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Our (second) video of the day today is an interview conducted by Newsmax with Economist Doug Casey. Doug believes that the idea of America has died and been replaced by something else entirely.
Newsmax Interview of Economist Doug Casey. Casey proclaims that America has died.
What do you think? Has the idea of America died? Hit me up on Twitter @ronpaulfan1982.
Not many people realize that the oil companies have bought themselves the cheapest insurance possible when they lobbied the Federal Government to provide them with a liability cap on the liabilities for oil companies after a spill. As Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner points out, there is a government-created slush fund to keep big oil from paying to clean up it's own oil spills.
See the whole article at The Washington Examiner.Republicans need to remember that they're supposed to be pro-market, not pro-oil. Pro-market politicians would go along with Democrats in abolishing the current $75 million cap on economic damages for oil companies and go even further: Abolish the communal "oil spill fund" and leave oil companies liable for the entire cost of their spills. Current federal law limits the liability of companies responsible for an oil spill. The guilty party has to cover the cleanup, but as far compensating those harmed by the spill -- such as fishermen and property owners -- the companies are on the hook only for the first $75 million.
The rest of the compensation comes from a special federal account, funded by an 8-cent tax on every barrel of oil produced in the United States or imported here. That fund currently has about $1 billion to cover the BP oil spill in the Gulf.
The federal government has no business protecting BP from paying for the harm it has done to shrimp fisherman. The liability cap and the spill fund are subsidies for oil drilling. In a free market, oil companies would have to buy more insurance to cover the cost of a potential spill. In other words, a free market in oil drilling would mean no liability cap, no 8-cents-a-barrel tax, and no special fund whereby careful drillers pay for sloppy spillers.
WASHINGTON — The president of the World Bank said on Monday that America’s days as an unchallenged economic superpower might be numbered and that the dollar was likely to lose its favored position as the euro and the Chinese renminbi assume bigger roles.
“The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency,” the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. “Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar.”
Read the rest of the NY Times article.
The United Nations called on Tuesday for a new global reserve currency to end dollar supremacy which has allowed the United States the "privilege" of building a huge trade deficit.
"Important progress in managing imbalances can be made by reducing the reserve currency country?s 'privilege' to run external deficits in order to provide international liquidity," UN undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs, Sha Zukang, said.
Read the rest on Breitbart.com
Based on deep analysis of the actions of the Federal Reserve over the past two years, AmericanBankster.com has learned that Ben Bernanke is indeed using the playbook of another master economist: President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.
The CIA World Factbook reports:
Robert MUGABE, the nation's first prime minister, has been the country's only ruler (as president since 1987) and has dominated the country's political system since independence. His chaotic land redistribution campaign, which began in 2000, caused an exodus of white farmers, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE rigged the 2002 presidential election to ensure his reelection....In April 2005, Harare [the capital city of Zimbabwe(mine)] embarked on Operation Restore Order, ostensibly an urban rationalization program, which resulted in the destruction of the homes or businesses of 700,000 mostly poor supporters of the opposition. President MUGABE in June 2007 instituted price controls on all basic commodities causing panic buying and leaving store shelves empty for months.
The government of Zimbabwe faces a wide variety of difficult economic problems as it struggles with an unsustainable fiscal deficit, an overvalued official exchange rate, hyperinflation, and bare store shelves. Its 1998-2002 involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the economy. The government's land reform program, characterized by chaos and violence, has badly damaged the commercial farming sector, the traditional source of exports and foreign exchange and the provider of 400,000 jobs, turning Zimbabwe into a net importer of food products. The EU and the US provide food aid on humanitarian grounds. Badly needed support from the IMF has been suspended because of the government's arrears on past loans and the government's unwillingness to enact reforms that would stabilize the economy. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe routinely prints money to fund the budget deficit, causing the official annual inflation rate to rise from 32% in 1998, to 133% in 2004, 585% in 2005, past 1,000% in 2006, and 26,000% in November 2007, and to 11.2 million percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the official exchange rate fell from approximately 1 (revalued) Zimbabwean dollar per US dollar in 2003 to 30,000 per US dollar in September 2007.
GDP - real growth rate: -14.1% (2008 est.)
Unemployment rate: 80% (2005 est.)
Population below poverty line: 68% (2004)
Clearly, Ben Bernanke has the same plan in store for the United States of America.
I wonder if Zibabwe has a universal health care program? Oh wait, does it even matter if inflation is at 11,000,000%?
In conclusion, deficits matter and the printing of money destroys lives.
Here is a video playlist about the Hyperinflation that Zimbabwe is facing:
Photos courtesy of Wikipedia.
China
alarmed by US money printing
Today’s Headline from The Telegraph in the UK reads: “China alarmed by US money printing”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/6146957/China-alarmed-by-US-money-printing.html
The article goes on to say:
Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and
now head of China's green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's
recourse to "credit easing".
"We hope there
will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth
again," he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a
policy gathering on Lake Como.
"If they keep
printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two
the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and
this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves
into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.
China's reserves are
more than – $2 trillion, the world's largest.
"Gold is
definitely an alternative, but when we buy, the price goes up. We have to do it
carefully so as not to stimulate the markets," he added.
Why is this important? It means that China won’t be
buying any short-term or long-term US debt. If President Obama
and the Congress don’t show any signs of easing up on SPENDING, then the Federal Reserve will
have to increase the amount of dollars it prints. If it keeps printing dollars
at this rate, then very soon we will see the effects of inflation begin,
followed by hyper-inflation.
Prices will spiral up and out of control and most of the middle class will
become poor and the already poor will suffer the most. The cost of milk and
bread will be prohibitively high. Small farms will go out of business, driving
prices even higher as competition is diminished.
We have dug ourselves into a huge hole, and the more we
spend the deeper we go. We need to carry out the following actions in order to
prevent hyper-inflation and the collapse of the dollar.
·
Audit the Federal Reserve: Sign the Petition
at http://auditthefed.com
·
Stop the spending; hold all spending and find
ways to eliminate at least 20% of the budget. Easiest places to cut are
overseas spending. End the Empire. End the Drug War.
·
Repeal the 16th Amendment and the
Income Tax. This is the only real way to stimulate economic growth.
·
Pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the
Constitution. Government borrowing from future generations should be illegal.
·
Allow people to choose their own unit of
exchange: legalize gold and silver and other precious metals to be used as
money.
Do you agree with these suggestions? Contact me via
twitter at: @ronpaulfan1982
For Liberty is a documentary about the Ron Paul Presidental Campaign. We can look back at this documentary and stay motivated for the next go around in 2010 and 2012.
The movie premiers on September 20th, 2009. You can pre-order your copy at: ForLibertyMovie.com
Since the bailouts last
fall, lawmakers have been behaving as quasi-owners of the bailed-out banks and
businesses, leading to calls for increased regulation of executive compensation
and other wasteful expenditures. We have heard much about bonuses and executive
pay packages that sound more like lottery winnings than an honest salary.
Many lawmakers voted in favor of these unconstitutional bailouts, believing
that these corporations were too big to fail, and allowing them to go under
would precipitate widespread economic disaster. This second wave of citizen
outrage at the bailouts has left these lawmakers with a bit of egg on their
face, and once again, they feel the need to "do something" to
"fix" it. Shouldn't there be a regulatory structure in place governing
executive compensation? Politically, it seems quite feasible. People are
outraged that the system has once again gutted the many to make a few at the
top fantastically wealthy. But they are incorrectly demonizing the free market.
The Healthcare Problem Explained and Solved
Why is healthcare suddenly an issue? The primary reason that the public is upset is their insurance rates keep rising year after year for the same service. The reason Congress is sticking their nose in the healthcare business is because the US faces the worst recession since the ‘30’s and the US Government is out of money and out of credit.
The dollar is no longer king, foreign investors (China and Japan) are not buying US Treasury Bonds and the Federal Reserve has doubled the money supply and counting.
Healthcare costs rise faster than other industries for three primary reasons:
First, the medical industry is a highly regulated industry with too many laws restricting competition. The segments of the medical industry that are less regulated and experience more competition are experiencing stable and even falling prices; elective procedures such as plastic surgery and laser eye surgery are getting cheaper. One reason that the industry might be so tightly regulated is at the behest of the top insurance companies; if the state or federal government can produce a law that helps Blue Cross or BlueShield wipe out the competition by requiring citizens to buy health insurance from only approved insurers within their own state, then these big business health insurance companies may throw their support behind tighter regulations and more restrictions for their competition. It makes it so that you’d have to have billions of dollars to start an insurance company.
Second, the tax code has brought about the employer-provided insurance system that has resulted in less competition and higher prices. Businesses are allowed to deduct the healthcare costs of their employees from their taxes, but individuals cannot deduct their own healthcare costs from their taxes. The employer-provided insurance system creates yet another degree of separation between the patient, [Insurance Company, Employer] and doctor. This adds another administrative expense, gives less choice to employees and consumers and more control to big business owners, union bosses, bureaucrats and politicians.
Finally, Medicare is one of the government’s largest expenses and where there is government largess there tends to be waste and temptation for corruption and fraud. Without Medicare pumping billions of dollars into the medical industry with money hot off the Federal Reserve presses, healthcare would be cheaper for everyone.
The solution then is to loosen and/or eliminate many of the regulations on the healthcare industry (especially those that create monopolies for the politically connected), repeal the individual income tax and allow people to keep more of their money to pay for their own doctors visits and to insure against major medical emergencies. If the political will to repeal the income tax does not exist, then simply allow individuals to deduct all healthcare costs from their taxes, as businesses do.
Medicare cannot be simply repealed like the income tax. Many people have become dependent on government. The best we could do is to allow people to opt out of Medicare until it becomes irrelevant. With fewer regulations and no income tax it would only be a matter of time until the free market drives people to choose private insurance over Medicare. Even with the individual income tax repealed, the government will still collect the same amount in taxes as we collected in the year 2000. We’ll still have money (provided we wise up on the foreign policy front) to take care of the people that have become dependent on government and allow everyone else to take full advantage of the free market’s low prices and high quality goods and services.
See our Blog Archives for more blog entries.
05.27.2010
Not many people realize that the oil companies have bought themselves the cheapest insurance possible when they lobbied the Federal Government to provide them with a liability cap on the liabilities for oil companies after a spill. As Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner points out, there is a government-created slush fund to keep big oil from paying to clean up it's own oil spills.
WASHINGTON — The president of the World Bank said on Monday that America’s days as an unchallenged economic superpower might be numbered and that the dollar was likely to lose its favored position as the euro and the Chinese renminbi assume bigger roles.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe routinely prints money to fund the budget deficit, causing the official annual inflation rate to rise from 32% in 1998, to 133% in 2004, 585% in 2005, past 1,000% in 2006, and 26,000% in November 2007, and to 11.2 million percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the official exchange rate fell from approximately 1 (revalued) Zimbabwean dollar per US dollar in 2003 to 30,000 per US dollar in September 2007.
Why is this important? It means that China won’t be buying any short-term or long-term US debt. If President Obama and the Congress don’t show any signs of easing up on SPENDING, then the Federal Reserve will have to increase the amount of dollars it prints. If it keeps printing dollars at this rate, then very soon we will see the effects of inflation begin, followed by hyper-inflation. Prices will spiral up and out of control and most of the middle class will become poor and the already poor will suffer the most. The cost of milk and bread will be prohibitively high. Small farms will go out of business, driving prices even higher as competition is diminished.
...the tax code has brought about the employer-provided insurance system that has resulted in less competition and higher prices. The employer-provided insurance system creates yet another degree of separation between the patient, [Insurance Company, Employer] and doctor. This adds another administrative expense, gives less choice to employees and consumers and more control to big business owners, union bosses, bureaucrats and politicians."
"Over time the terms conservative and liberal have changed, and while this idea of labels changing is nothing new, it is important to acknowledge such change and to recognize the meaning to assess where we stand as individuals."
"...the crowd, made up of Obama's economic advisors, has already gathered insisting that they must break the window in order to save the glazier's business and all the merchants that depend on the glazier."
An Open Letter to Congress and the President
"When a business fails, the market (through consumers and investors) has decided that the business is not efficient enough or in high enough demand to exist, therefore, it should and must fail! To prop it up with taxpayer dollars is to take efficient money out of the economy and place it in the inefficient hands of bureaucrats where half of the money will be eaten up by the bureaucratic machine, and the other half will be wasted on a business that the market has already decided must fail."
Our Reaction: "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
"US fast-food giant McDonald's said Monday its 2008 net profit soared 80 percent from a year, lifted by growing demand from consumers seeking low-cost meals in a deepening global recession."
"Wall Street is losing faith in Washington's efforts to fix
the financial crisis."
"The size of the problem is growing faster than the banks' ability to
handle it....We're halfway through the bailout money, and the banks
are in worse shape than they were six months ago."
Not only are taxpayers experiencing ever-increasing direct
taxes such as gasoline tax, property tax, sales tax, cigarette tax,
alcohol tax, etc., but your standard of living is being taxed through
the devaluation of your dollars.
Every time the government creates a new program, your standard of living
will get worse.