brown people, its socialism and not OK anymore. Lets not beat around the bush here.

Its socialism to lock up 2M brown people in prisons and keep them separated from society, thats ok... lets make them pay for their own incarceration with slave labor.
Another view point you would be in favor for, since your money is supporting the justice system.

Hedonist, for your further enlightenment, this is a simple comparison,

Person A - "During the Obama years unemployment averaged 7.36%."
Person B - "During the Trump years unemployment averaged 5.01%."

Those numbers include both the 2009 and 2020 recessions.

And, by the way, the drop in unemployment from the beginning to the end of the Obama administration was 2.1% if you use 12/31/2008 to 12/31/16, or 3.7% if you use 3/31/2009 to 3/31/2017. The only way you get a 5% drop is if you use a starting date around the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010, a year into Obama's first term. If you apply the same standard to Trump, then you should say that unemployment during the Trump years dropped 6.3%, being the period from 6/30/2020 to 12/31/2020. Originally Posted by Tiny

I wasn't enlightened, sorry. If we are going to make this simple, just say whether you agree that any "whataboutism" is a comparison. Yes or no?