221–230 of 367 posts
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Your president said we had "not a great day" the last time you rescued us.
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Jesus Christ what the fuck is this. Can we talk like adults? Is that something we're all capable of?
Really? Europoors? We can't even come up with our own witty word play?
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Federal receipts as a percent of GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S Basically unchanged for 70+ years, and far lower historically. Meanwhile significant growth in real GDP per capita and therefore real government receipts per capita. The change isn't that the government is collecting less money. They get more than ever. But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting wor…
> But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting worse rather than better. cough Universal single-payer healthcare with aggressive, adversarial price negotiation.
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Fiat currencies are the "grown up" result of realizing that everything else in modern society depends on people believing in the social contract, and that doing the same with currency is both more stable and more predictable than having an economy that depends on the amounts currently available of arbitrarily chosen rare metals.
I would be interested to see if we could create an hours-worked currency. Every person is given a similar amount of lifetime (only a few countries are exceptions). Time can't inflate or deflate, is understood by all and easily measured, and it can't be stored. Taking it from others or trading it between people is difficult (we use money as a proxy instead). Some obvious problems: quality of time, the value of differe…
One of them is that your time is cheap when you're young and unskilled, and grows valuable as you grow old and become skilled (and have less time left). Each isn't equal for the same person, much less between them.
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It's pretty obvious when I see this comment or others about the dollar losing value at a historic rate that the person commenting read it somewhere and doesn't actually understand the currency movement and has zero context. Your comment isn't even factually correct either - the USD is down 10.63% against the Euro this year, not 15%. Now to add a bit of context, it's up nearly 40% over the last 15 years against the Eu…
Because this was a reply to my comment: It reads to me a lot like "you are reading the tea leaves wrong". Switch the graph, the time frame. But what would be a better way to talk about this? A more helpful and actionable one?
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Why can't it be gold again? It was working pretty well for thousands of years.
The part where countries engage in warlike activities against each other to get their hands on more gold sounds like it would cause economic uncertainty.
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> But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting worse rather than better. cough Universal single-payer healthcare with aggressive, adversarial price negotiation.
That can't be the explanation because it wasn't present in the US before the government was running huge deficits either.
Hence the propensity to sink growing amounts of GDP into paying an ever-heightening stack of middlemen to provide medical care at market prices... instead of simplifying the stack and saving money.
The US government created a mandate, then allowed it to metastasize as health care became more technical and expensive, and is now in the business of sticking its fingers in its ears and pretending there’s not a financial problem.
https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
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You think that Bezos and Musk have billions in their own personal bank account? So what do you mean be "extreme wealth"? Companies? Dividend payouts? House? Yachts? I agree that luxury items that are out of reach of the middle class (eg sport cars etc...) should be taxed highly, but a toy that a rich person can buy vs a rich person investing money into his own or other companies is a problem if you want to tax that s…
Paper wealth used as collateral for loans should be taxed as income (or capital gains).
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People read FUD articles like this then start ignoring any common sense, including even their own senses, because apparently the world must be ending and we're all going to die. There's no pain. What pain is anyone (except a couple dictators under sanctions) feeling? Almost every major currency has lost value relative to the US Dollar over the past 10 years. Not just, like, a little bit. Like, a lot a bit. The Indian…
Huh? The CAD/USD exchange rate is exactly where I remember it being 30 years ago.
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Huh? The CAD/USD exchange rate is exactly where I remember it being 30 years ago.
CAD/USD is down ~5.3% over the past 20 years.
FWIW, my mental CAD/USD price anchor was set when I was coming of age at 0.75 CAD / USD. Today it at 0.73 CAD / USD, and I've seen it touch 0.60 ish and pass parity in my lifetime.
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I agree with you. I don't even think in the near future there will be a single global reserve currency. There will be multiple ones, all of which weaker in terms of power and influence than the dollar.
Do you even need singular global currency in modern world? Where every transaction can be in essence instant if there was desire. And everything is digital. Overall it is rather different world and things can be done different than before.
Pricing at international scale becomes a lot more complicated without a singular global reserve currency.