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#15324457
I just remembered the time a client called me and said he had some original Danny Kaye albums on vinyl, and I had to bite my tongue because my grandma woulld say, "I met Danny Kaye once, he was the funniest faggot I ever met."

Like she literally sat on the bench of a piano as he played songs for her and that was her takeaway. I loved my grandma, but god damn was she bigoted.

One of my favorite things she used to do was she'd take me and my cousins to church and then lunch at the shittiest Greek run restaurants in the Chicago area. And whenever the bill came, she'd ask the waitress: "What are you?"

And they'd answer Lithuanian, Belacrusian, etc. and my Grandma would always answer, "Such hard working people. Such a hard working people." We were trash Irish btw, my grandma was just a straight up 10/10 and ended up with a husband who used to have dinner parties wih Ray Kroc he was so rich. Half of my uncles have PHDs from Hamburger University because of it.

I loved Kids in the Hall at the time, and I wished we'd get a gay as fuck Scott Thompson style waiter who would sarcastically say, "I'm from the moon. I'm a moon person."

"Moon people. Such hard woring people. Well, I'm glad you're here."
#15324458
Im not makin this shit up. One of my uncles got a McDougal Genius Grant of $100,000 for his thesis at Hambuger University on pickle placemetn on a burger, and whether or not 2 or 3 slices is optimal.
#15324459
The conclusion to his thesis was two slices. Pickles are fun, and when you bite into a burger it should be a surpise; they should nnt cover he entire patty.

This lengthy observation was worthy of a McDougal genius grant. My uncle gets real riled up when I call him the "Pickle Genius" at family events.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15324460
What's the problem?




Government deficits create private wealth, while surpluses drain it.

It's simple accounting.


:)
User avatar
By JohnRawls
#15324461
SpecialOlympian wrote:It's so. fucking. annyoing.

Even when you fundamentally agree with him. I rarely see anyone so grating, like the emotional equivalent of rubbing pumice on your hands. Yes, I'm cleaning and taking care of myself but this still sucks, I hate this.

Truth To Power, you are at a minimum 30 years old if you're posting on this forum. It is time you to learn to socialize with other adults. I'm willing to slow roll you through this proces, which I assume will be extremely painful for both of us, but you need to calm the fuck down first.

I will teach you how to make frands and keep them. I'm literally a professional friend: you give my company a million dollars and I'm there on the phone for you during office hours. I'm a praciiced listener.


MAAAAAN BRIGAAAAAAAADE!
User avatar
By QatzelOk
#15324469
These are the top three "denial strategies" being used to pretend that the USA is not going bankrupt:

Self-interest leads to denial protected by a blanket of fake theory

Rancid wrote:...I own US bonds, which means the US government owes me money. If the US government disappeared, yes I would lose that money, however, if the US government disappeared, I'm pretty sure I'd have bigger things to worry about than my money anyway. :lol:...


What-about-ism- the perfect capitalism is "out there"

Truth To Power wrote:...Geoism...


Media Distraction- Did you see the latest TV show?

SpecialOlympian wrote:..."I met Danny Kaye once, he was the funniest faggot I ever met."...


So Rancid is invested in the USA state apparatus: therefore, "theories pulled from dusty old Economics books" will save him.

Truth to Power knows of this perfect capitalist system that really exists in a far-off land that will make us all very, very happy. (And War-with-China is justified by it. Another war!)

And finally, Spesh uses the most common way of denying the upcoming social catastrophes that state bankruptcy will bring on. Just change the subject!

I have a lot of personal experience with this one, and so do you all. When I was a kid and the government of Canada started piling up deficits every year, I asked my parents what this would mean for my future (which is now). They would look away from the TV and ask me to stop distracting them while they watched "Happy Days."

Failure is being prepared and justified by my own community.
User avatar
By Hakeer
#15324471
ingliz wrote:What's the problem?




Government deficits create private wealth, while surpluses drain it.

It's simple accounting.


:)


It is borrowing money from future generations (our children and grandchildren) to pay for trillions of dollars transferred within OUR generation to the billionaire class.

And what happens in the 2030’s when Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid trust funds run out according to the CBO? Either the Republicans (Project 2025) make old people, sick people, and poor people suffer, or Democrats get control of Congress and finally make the billionaire class pay for the fiscal disaster that the tax cuts since Reagan have created.
User avatar
By QatzelOk
#15324475
About what government debt really is, Hakeer wrote:It is borrowing money from future generations (our children and grandchildren) to pay for trillions of dollars transferred within OUR generation to the billionaire class...

Exactly.

When I was ten years old, I was worried that the Canadian government was starting to run up deficits every year. My parents just told me to shut up and watch TV, like they did.

Banksters get their wealth from interest on their money. So government debt means they get rich, while everyone else goes bankrupt.

And since banksters control media and universities, there are lots of fake theories out there that say that "deficits don't matter," and lots of whore politicians to repeat this in faux-sincere state-of-the-union speeches.
#15324478
Hakeer wrote:If all you have is various kinds of consumption tax, billionaires would love it! They would gladly trade that for no tax on their income.

Huh? What are you even talking about? A consumption tax doesn't tax what people take from the community: consumers have already paid the producers for whatever they are consuming. What people -- especially billionaires --TAKE from the community WITHOUT paying the community for it -- i.e, what they are legally entitled to steal, I repeat, steal from the community -- is the rents of privilege, the wealth they extort from producers and consumers by legally depriving them of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible.
#15324480
QatzelOk wrote:When I was ten years old, I was worried that the Canadian government was starting to run up deficits every year.

That would be in the 1970s, after Trudeau pere made Canadian governments dependent on private banksters for deficit funding that the publicly owned Bank of Canada formerly provided. Interestingly, bank profits have since then increased by an order of magnitude as a fraction of Canada's GDP....
Banksters get their wealth from interest on their money.

More accurately, they get it by charging interest on the money they are legally entitled to create by lending it into existence. It's not actually theirs.
And since banksters control media and universities, there are lots of fake theories out there that say that "deficits don't matter," and lots of whore politicians to repeat this in faux-sincere state-of-the-union speeches.

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." -- Henry Ford
#15324481
QatzelOk wrote:Truth to Power knows of this perfect capitalist system that really exists in a far-off land that will make us all very, very happy.

No. Although Marx dismissed geoism as "capitalism's last ditch" (i.e., its final defense against socialism) geoism is not capitalism any more than it is socialism. Try to get that through your head.
(And War-with-China is justified by it. Another war!)

No, I merely observe that if China really implements an effective geoist system instead of their current crippled and corrupt version (that has nevertheless enabled them to achieve the greatest economic miracle in the history of the world), they will rapidly outstrip the USA economically, and on form, if that happened, the USA would likely start a war with them.
#15324482
SpecialOlympian wrote:The conclusion to his thesis was two slices. Pickles are fun, and when you bite into a burger it should be a surpise; they should nnt cover he entire patty.

"Two pickles good; three pickles better."

The whole point of McDonalds is that wherever you go in the world, you won't get a surprise there.
#15324483
SpecialOlympian wrote:Don't do that annoying shit where you quote everyone line by line. I ain't reading that.

You don't want to be able to follow the logic of the discussion? Why not? Afraid you might learn something that proves your beliefs are false and evil?

IME these issues are not easy for people to understand, so I will continue to do what I can to be clear, sorry.

BTW, I just encountered a good proof that you are wrong. Hakeer quoted my whole post, and then responded, "Name one." One what?? The post he quoted was only a few lines, but I did talk about more than one thing. Your preferred method of posting fosters ambiguity and misunderstanding. I will not be doing that.

Clear?
#15324485
Hakeer wrote:I know. He has a psychological compulsion to contradict every single sentence you write.

That is a bald falsehood. I do not take issue with factually correct statements. If I contradict every single sentence you write, it is because every single sentence you write is false. You might want to ask yourself why that is.
#15324486
SpecialOlympian wrote:YOU ARE A CLASS TRAITOR



YOU ARE A CLASS TRAITOR

You get where ths is going I'm not putting in any more effort.

I get what you did there.

So, I shouldn't expect more than minimal effort from you. Check.
#15324505
Deutschmania wrote:I think that the main problem here is that @Truth To Power has launched into an immediate self righteous personal attack

How dare you, maggot!
upon all whom

who
dare to critique their notion of the land value tax ,

That's not my notion.
and has neglected to first define what in the world Geoism , also known as Georgism , after it's originator , Henry George , even is .

I realize most of the few people who have even encountered the issue think of geoism as a land value tax (LVT) or Georgism, but I have reasons for eschewing those terms in favor of location subsidy repayment (LSR):
1. LVT assumes land is privately owned and taxed ad valorem, so a system of leasing publicly owned land, as in Hong Kong and China, is not included. LSR is more inclusive.
2. The goal is to recover the publicly created unimproved rental value of land for public purposes and benefit rather than giving it away to private landowners in return for nothing; but if LVT is imposed at a low rate, land value is dominated by the expected future relationship between the land rent growth rate and the discount rate, not the current rent. If it is imposed at a high rate, land value is dominated by pre-paid tax, not the current rent. Either way, LVT does not achieve the desired goal. LSR is thus also more accurate.
3. Henry George was the best-known proponent of LSR-like arrangements (principally for his first and by far most successful book, "Progress and Poverty," in which he first advocated the famous "Single Tax" on the unimproved rental value of land), but he was not the originator of the idea, so calling LSR "Georgism" is ahistorical. The French physiocrats had proposed a single tax on land rent ("l'impot unique") more than a century before George, and classical economists including Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill had advanced arguments for similar methods of raising public revenue. Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" can be understood as one long argument for taxing land rent. Patrick Edward Dove advocated recovering land rent as the principal if not exclusive source of public revenue in his book, "The Theory of Human Progression" nearly 30 years before George wrote "Progress and Poverty."
4. I do not call or consider myself a Georgist because Georgism is about Henry George, just as Marxism is about Marx, and Christianity about Jesus, and I differ with George on some substantive points:
- Pigovian taxes are useful in addition to LVT, so I don't advocate George's Single Tax on land rent.
- People must rightly be compensated for the forcible removal of their natural individual liberty rights to use land, so I advocate a universal individual exemption (UIE) from LSR, rather than repayment of 100% of land rent as George advocated.
- George favored abolition of patents but not copyrights; I would abolish both.
- George advocated free trade because it is in consumers' interests, but there are valid reasons to impose tariffs and other trade sanctions on countries whose governments and elites exploit and oppress their own populations, damage the environment, etc. to obtain competitive advantages.
- Like George, I advocate government issue of fiat money, but George did not understand the necessity of also requiring private commercial banks to hold 100% reserves to cover their demand deposit liabilities.
Now I have heard of it , as I happen to be a weird autistic geek , for whom radical social theories such as these constitute a restricted interest of mine . But I don't suppose that all that many other people would have ever known of such a set of ideas . After all , Georgism hasn't caught on in influential impact , the way that Marxism has . And as Marx himself asserted , Geoism is an overly simplistic reductivism , in that it focuses on the value of land , to the exclusion of the value of labor.

Marx was (surprise!) incorrect. In fact, it is amusing that Marx would call George overly simplistic when Marx was trying to pretend that no one but the workers contributes anything to production. Marxism is all about overly simplistic refusal to make the crucial distinctions: it essentially consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker.

George was more of a traditional classical economist than Marx, and accepted the labor Theory of Value, which Jevons had already refuted in 1871. Like the classical economists -- but unlike Marx -- George was aware of the fact that providing tools, buildings, machinery, training, etc. to initiate and enable the production process is a contribution to production that earns a return, just as labor is a contribution that earns a return. What isn't a contribution and doesn't earn a return is owning the land, as it would have been there, just as available for productive use, had the land's owner and every previous owner never existed.

It is ironic -- and tragic for all humanity -- that Marxism has been so much more successful than geoism because deep in the bowels of Vol III of "Capital" where no one would ever read it, Marx actually admitted that Henry George was right -- but said this fact should be ignored, as it would remove the rationale for violent seizure of factories by the proletariat!
#15324508
SpecialOlympian wrote:Truth To Power, you are at a minimum 30 years old if you're posting on this forum. It is time you to learn to socialize with other adults. I'm willing to slow roll you through this proces, which I assume will be extremely painful for both of us, but you need to calm the fuck down first.

How calm is it appropriate to be when fighting the greatest evil that has ever existed?
I will teach you how to make frands and keep them.

I don't need fronds.
I'm literally a professional friend: you give my company a million dollars and I'm there on the phone for you during office hours. I'm a praciiced listener.

I'm sure I had $1M lying around here somewhere....
User avatar
By Hakeer
#15324509
Truth To Power wrote:Huh? What are you even talking about? A consumption tax doesn't tax what people take from the community: consumers have already paid the producers for whatever they are consuming. What people -- especially billionaires --TAKE from the community WITHOUT paying the community for it -- i.e, what they are legally entitled to steal, I repeat, steal from the community -- is the rents of privilege, the wealth they extort from producers and consumers by legally depriving them of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible.



If you buy food, gasoline, LAND, hotel stay, etc. and there is a sales tax, the government’s tax is included in the cost of the commodity or service you purchase. That is what I mean by a consumption tax.

What you call “rents of privilege” the Internal Revenue Service calls “income”, and if you abolish income tax, the billionaires will get to keep all that money.

What I said is that the billionaire will gladly pay consumption tax in exchange for no income tax.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15324511
Hakeer wrote:It is ...

It is financial capitalism, and finance capitalism shifts taxes from the rentier class onto labour and industry. You wannabe capitalists can't complain. It's built into your 'all's-for-the-best-in-your-best-of-all-possible-worlds' system.


:)
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