Global Debt Hasn't Been This Bad Since the Napoleonic Wars, Says WEF President (fortune.com) 264
The massive volumes of debt piling up around the globe forced the president of the World Economic Forum to reach back more than 200 years for a comparable period. Fortune: In an interview Sunday with CNBC at a WEF conference in Saudi Arabia, Borge Brende warned overall debt is approaching the world's total economic output. "We haven't seen this kind of debt since the Napoleonic Wars," he said. "We're getting close to 100% of global GDP in debt."
According to the International Monetary Fund last year, global public debt hit $91 trillion, or 92% of GDP, by the end of 2022. That was actually a dip from pandemic-era debt levels but remained in line with a decades-long trend higher. Data on global debt during the Napoleonic Wars, which took place in the early 1800s, is harder to come by. But for comparison, some estimates put British government debt at more than 200% of GDP by 1815.
Brende also told CNBC that governments need to take fiscal measures to reduce their debts without triggering a recession. For now, global growth is about 3.2% annually, which isn't bad, but it's also below the 4% trend growth the world had seen for decades, he said earlier in the interview. That risks a repeat of the 1970s, when growth was low for a decade, Brende added. But the world can avoid such an outcome if it continues to trade and doesn't engage in more trade wars. "Trade was the engine of growth for decades," he said.
According to the International Monetary Fund last year, global public debt hit $91 trillion, or 92% of GDP, by the end of 2022. That was actually a dip from pandemic-era debt levels but remained in line with a decades-long trend higher. Data on global debt during the Napoleonic Wars, which took place in the early 1800s, is harder to come by. But for comparison, some estimates put British government debt at more than 200% of GDP by 1815.
Brende also told CNBC that governments need to take fiscal measures to reduce their debts without triggering a recession. For now, global growth is about 3.2% annually, which isn't bad, but it's also below the 4% trend growth the world had seen for decades, he said earlier in the interview. That risks a repeat of the 1970s, when growth was low for a decade, Brende added. But the world can avoid such an outcome if it continues to trade and doesn't engage in more trade wars. "Trade was the engine of growth for decades," he said.
There is no such thing as lasting growth (Score:4, Insightful)
But since wealth is a virtual thing nowadays, everyone keeps on going the way their greed tells them to. Numbers can grow infinitely.
As if something which stays level is a bad thing.
Sure there is (Score:2)
Our problems are distribution. Which is addressed quite well in this short video here. [youtube.com]
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Growth is easy with inflation!
The problem is freeloading (Score:2)
The problem is that debt diverts a large share of actual economic output (goods and services) into passive income (interest paid). Disconnecting productivity from consumption is bad. Communism goes all in on it but runaway capitalism does it too.
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I know!! (Score:4, Funny)
We need to start issuing Credit Default Swaps among nations. Then we take thoe CDWs and split them into tranches by risk-factor estimates.
Then we short the whole bunch.
Public = government (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not sugar-coat this, shall we? "Public debt" is really "government debt". And don't kid yourself thinking you live in a democracy. You don't. The decisions to spend money that the government doesn't have are made by the government without checking with anyone else. Taxation isn't going to fix it either unless the government stops spending money entirely which will never happen. They have the people by the short and curlies due to baseline budgeting and the ability to create and raise new taxes and fees. The world economy is in a constant state of eating its tail.
The trouble in democracies ... (Score:2)
Nobody votes for austerity, that's the simple fact. Spending is what gets you elected, so that's what politicians offer us. It is very hard to see politicians in most countries getting elected on the basis of saying they're going to reduce the debt. Here in the UK, David Cameron actually did a great job of getting government spending under control when he was Prime Minister, and were at the point of being able to start reducing the debt, but his austerity measures made him so unpopular that he felt he had t
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After such a rosy review of Camron's term in office I feel obligated to point out that a significant part of his austerity has turned the NHS from the pride of Britain to shit.
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Debt as a fraction of GDP went from 50% to 75%!
Hardly relevant, since that's down to where the previous administration left things. When Cameron became PM in 2010, government net borrowing was over 10% of GDP; you can't turn that around overnight, so of course net debt went up. But net borrowing decreased significantly every single year of his administration, down to 2.7% of GDP in 2016, and if that trajectory had continued we would have been a couple of years away from running a surplus.
Which is irrelevant
who cares about debt? (Score:5, Interesting)
Listen, the debt is not tied to expenditure. The US government at least can just spend whatever it wants without consideration for tax receipts or incurred debt. In fact, the incurring of debt is not directly related to expenditure at all. It's a mathematical fantasy. The USG never defaults. Who is going to enforce that?
The only issue that debt, low taxation and deficit spending cause is a lack of belief in the value of the fiat currency, the dollar. This is significant, but it is not a mathematical certainty. It is something that plays out when too many dollars are chasing too few goods, which we see as inflation.
Distilled down, the issue is windfalls that result in excessive spending on consumer goods. Like those checks cut during the COVID lockdowns. Those cause real inflation, too much money chasing too few goods. As the inflation spreads through the economy, the expectation is that next month's supplies will cost more than this month's, which induces companies to raise their prices to make up for it. Therefore the inflation continues, as it is doing now.
What needs to happen, as did in the early 1980s under Volcker, is a severe economic slowdown to cure those very firms of their expectation that they can infinitely raise prices. The pain must be felt to make the inflation end. By all of us.
In a way, the WEF isn't completely wrong, but is barking up the wrong tree.
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And the accumulating interest on that debt which needs paid off? That's not a consideration? You must be one of those who only pays the minimum amount on their credit card debt each month.
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The government's balance sheet is not mine. I have to pay my debts, they don't really have to. At least not in a meaningful timeframe like my lifespan.
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I get what you are saying, but if you can deficit finance your expenditures, what stops you from deficit financing your debt service? And who needs additional flexibility for unforeseen circumstances if you can just spend what you want?
I'm pretending, really, that there are no limits. There are, but they aren't the same ones that we have in our own personal finances. The limits are in the belief in the value of the fiat currency. I covered that elsewhere, but in a nutshell it's a foreign policy issue, r
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It'll fail here too, but it'll fail primarily because of worldwide events rather than anything in particular the USG does about it. I don't think the problem is soluble without great pain, and politicians won't want to take that poison pill that ends their careers.
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But this is where public debt and private debt differ. Private debt has to be paid off. Public debt and interest are quite a bit different - because the debt holder is the one who prints the money.
For example, someone suggested that the US government could int a $100T bill to pay off its debt. You and I cannot do that (le
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the US government could (m)int a $100T bill
Technically, they can't print bills like that. The talk was that they mint a $100T coin.
Call me when the job is done. Careful about which coin you put in the payphone.
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It's a nice idea, but when you look into it it's just accounting tricks.
Most of the US federal debt is held by the American public. If the US wanted to pay off it's debt it could raise taxes on that public, or it could print a bunch of money which would cause inflation, which would effectively tax that public. The result is the same but with method 2 you get to write some extra zeros on both sides of the balance sheet.
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In fact, the incurring of debt is not directly related to expenditure at all. It's a mathematical fantasy. The USG never defaults. Who is going to enforce that?
It's really simple, the rest of the world is going to enforce that by at some point no longer taking USD (or in reality simply taking a lot more) for payments for real things they have, like oil or lithium or food.
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I fear that also, but I was avoiding the issue as it brings foreign policy and even more political stuff in play.
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I have a really bad record as a prognosticator. With that said, and with 0% belief in my abilities, I see this ending like this:
1) At some point the Fed will get a bug up its ass to fix the problem, like Volcker (and a majority of the FR board) did. The problem could have been handled during the 1970s, but wasn't until Volcker (new chairman) was able to convince enough to go that direction in late 1979. I hope someone does this soon. We will see a crushing recession - but hopefully short - as the econom
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The US has $900 T in debt. This makes foreign investors nervous and a different country seems better.
Nobody else wants dollars. What are those holding the surplus going to do with them?
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70's inflation was a supply side issue which Burns managed well enough. Look at real GDP ... the recessions under Burns line up with the energy crisis caused by war. Volcker's depression lines up with nothing but Volcker.
There is no such thing as creative destruction. If you let a depression disperse workers and knowhow and reduce productive assets to rust it's gone, you have to build it up from scratch. There are worse things than inflation, like economists.
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> Listen, the debt is not tied to expenditure. The US government at least can just spend whatever it wants without consideration for tax receipts or incurred debt. In fact, the incurring of debt is not directly related to expenditure at all. It's a mathematical fantasy. The USG never defaults. Who is going to enforce that?
Ask Brazil, Zimbabwe, etc. about that. It's true that we can print endless currency and "pay off" our "debt" because it's not tied to any actual resources. But we can't print actual r
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Most public debt, at least in the west, is owed to that same public. For the US it's about 75%. The US government can absolutely default, and the people left holding the bag will mostly be Americans.
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The USG never defaults. Who is going to enforce that?
The US government defaulted in 1934, and again in 1971.
No problem (Score:2)
Tax the billionaires out the wazoo. Tax all billion dollar companies doubly out the wazoo. Tax trillion-dollar companies into million dollar companies, And tax hedge funds and venture capital a minimum of 36%.,
Where do you *think* the debts going?
Yes problem (Score:2)
Tax the billionaires out the wazoo. Tax all billion dollar companies doubly out the wazoo. Tax trillion-dollar companies into million dollar companies
If you're being serious, you're lacking a sense of scale: the US national debt is over $34T. Global debt is 10x that.
Billionaires typically don't generate a lot of income to tax (they're billionaires by wealth, not by income). If you go ahead and confiscate all the wealth of America's billionaires, that would bring in $4.5T. Once.
The 2023 earnings of all the S&P500 companies combined was $471B. The current effective tax rate for that group is around 18%. Even if you could double or triple the tax collec
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That would be a really bad move. The fact those job creators are ultimately the ones producing the goods we all need. There will be "plenty" for them no matter what policy choices we make (sort of some revolution that has them stood against a wall anyway).
However if you take away enough of their 'wealth' because of your pathetic jealousy they will pull back on the industrialization of what they have left. You think you have inflation now; just implement ^^ this ^^ type of policy and watch how expensive bre
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Tax the rich more? They already pay a huge percentage of income in taxes. But at least increasing taxes is on the sane side of the spectrum. Taxing the rich more won't really change anything. There are too few of them. Tax the poor and middle class and maybe they'll stop electing the idiots that are spending like there is no tomorrow (or forgiving debt that people should never have taken on in the first place). I'd also be for forbidding companies to pay part or most of the salary of employees in stock. Pay
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> Tax the billionaires out the wazoo. Tax all billion dollar companies doubly out the wazoo. Tax trillion-dollar companies into million dollar companies, And tax hedge funds and venture capital a minimum of 36%.,
Yes, that will drain the money supply but... we kinda need more resources, not more dollars and you're going to screw that over since most of their wealth is tied up in big companies that employ tons of people. So great, you've confiscated Amazon and Bezos is an asshole anyway so he had it comin
It's fine. Rationality is gone. (Score:4, Interesting)
Defaults will wipe away a lot of the debt. And they'll wipe away a lot of what some people presumed to be wealth. It'll correct. A lot of people will be caught in the crossfire, and that's a shame. When people are willing to sink their fortunes into crypto, DJT-Q, or meme stocks, having things go bust for relatively predictable reasons seems almost quaint.
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Hmmm... if your "banker" called in a panic and told you to sell everything, I don't know who you're talking to, but... don't talk to them anymore.
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I think he was suggesting incompetence, not a scam. If you're worried about public debt the last thing you want to do is sell a bunch of assets for dollars, i.e. shares in the entity that owes all that money.
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Yeah, I was implying incompetence. I put "banker" in quotes because banker isn't really a title that you can infer anything from. If it's just some dude that works for your bank that also stumbled across a particularly apocalyptic web page and wants you to know it... well, perhaps don't listen to that person. "Abandon ship" doesn't sound credible to me.
Who the earth loaner? (Score:2)
Who the hell borrowed money? March ? Jupiter? To Uranus!
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It's another symptom of wealth concentration. When the average person has no more to tithe to the greedy, they started taking more IOUs.
It's still power; in fact, I'd say debt is more powerful than cash.
Or comparing to the Gilded Age (Score:2)
Economic inequality is worse today that during the Gilded Age. [yahoo.com]
The solutions of old though won't work [vox.com] for the unique set of circumstances we find ourselves in today. Most problems stem from the extreme political-regulatory capture by the billionaire class. Voting nor Jan 6th dumb insurrections won't solve it, only nonviolent action by ten million people or more would hope to put a dent in it.
The solution being .. (Score:2)
Covid (Score:2)
Thus spake the monsters themselves (Score:2)
These illegitimate unelected globalist self-appointed elites and their Ernst Stavro Blofeld [wikipedia.org] mini-me Klaus Schwab have often bragged about their "leadership programs" for young politicians and corporate leaders. THEY have been grooming and promoting the very politicians and bureaucrats and corporate execs who have created all this debt!
Just how much of this debt existed before the WEF started promoting all this bad policy making and globalism in 1971? These kids of the Th ir d Re ich (look them up and be su
Endless Growth (Score:2)
For now, global growth is about 3.2% annually, which isn't bad, but it's also below the 4% trend growth the world had seen for decades, he said earlier in the interview. That risks a repeat of the 1970s, when growth was low for a decade.
Low growth is considered a "risk". It's too bad we can't be satisfied with sustainability. Isn't striving for endless growth a bigger risk for our planet?
Not surprising (Score:2)
Interest rates have been at unprecedented lows for a couple decades, so the sensible thing to do was borrow lots of money. Now that they're just pretty low, the sensible thing to do is start paying some of it back with all the productive things you invested it in. You did invest it in productive things, right?
Pander to the proletariat (Score:2)
Public debt vs private debt (Score:2)
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More to the point, they're *guaranteed* bucks.
People don't understand the significance of risk to profitability. By underwriting 80 billion dollars of risk for banks, it's essentially guaranteeing them profits. When it's politically infeasible to spend money on something, the government guarantees loans. That's politically popular across the board because it's spending *later* money and it puts money in bankers' pockets.
Re: student loans are big bucks for the banks! (Score:3)
People shouldn't be taking out big loans for education to begin with. It turns out that Ivy League diplomas aren't worth as much as most people think. Certainly not worth the price of admission. Employers are feeling that too, apparently:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]?
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I'd think that someone who got a 1590 on their SAT would do well in any situat
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Huh. Are you saying a Mercedes S-Class at $0 isn't better than a Honda Civic at $0?
Depends on your definition of better, if you want a car to get you to a place, keep to the speed limit and be economical on fuel and maintenance I would say a Honda Civic beats a Mercedes S-Class hands down. If you want make other people Jealous, show how rich you are, race your car, cruse in comfort then sure a Mercedes is better.
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The student loan problems come mostly from for-profit schools and low-tier public schools. These schools admit weaker students, graduate a smaller percent of students who enroll, and provide poorer opportunities to students who do manage to graduate. The problem is especially bad at for-profit schools, which enroll ~10% of college students, but create 40% of the student loans in default.
Students at Ivy League schools are less likely to take out student loans and are more likely to find a job after they gr
Banks? (Score:2)
Banks are only one side of the equation. The other are universities, who can now charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a liberal arts degree, a strata once reserved for students getting juris and medical doctorates.
Re: Japanification (Score:2)
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Borrowing money because your kids will pay for it is not a wise plan. One might even hypothesize that strategy has something to do with current low birth rates.
"are the main threats to unsustainable debt."
I don't think you've considered what "unsustainable" means.
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Shouldn't be too hard... Obama didn't do much to lower student debt during his tenure. College costs kept going up, and he really didn't do anything to stop it that was actually effective.
Of course, you could say the same about the president before him and the president after him as well.
Re: Bottom line (Score:2)
College costs go up in response to easily available student loans, not the other way around. Student loan forgiveness is only going to make the problem worse.
The only thing you can do to halt the cost increase is to place limits on how student loans can be used even if they're given out. Problem is, that doesn't get votes, but forgiveness does even though it's the wrong answer.
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It's not just that. I toured the college I attended a few decades ago. The dorms were more like apartments than what we had. My old residence hall was one of eight I remember being around when I was there. The two twelve floor high rises were demolished a long time ago along with many of the other low rise residence halls. There are something like fourteen new dorms. I survived just fine with fewer amenities - walked to school uphill both ways and all that. But the competition to provide the most amenities
Re: Bottom line (Score:2)
This is what I'm talking about. You've got tuition in one hand and cost of living in the other. Student loan money goes through the university to the student. If the school is forced to regulate this in order to receive the loan money at all, then you can start seeing costs go down.
That also means no drunk parties on weekends on the taxpayer's dime if any from of forgiveness comes into play, including for those already eligible for it like public servants and military loan repayment plans.
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Ooh, a Republican after my own heart! Can we start dictating exactly what food SNAP recipients can buy and how nice the housing a Section 8 voucher can be used on? Assuming you're on board with not allowing them to buy any of that woke tofu, of course.
Re: Bottom line (Score:2)
Ooh, a Republican after my own heart! Can we start dictating exactly what food SNAP recipients can buy and how nice the housing a Section 8 voucher can be used on? Assuming you're on board with not allowing them to buy any of that woke tofu, of course.
First, I'm not a Republican. Second, that money is explicitly earmarked for education. If that's not what it's being spent on, then why are we even doing it? And for what it's worth, I personally never borrowed a dime for college, instead I funded it mostly with my own (minimum-ish) wages, and did most of it at an in-state community college and a cheap in-state university you've never heard of. Nevertheless, I'm now within the top 3 percentile of income earners.
That said, my annual tax bill is probably high
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Gold has an artificially inflated price, inflated by morons that follow this bad advice. In actual reality, Gold has something like 25-50% of its price in industrial value and it has no value whatsoever outside of its industrial use.
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The value of all currencies is tied to what is offered by it.
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The only advantage gold has to it is scarcity, and that is moderated by significant untapped reserves and the fact that governments hold a lot of it and can release it onto the market at any time.
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You just defined the value of almost everything. If something is readily available and easily accessible and has no cost to acquire then it has no value even if it's essential for you to live. A good example is air.
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Agreed, but I was simply stating that investing in gold is speculation that it will retain value, and there are downside risks. Gold bugs try to state that there is no risk at all, which is not the case.
Or pretty much what this says. [visualcapitalist.com] 1970 is a very good date to start from for gold, so this can't be seen as a cherry-picking example.
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Actually, no. In a working market, price pretty closely resembles usefulness. Of course, working markets are rare.
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If people want a reference for gold's scarcity, the total amount mined by humans is approximately 5 olympic swimming pools worth.
That's actually slightly more than the total amount of gold that has been discovered (244,000 metric tons), assuming my math is correct. But only about 187,000 metric tons of that has actually been mined, so it is probably more like 3 to 4 olympic swimming pools.
But that's only half of the story. Every year, the world mines O(3,000) metric tons of gold. So in 60 to 80 years, that number will have doubled, assuming the current rate of mining holds. Unfortunately, the currently known reserves will run out
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Hahahahaha, no. Not for a long time now.
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inflated by morons that follow this bad advice
Can you give us some good advice then?
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And, as usual, you continue to demonstrate you are without insight.
Re: Simple Truth (Score:2)
Buy gold.
Gold is what has persevered wealth through periods of debt based financial reset. like the one we are entering into...
You don't have to sell everything and put it all in gold. But consider putting at least 10% of your assets into something tangible...
Many replies will mock this, but 5000 years of gold preserving wealth is a pretty good track record.
They'll mock it because this is absolutely terrible advice. You've watched one too many gold sales commercials. You know why gold sellers pay so much for those ads? Because gold is cyclical and not only do they advertise the most at the high points but they sell above spot as well. Then they buy back below spot when gold lowers and repeat.
Think about it: If gold is such a great investment, then why do they pay so much in advertising just so they can divest it?
Re: Simple Truth (Score:2)
Non-sequitor
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Gold swings by about 5000%, and is currently quite high.
Most people who have significant assets have the vast majority of those in "something tangible": their house.
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It didn't preserve wealth worth a damm. Tell me how much your wealth was "preserved" when armed men showed up and just stole it, or sack the town you had it in?
Also, interestingly enough, we've created more real wealth and goods in the last 50 years, then the previous 5000 years combined.
And BTC kind of relies on real wealth, aka a working power grid and a working computer industry. Without those, BTC isn't worth squat. So it is easily 5 steps removed from anything tangible.
Re:Gonna keep on getting worse. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well the reality is no matter how you slice it the USA has contributed more to Ukraine in terms of actual goods than the EU. That should be looked upon as entirely unacceptable.
You are right though, for the most part this is a great way to pump a bunch of money out of the public treasury into MIC and its owners pockets. Funny how everything that touch Ukraine turns out to be money laundering scheme when you zoom out a bit.
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Re:Welcome to the Communism!! (Score:5, Insightful)
While government fails to work, the private sector gets things done.
Our new video shows ways markets outperform even the best-meaning politicians.
Boeing is a prime example of what you get when the private sector is left to self regulate. Airplanes that nose dive and missing bolts with no paper trail. Business demands profit while government does not. How about the private healthcare industry in this country? We pay massive amounts for healthcare and still aren't in the top 10 for metrics like lifespan and infant mortality. The playbook is cutting government funding to make it intentionally shitty and then claiming government doesn't work. Well yeah when you actively hamstringing the people you represent. This opens the door for all you buddies with businesses to take over what the government was doing so they can profit at the tax payers expense. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of privatization helping consumers.
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How about ISPs in the US? I hear they're really fun.
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Huh, user number that low and you never heard of Airbus in all your years.
Boeing not only has competition but it is currently having its ass handed to it in terms of market share.
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Yes.
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I haven't been this optimistic in the economy ever
While true, people, especially in the US, barely know how to add 1 + 1. In most cases, their wages kept up with inflation and some exceeded it. But they see prices going up and have no clue they are making more $ at the same time.
I heard an economist talk at length over the issue of wages vs expenses. He said price inflation is why people say the economy is bad but they do not realize their wages kept up with inflation. My take is people will believe the economy is bad until either their wages doubles o