Wouldn’t it be just terrible if the Dow stayed over 12K tomorrow after the close, and gave the Bushies something they could crow about in the final weeks of the campaign? I would question the timing. But as good Democrats, you can do your bit and SELL ALL YOUR POSITIONS in the market in order to deprive the RETHUGLICANS of this insipid talking point and ensure that Nancy Pelosi will become the new Speaker.
We are counting on your patriotism, and know that you will not shirk your duty for the future of this country.
Yehaw!
Thirty hand-picked stocks got back to where they were under Bubba (unless you figure in inflation, natch).
Let me know when the other 6000 stocks get anywhere near their Lefty high:
http://tinyurl.com/7rebl
Yeah, the days of irrational exuberance were great, weren’t they?
I’m just kidding, Dan.
Every politician for decades has used the Dow for or against the party in power…I got no problem with the Republicans using it this time when it’s up.
Yeah, I know. And I’m serious about their being great, in the same way it was great being 18 and legal to buy booze when Carter was in office. So, I guess we’re even.
So..Dan..I figure if the lefties listen to you..we cam make a mint on Starbucks and Apple tomorrow….
gahrie–
Shhhhh! Geez!
Speaking of Republican Ploys to Get the Vote out Next Month:
We need more!!
Don’t know if you’ve posted on this yet, but some morons have posted threats against 7 NFL stadiums this weekend…I know Ace has it in some comments, but I have it…with the actual web comments from the (now crashed) moron site. Not that I’m trying to plug it or anything, but…given the opportunity, you see, it may be worth the visit…
monkeyboy – you disqualified yourself from commenting about economics or the economy when you stated that “we depend on china for cash to keep our economy running.”
Here ya go, seang,
From the official newspaper of the Republican party yesterday:
http://tinyurl.com/y4qxhg
Maybe they read my comment?
Hehe
what in this article supports the notion that we rely on china for cash to keep our economy running. we run a large trade deficit with china. this in effect means that china produces goods in exchange for u.s. dollars – they get the u.s. dollars from us, not the other way around. they then invest these dollars in us financial assets. because they have a fixed exchange rate they have to keep their reserves in the currencies of the countries where they run a trade surplus.
you have the causation completely backwards.
“this in effect means that china produces goods in exchange for u.s. dollars”
That’s pretty much the standard arrangement here, too, when you want to buy something, seang.
I understand what causes it.
Not only do the government and the citizens of America spend every dime they get these days, they also borrow 80% of the rest of the world’s savings each year…and then blow that, too.
We rely on China’s money coming in every month.
If it stops, we’re in trouble.
If they stop lending us money and start selling our debt they already hold on the open market, we’re in real trouble…
“Owners of capital! rejoice in the highest ever nominal (not real) prices of your wealth!”
Could work. Worse has.
oops. Wrong quote!
“Owners of capital! rejoice in the highest ever nominal (not real) prices of your wealth!”
Could work. Worse has.
Its more that we depend on promising them our future production in exchange for their present production. Not so much keeping our economy going, but keeping our tastes sated without having to work for them today.
Just out of curiousity, what do monkyboy and actus propose as a solution to this Chinese debt problem you both are concerned about?
Well, they’re concerned about the savings rate. Under most current theories of trade balance and economics, it’s too low.
So they propose that everyone should vote for the party whose firm position, for the last half-century at least, has been that grasshoppers get subsidized and ants get robbed. Not only will they rescue you if you’ve been fecklessly spending instead of saving all your life, they will do so by robbing the people who have attempted to be provident.
They don’t, actually, give a damn about trade balances. What they’re bitching about is that there aren’t any more nice fat pools of savings for them to raid. My heart bleeds.
Regards,
Ric
seang: Don’t waste your fingertips. Monkyboy’s brain is impervious to fact. In an earlier thread, several of us held him down and tried, without success, to drive that very fact into his skull with a sledge hammer. The hammer broke.
The upside is that I have a note in to the bioweapons division of the Defense Department which, I believe, would be interested in the possibilities inherent in the structure of his cerebral cortex. Thousands of lives could be saved every year. We’ll see…
Yes, well, government saving is a terrible scourge. One we put an end to every few years by electing politicians that help to increase our dissaving. By spending the future wealth today.
AAAAWWWWWWWW! Isn’t that CUTE! Little actus invented a new word! Come on, little guy, say dissembler! Come on, you can do it you precious little thang…
WHOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!
You never heard of that idea? dissaving? thats what we do when we run deficits.
Here’s the result for the *word* (not the idea) “dissaving” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
But inventing a word is just sooooo precious…
You inventing ideas? Not so precious…
As obtuse as monkyboy is, I have to give him points for the H*R name reference. Unless it’s not, in which case he’s just entirely useless.
Actually, Ric,
I’m very concerned about budget deficits and negative trade balances.
It’s why I became a Republican in the first place many years ago. The Republicans used to care about these issues, too.
What happened?
Based upon your previous posts, that’s right up there with swamp land in Florida, Bridges in Brooklyn, 10% of 15 mil form Nigerian ex-patriates and Dennis Kusinich as our next president.
Go sell that lie to someone who doesn’t have 2 brain cells to rub together.
ahem, thanks. this is my first stab at posting and im still not sure if he’s serious. nothing he’s said supports his argument that we rely on china’s cash to keep our economy going. thats just nonsense.
they sell to us and use our cash to support their currency peg. thats it. if they chose not to hold dollars their currency will appretiate vs the dollar and they will sell less on the margin. there is no crisis here. their choice to hold dollars is in effect an instrument to mainatain an growing export sector, its not necessarily to earn returns. its the typical asin economic model that helped japan grow and then suffer 10 years of recession and deflation, it was instrumental in the asian currency crisis and its supporting a bad debt problem in china that is estimated at much more than the value of their foreign reserves. all the while the u.s. remains the most robust economy on the planet.
id we have a budget deficit problem its that at under 2% of gdp its too small to support a growing domestic savings rate.
monekyboy, i apologize if my original comment was out of line.
Did you try an economics dictionary? What does google give you )? It gives me about 83 thousand hits. Lots of hits for a word I just invented eh?
And by selling they will increase their taxes for the year, thereby further lowering the deficit! Man, they just can’t win for losing.
What are you sayong, BJ?
All the “real” Republicans support massive budget deficits and huge trade imbalances these days?
Seang,
I agree it costs China to maintain the current exchange rate…but it also benefits them, too.
I’d say the benefits far outweigh the costs, currently.
Looks like the Chinese Central Bank people do too…
i do not disagree that in the short run having a fixed exchange rate assists them in developing an job creating export sector (its exactly what japan did and still does for all their talk of floating exchange rates – the mof will continue to support usd/jpy above 100, thats why they accumulate their fx reserves). i think the “cost” will come when the inefficiencies that get bulit into a centrally planned export dominated economy have to be resolved. japan is just now recovering after over a decade of wealth destruction. china will faec an even greater crisis. it wasnt long ago that japan inc. was poised to own all of the u.s. driven by their export sector, huge trade surplus and necessary dollar reserves. in the end the u.s. model proves to be the most efficient and resilient.
You are leaving out the tremendous amount of savings the workers of China put aside each year…30-40% of their earnings…compared to Americans, who actually spend more than they earn each year these days…
Google returns about about 104,000 results for “teh internets.” Maybe actus should start working that phrase, too. Maybe while he’s explaining how comfy he is with outing—or perhaps just making up stuff about—his political opponents.
which is exactly what the japanese, koreans, thai… did and it still didnt save them from tremendous wealth destruction and a lower standard of living while they were saving.
i agree we need to save more but the only way to do that is to have a smaller current account deficit or a larger federal budget deficit.
keep in mind the accounting identity that the public sector deficit is equal exactly to private sector savings and with a fiat currency the federal govt is not revenue constrained and govt bonds act as a reserve drain not a source of revenue. i know most will hate to hear concepts like this.
monkyboy,
SeanG is better at details (though I wish his SHIFT key worked.) Pay attention.
Americans don’t save using the traditional metrics for saving because Democrats have demonstrated that savers are mugs. Anybody who has enough savings to do himself, or the country, any good is “rich” and can be plundered at will, to the huzzahs of the non-“rich”.
What we do instead is complicated and not yet well understood; it involves interlocking debt. In effect, we “save” by making promises to one another. The promises are effectively debt, so using classical interpretations it looks bad—which is the point. The system was invented because economic actors got sick of having their reserves plundered in the name of “fairness”. The mutual debt system not only isn’t taxable, it isn’t possible to define a way to tax it. Nothing to take, here, folks, see—books are all open, no secrets, we got no money, only debt. The fancy new building and all the recently-hired employees are just an illusion.
It’s all part of the evolution of economic systems. Money is not wealth; it is a <i>symbol</b> of wealth, and can be manipulated symbolically. All our money is symbolic nowadays. Even those pieces of green (and, nowadays, peach-colored) paper in your wallet are just credit tokens, to simplify the bookkeeping associated with small transactions. And with the Internet and Swift and a dozen privately-run networks operating at microsecond speeds, any attempted distortion of the system gets detected and compensated for before it has a chance to take effect. John Maynard Keynes is dead, dead, dead.
As for the Chinese—they are running a scam, and are desperately running in place to keep it going. I have to believe that they know it, and just think that they’ll be able to engineer a soft landing when the bills come due.
The enormous savings rate of China is there not because the Chinese are thrifty and provident, but because the Chinese Government has not permitted a consumer culture to take hold. They haven’t done that because they’re following the Japanese model from the Fifties and Sixties, as noted above. Note that all the features you admire about China were also advantages touted for “Japan Inc.” in the Seventies and early Eighties: high personal savings rate(s), minimal consumerism, government intervention to support exchange rates and keep industrial investment high, robust infrastructure investment… you don’t hear so much about “Japan Inc.” any more. There are reasons for that.
Japan has a big economy compared to its population, and when the artificial structures burst their seams in the Eighties the effects spilled over to the rest of the world; that’s one of the things that hit Bush I in the face. Diplomatic efforts are under way—reported occasionally in the financial press—to get the Chinese to understand that they’re saving money by borrowing trouble. Hopefully the combination will be effective. If not, when (not if) the Chinese economy melts down as the Japanese one did, I suspect that Internet-enabled bankers won’t be asleep at the switch, and the effects outside China will be minimal. In the meantime we see them digging themselves into a hole, and are doing the right thing: loaning them another shovel.
Regards,
Ric
seang,
Assuming that China is going to follow exactly the path Japan did in the 90’s is…more of a guess than a rational assumption.
Japan is a rather small island with limited natural resources. China is as big as America, has plenty of natural resources and a waiting population of 800,000,000 peasants ready to join the modern economy as they are needed.
China’s economy may indeed stumble, but that might not happen for another 50-100 years…
It has its place. Terrible classless stuff that outing business, no?
I’d say most americans save by buying equity in their houses. How does your complicated interlocking savings work? How does is show up economic statistics?
Not according to you, even if you have nothing to back up the supposed outing. Not that it surprises me, given that you don’t see any wrongdoing when it comes to threats against children or baseless crap about underage prostitutes. You have as little respect for your fellow humans as you do the language or the facts. Which is why everyone here knows you’re a sewer-dwelling weasel. And anyone who didn’t know that should follow the links, because actus will surely misrepresent what they say. I had let up on him as his behavior here improved, but if he’s going to persist, I will have to give him the full treatment.
For the first: you’re a lawyer, or will be soon. Unless you’re going to go strictly into pro deano or the mandarinate, you’ll have to figure it out to hold up your bit of the system. My posts are long enough as it is, so I’m not going into further detail. Hint: what was the proximate cause of the 1929 crash?
As for the second, it doesn’t if the participants have anything to say about it, and they do.
Regards,
Ric
Shorter Ric – A country of hard working, thrifty people are actually a bunch of scammers.
Spending everything you make plus borrowing more and spending that, too, is the true path to wealth…
That’s not even a decent stab at humor. Semi-literate peasants do not make remotely decent additions to a modern economy.
so you didn’t come across words like ‘terrible’ or ‘classless’? Ok.
The? There was one?
What sorts of interlocking debts leading to savings are you thinking of? Do you have a link that explains it more? Maybe something academic? something out of NBER or one of the fed reserve banks? I’d think they’d be interested in how we save.
and what does pro deano mean. you mean pro bono?
How about “wrong?”
Of course not. It’s the pattern of defending the indefensible, then dissembling to try to pretend otherwise.
But as actus is persisting:
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
Why do the regulars at PW ignore actus above all others?
Good question. The short answer is that he is to be ignored because he is a chronic dissembler, a sewer-dwelling weasel, utterly lacking in common decency. But perhaps some backstory is in order.
This is the guy who was excusing Jeff Goldstein’s blog-stalker. Let’s review the history. When Paterrico blogged the topic, the loathesome Liberal Avenger’s response was:
Patterico responded:
Then actus jumped in:
Keep in mind, actus has been to law school and knows that mental illness does not excuse criminal conduct unless the person does not know right from wrong, as Frisch admits she does. But what did he write?
actus tries to pretend he didn’t write that, claiming that what he said was that “she was so wrong as to appear crazy!†That’s dissembling, because he knows mental illness generally does not excuse sociopatic conduct, let alone the appearance of mental illness. Other lefties, like criminal defense attorney Jerilyn Merritt were able to simply condemn this sociopathy without excuse; actus was not, which speaks volumes.
The other reason you know it’s dissembling is because it fits the actus modus operandi. Regular PW readers and regular Patterico readers know that actus goes to both places to snark in order to pick ridiculous fights. It’s what he does. For that matter, note that he did so at Patterico, not here at PW, where it might well have gotten him banned in the heat of the moment. He knew exactly what he was doing, and so does every regular reader at both blogs.
The actus modus operandi is also on display in a later thread at Patterico, in which he defends GiGi’s fabricated garbage about Rush Limbaugh and underage prostitutes.
Everyone should visit the thread where I confronted actus with his vile garbage to enjoy the spectacle of the loathsome little creep melting down into a puddle of laughable dissembling, profanity and otherwise childish behavior.
This bit is nice also, in which actus tries to pretend he’s not comfy defending GiGi’s fabricated filth, only to be confronted with what he actually wrote, which, for the record, was:
Mind you, he has no sort of direct evidence about teenage prostitutes, but maintains it’s not baseless. And note that he does not condemn the admitted sleaze.
Above the entertainment value to regular PW visitors, the linked threads should inform any new visitors that the odds of having a reasonable discussion with this mope are slim to none, with slim already on the train, heading out of town.
This is why the PW regulars deal with actus as they do. It’s really not even ignoring so much as shunning him due to his chronic bad-faith dissembling, his apparent comfort defending the indefensible, his (as RiverCocytus put it) “spittle, splutter and spindoctoring.â€Â
Or, as Christoph put it at Patterico:
Though that’s really unfair to swine. Regular PW readers and regular Patterico readers know it. And now folks just stopping by know it.
Reading isn’t all that hard, monkyboy. I suggest that you develop the sleight; it will be useful to you in future.
The thrifty, hardworking people are (among) the victims of the scam.
And Americans preserve assets for the future. We just don’t “save” in any way that exposes those assets to Pelosi, et. al. The system is inefficient and expensive, but the fact that you can characterize it as
is an indispensible feature.
Regards,
Ric
Dude.
Terrible:
1. distressing; severe:
2. extremely bad; horrible:
This is like being a guest poster: i have my own troll.
As already noted, it’s the pattern of defending the indefensible, then dissembling to try to pretend otherwise.
After human beings point out what a heinous bastard he is, he tapdances back to say something close to saying it’s wrong, but can never bring himself to do so. Indeed, he didn’t here, either.
What if I said you were terrible? what would that mean to you?
You mean if you came into a thread to support some wrong I did and then back-pedalled and used the word “terrible” when everyoned called you on it?
Aside from the fact that I don’t do the sort of disgusting things you seem compelled to defend, I would attach the same meaning I attach to it now—that it’s thrown out there to cover your tracks, per usual.
BTW, I forgot to mention—the fact that it has taken you almost two weeks to figure out I’m trolling you is yet another sign of how much more stupid you are than you think you are.
What If said you were extremely bad and horrible? how about that? Distressing? severe?
You think that I only mention things as soon as they pop into my head? is that how it works with you?
It sure seems like it. If you actually have put some effort into what you write, you’re an even bigger moron than I thought.
So how about “extremely bad and horrible”? distressing? severe? Tell me how you think about those words. What they mean to you, when they’re said about you?
Already answered that. It must have sailed over your pinhead.
Cuz I asked at 12:54.. and I was wondering how you would feel if someone where to say that about you.
Some scam they have going there, Ric.
There are more Chinese living a middle class lifestyle now than Amricans are.
And who, exactly, is going to pay all this debt the Republicans are racking up?
If it’s not us, then it will our kids.
Maybe they will be more responsible than the current generation of Americans…who are acting like drug addicts in denial about their problem.
Already answered that. It must have sailed over your pinhead. And you apparently missed the day they covered the “asked and answered” objection in law school. Or didn’t understand it, what with having the tiny brain and all.
Stop supplying oxygen to the Telephone Pole…
Ric,
Why don’t we just employ the same methods as our fine governor here in Illinois: skip apyments to the State’s pension funds, try to sell off every state asset you can, raid every fund outside the general account and then spend what you have “saved” on splashy new entitlement programs!
A model for our times!
[Oh, you do need a Democratic governor and both houses of the legislature – all carefully watched over by the Attorney General (who just happens to be the Illinois House Majority Leader’s daughter…)]
For good local governance guidance – see Cook County and City of Chicago.
monky – your “Chinese Middle Class” is middle class by their measures. If you would think they are “middle class” by any standard that wouldn’t make an American cringe…well, I have a wonderful opportunity for you on the Badhkshan/China border area…
Did you post it? where? What time? Cuz I was here at 12:41, and at 12:54. You asked yourself a different question, and then answered it. It was quite a good answer. And a tough question. You’re real good at asking yourself questions. But it wasn’t quite what I asked.
How would you feel if someone said you were horrible and bad? severe and distressing? Would you feel like that was improper, because its only proper if you had done something … wrong?
Ooh. We’re blogging to the rules of evidence!
They even have billionaires in China now, Maj. John.
Their middle class is just as comfortable as ours is…perhaps even more so, because they have a better chance of maintianing their lifestyle than ours do…
Kinda in the same way that “wrong” is a different word from others.
I know you would like to avoid having me expose your pattern of defending the indefensible, then dissembling to try to pretend otherwise—hence your hypothetical. But a hypothetical answer is completely irrelevant to your actual sewer-dwelling behavior, so let’s keep the focus on that.
monkyboy,
Are you going to enlighten me?
By what standards do you define Iraq/Afganistan failures?
I’m sorry.
I musta missed the part where the Left told us how they were going to get rid of the debt if we’re fucking insane enough to elect them this election season. Now I HAVE seen where Pelosi’s mentioned about $90B in new spending, but I can’t recall where they said they were gonna reduce the debt really. I guess I missed the part where they said they were gonna make it easier for those that work hard to save what they make also. In fact, I don’t recall the Dems ever mentioning words like “personal responsibility” or “allowing people to keep what they make”. What part of the manifesto was that under?
How is it ever possible for anyone to avoid you, Karl?
see, i would feel terrible if somoene were to correctly call me terrible. How would you feel?
Major John,
A metaphor —
I used to have to maintain a machine called “Orthophot”. Never mind what it did; the significant part is that it was the latest model in a long series of very expensive gizmos made for a very limited market.
The original machine was designed in the Fifties, with mostly mechanical parts and a few transistors. It was improved in the early Sixties with new features, but because the market is so limited it wasn’t economic to redesign it. So what the makers did was to break circuits here and there and wire in the new functions using early-model ICs. In the late Sixties they did it again the same way, and again in the Seventies. At the end you had a Z80 microprocessor (actually three of them) controlling circuits made of 7440 JK flipflops, which in turn ran AC servos powered by germanium transistors… I’ve left out a couple of iterations. Working on it was like technological archaeology.
Economics—all of society, in fact—is like that. Nothing ever gets actually discarded; the new stuff gets fitted in and around the old with a minimum number of breaks, and if 5V solid-state circuitry has a problem coexisting with 100 volt 400Hz AC, well, toss in some filtering and hope for the best. And if nobody makes germanium transistors any more, you still can’t do a redesign; the thing has to produce. So you sort through newer stuff and find something to jury-rig, ending up with Fifties servos driven by Eighties electric-car transistors, controlled by Nineties microprocessors simulating early-Sixties ICs and… You can’t shut down society and rebuild it. Lots of people have tried, and the result’s always worse than the original failure. All you can do is jam new tech into the cracks and pray.
Tax-and-spend social-credit Government is over, but it isn’t gone—and never will be; the newer, faster, more efficient systems have to have exceptions and simulation-routines built in to cope with it, just like they have to interface with gold bugs, hard-money freaks, Keynesians, Miesians, and the occasional sincere Socialist. We can dream of scrapping it and starting over, but we can’t. Somebody has to be turning the crank all the time.
The nasty secret of Socialism is that what is claimed to be Progressive is actually not just reactionary but retrogressive—and retrogressive to something that never really existed: the Noble Custodian of the People’s Welfare that served as the PR campaign for the grasping goons who ran societies for centuries. Marx just looks like a loony until you realize that what he did was a brilliant, even genius-level summary of pre-1800 classical economics with all the nouns changed.
And what has Leftists around the world baying at the moon is that whatever the United States is doing, it works. All their theories say it shouldn’t, that it should fly apart, crash, and burn in an awful cataclysm, and it just keeps on truckin’. More modern thinkers like monkyboy (who is, more or less, half a century out of date) have many of the same problems. It’s debt, for cat’s sake! It’ll have to be paid! It’s a disaster! They’ve been saying it since about 1960, in more or less the same terms. Somehow it never quite happens, but it’s bound to, right?
Nah. The big problem is that all our governments are run by second-rate minds, and all the first-raters are staying behind the scenes because the second-raters have lots of goons at their disposal. There isn’t any promotion. Our adventure in Iraq is not in any way imperial—George Bush doesn’t want to own Iraq, or run it; much of what looks like errors, from “not enough troops” to “not stopping al Sadr”, derives from that determination. But leftist bigots with no imagination, like actus, don’t have any other category for it, so they shoehorn it into “conquest” and stop thinking, and there aren’t very many people willing to pound their heads against the wall trying to explain reality, so it passes.
Similarly, there’s a sort of second-level Paradox of Saving. You know the Paradox, right? The solution to it is to think outside the mattress. If the money’s put in the bank, the bank can loan it; it becomes capital to build industry on. But after a bit the bank gets bloated, and the second level kicks in. Buying machines gets you nowhere. What you want is for the guy to spend that money on the product of the machines; if he doesn’t, the Industry is just a pile of bricks and cast-iron. And the step after that is to realize that money’s a symbol, and any fool can scrawl symbols…
Soldier on. You’ll be fine. America will have problems, recessions and panics and bubbles and social problems of all kinds—and will continue to get richer. There are guys (both sexes) in $1000 suits all around the country rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of the Chinese getting rich. They’d love to have more people in the game. If 300 million people doing it right can generate $20 trillion a year, what could 1.1 billion do? It’s gonna be fun. Just thumb your nose at the monkyboys and keep on keepin’ on.
There’s lots of opportunity. Among other things, the field of simulating monkyboy-level economics sufficiently to keep it out of the way of the real work is wide open. I’m just sorry I got too old to learn new tricks before I figured it out.
Regards,
Ric
But comfy with someone threatening a child, making up crap about underaged prostitutes and outing (or making up an outing).
I’m sure you would feel terrible at someone calling you terrible precisely because they would be correct. If you want to avoid that happening, you might try acting like less of a moral moron.
That one should be easy, even for a moron.
Ric,
Never, not once, have I ever thought your comments too long or overly detailed. On the contrary, I wish you would comment more than you do.
See, that’s what i’m talking about!
So we’re getting somewhere wiht the definition of terrible…. thats good.
Irght On!
Karl, actus, your conversation here is halving both your IQs.
Karl, you are losing waaaaaaaaay more in this…
monkeyboy, i have to disagree. the chinese middle class does not live nearly as well as our middle class. aside from material comforts they do not enjoy the liberties that we do and it’s really very hard to monetize that. as an aside the gap between the rich and poor is staggering. i spent almost 13 years living/working in asia and there is nowhere that comes close to what we have here – in terms of realized wealth or opportunity. this truly is the greatest country on earth and there is nothing happening now that threatens this reality.
The distribution of wealth in China is exactly the same as it is here, seang. We just don’t see our poor unless something like Hurricane Katrina blows the cover away…
no, its really quite different as is the opportunity to acquire wealth. at the risk of sounding presumptuous you have to go there and experience it.
Are you saying it’s any different here in America?
You think Bill Gates kids are starting out even with their peers?
what did bill gates start out with? just a regular guy like his kids peers.
of course im saying its different here in america. there is no comparison between the opportunity available to everyone here vs what is available to everyone in china. as en example, people in poor provinces need premission to travel outside their province to look for work. they become illegal immigrants in their own country. they stand little chance of getting ahead and yet the squalor they live in is better than the desperate conditions in the rural areas. look at how they treat their most needy citizens – orphans, hadicapped… its heartbreaking.
Seang,
Bill Gates came from a very wealthy family. He attended private schools his whole life and dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft with Paul Allen.
I think you’ll find most of today’s “successful” Americans started life ahead of the game.
Yeah, China’s poor don’t have a very good life, but there are many of them and China isn’t as rich as America yet.
What’s America’s excuse?
point taken on bill gates.
its not about the fact that there are poor people its about the fact that amreica’s poor have infinately more opportunity to get out of poverty than china’s poor. surely you cant dispute that.
and its not just that we are a richer country. our system allows for upward mobility to a much greater degree than china’s. its why people smuggle themselves in cargo containers from china. you dont see alot of poor americans going anywhere else.
A 2000 Economic Policy Institute study showed that almost 60 percent of Americans in the lowest income quintile in 1969 were in a higher quintile in 1996, and over 61 percent in the highest income quintile had moved down into a lower income quintile during the same period.
But seang is also right to point out how much better off the US is materially on an absolute basis as well.
And Bill Gates would be just a Harvard dropout had he not managed to out-negotiate folks who should have known much better at IBM. I’m sure the IBM execs went to good schools also, but lacked the vision Gates had.
I think an economy that’s growing at 11% a year presents a better opportunity for poor people to improve their lot than one that is growing at 2.6% a year.
I’m not knocking Bill Gates’ achievement, but it sure helps to have a wealthy family paying your bills and opening doors for you while you’re struggling to make it big…Bill Gates was never in any danger of living anything other than an upper middle class life no matter how Microsoft turned out.
…and if that country were run as a totalitarian system where the political apparat got all the profits produced by a slave economy?
America isn’t so different, Karl:
The cities around Wahington, D.C> are now the richest in America:
That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
http://tinyurl.com/wyjzq
And that’s where you become a moron. Factually, morally… a moron. The telephone pole. Tell it to the kids in Tiennamen Square. Oh wait, you can’t; they’re dead. Tell it to Harry Wu. On second thought don’t; he’s been tortured enough already.
To quote Socky McSockerson:
GOOD DAY, SIR!!!
where’s Verc when you need him? I keep lighting the telephone pole shaped beacon, but he doesn’t show up. :(
I think you guys are about 30 years out of date on your image of China. A sample photo of what Shanghai looks like these days:
http://tinyurl.com/yz93ej
America used to have vibrant cities like this one…
Nice picture, I like this one alot, too. Very prosperous middle-class there.
I think you missed the point there: the person thought they were talking about something I posted. But they were referring to an impostor—someone not using my handle but one spelled close to it. Not quite being a spelling nazi there, but more of an impostor nazi.
But you, on the other hand, you like the spelling stuff right?
My, quite a bit of admiration for a communist regime from Monkeyboy there.
Oh wait, he’s a leftist, why’s that a suprise?
They used to admire the Russkies until that whole experiment went south, so now they go for China.
So anyway Monk, when are you moving?
monkyboy reminds me of a co-worker twenty years ago. He was absolutely convinced that Japan, Inc. was going to own the world in a decade, and was just as oblivious to counterarguments and just as willing to change definitions on the fly to support his thesis. He was more nearly honest than monky, though—at the very least he hadn’t adopted the Leftoid absolute definition of “poor” that says a morbidy-obese American welfare recipient driving a ‘91 Cadillac and a Chinese peasant living in a dirt-floored one-room hut who has abandoned his dreams of an eight-share in a bullock to plow with are the same thing.
No time for more. Have a happy, guys.
Regards,
Ric
oh B Moe, you have to stop forcing your hegemonic American standards on everyone.