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Stellantis offering voluntary buyouts
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edyvw
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There is a way to deal with debt: one does not cut taxes at every opportunity and keep spending same amount.
Adam Smith was wrong. "If we all go for the blonde, none of us will get lucky".
Superseded by the Nash equilibrium and prisoner's dilemma.
Game theory 101.
Anything is possible but the reaction would be historic.
The G could nationalize the private retirement accounts of everyone. Your 401k/403b and IRAs would be used to pay the debt.
Some will see this as conspiracy, some will see the possibility. The aftermath will be calamitous.
Yup, I've never understood why people take long-dead visionaries and elevated them to omniscient demi-God status. As if the founding fathers and other thinkers like Adam Smith could have possibly imagined the world as it is today. They saw the world as it was then and tried their best to think through how their ideas would affect the future but it was an educated guess at best. The Constitution has been changed 27 times because the founding fathers couldn't possibly get it all right or anticipate the future and the same goes for all of the visionaries on which we base our current laws/economy/system of government.
edyvw
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Of course. But just throwing it as most people who cherish "good ole" days like to talk capitalism, self-making etc. might also read some stuff from those days.
I absolutely agree, we live in 2023, and it is not your father's economy, let alone founding fathers one.
IMO they never envisioned the degree of mobility of capital. For example the law of comparative advantage no longer holds true if capital is mobile. However, mercantilism is still practiced today like in the past and shunned by todays "free market" economists. People still look to grift off the taxpayer in some capacity. Proponents just dress it up differently with a new name.
As for the Constitution and the visionary of the founding fathers IMO they were in some ways well aware of its shortcomings which is why it contains a process for adding amendments. Their one failing was underestimating the influence of basic human nature. Humans are hardwired to gain the advantage over each other with the least amount of effort/pain so the document reflects a series of compromises which resulted in its legally questionable ratification.
My favorite demi-god is Frederic Bastiat
Edit: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
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And it shows!
I'm sorry but you should get your money back on your tuition. They pumped your head full of nonsense.... Not common sense.
I have read the old stuff. I also paid union dues for over 40 years, so I saw the games being played by both sides.
The unions want the most money and benefits for the least amount of work performed.
The company wants the most work for less money.
The union members act like crabs in a bucket.
The push-pull is the Adam Smith theory.
Nash said that;
You have to do whatever is the best for you, the group and the company.
I like the American presidents, here are a few quotes;
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. JFK
If you want a friend, buy a dog. Nixon
The trickle down theory. Regan
The have's and the have more's. GWB
Warren Buffett; When the tide goes out, you can see who is swimming naked.
Marry Barra's Stanford University presentation. Might be on youtube.
E. Hunter Harris (my last boss) CEO of IC, CN, CPR and NS railroads.
I read his books and interviews, and watched his presentations.
He had the gift of the gab and could walk up to a podium and talk for 2 hours without a script.
On the other side, I watched my union "brothers and sisters" screwing operations by playing dumb, getting in each others way
on purpose and extracting the most amount of money for the least amount of work.
I'll let the faculty at the UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management know billt460 from BITOG disagrees with their assessment of the national debt and that their PhDs, MBAs, and decades of research and writing about the topic are all meaningless and can be replaced with "common sense."
Let me guess.... You live in Boston. Isn't that in the State of Denial?
In MA but not Boston.
These were offered buyouts, not mandatory layoffs or firing. Things are changing with the advent of electric powered vehicles.
It's not just the growing of the debt, can we keep refinancing it at advantageous rates.
Part of the growth was the very low interest rates.
What Congress and Presidents forgot was those low rates are not guaranteed. They can rise.
When and how much of the current debt will be refinanced at higher rates given none of it is ever paid off, only carried forward, along with what is added?
Some form of monetize the debt. The problem is government "trust funds" such as Social Security hold a fair bit of that debt. What would monetizing the debt do to such "trust funds?"
Countries still go BK today, or at least flirt with it until the World Bank props them up.
Some current candidates flirting with it are Argentina and Lebanon. Perhaps Turkey as well. I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones can come to mind at the moment.
Bastiat and the Austrian School of Economics FTW! (Yes, I know he was French. He just didn't know his ideas would be the precursor to the Austrian School of Economic Theory.)
Definitely something to keep in mind and the cost of servicing US debt has definitely gone up as interest rates increased. I don't think anyone is saying we don't have a spending problem, I'm certainly not and I think we certainly do, I'm just illuminating the differences between how personal/business debt is serviced vs national debt. If we keep on our current trajectory we're in trouble and my real point is we aren't at the hopeless prognosis point, yet, and we can still turn this around. Whether we do or don't we'll all have to wait and see.
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