Yakk

Devin is hiro-acid. Sorry, I used his name from his sig, rather than his username.

D'oh -- I was doing manual quoting, maybe I got threads crossed? bah.

I thought I was quoting from a bevy of different posts in this thread.

Ah, there are two threads:
"$9 billion surplus -- wwyd" and "Budget surplus". I got my threads crossed. My bad.

Lets say you have a nation. And it doubles in size, because it has twice as many people.

You'd sort of expect the government to have to take in and spend twice as much money.

Population growth is a good chunk of our economic growth.

Other forms of economic growth have simular costs.

Inflation -- you really do have to take inflation into account. Otherwise, you are comparing apples and oranges when you use the budget figures of different years.

And lowering the debt as a percent of GDP is the goal. If your debt is going up, as a percent of GDP, in the long term, you are screwed. If it is going down, you aren't screwed.

If your GDP is growing 10% every 3 years, and your debt isn't (other than by inflation), that debt will evaporate to meaninglessness.

A debt:GDP ratio of 75% will, after 30 years, become 28%.

If your before-inflation GDP is growing by 3.5% every year, and inflation is running at 2%, and the dollar-value of the debt isn't changing, after 20 years your debt will be 26% of GDP.

That's victory, not a stalemate.

There are possible problems. If my growth numbers wheren't real growth (ie, garbage numbers), then my math isn't accurate.

And thus, we are winning.

The term 'form of government' seems to be more useful if it encompasses Anarchy.

In a true, pure, libertarian society, the air corperation will be charging people for the right to breathe, at a rate that maximizes shareholder benefits. It should look something like income tax.

(The atmosphere is a non-divisible large important resource. Under libertarian economic thought, it would be best utalized/protected under private ownership. With unrestricted property rights, the air monopoly should use the ideal form of monopoly pricing -- charging what the client can bear, in such a way that their income is maximized -- because people really don't want to do without air. The tax system run by modern democracies may be a decent approximation of this, where each person owns a single non-transferable share.)

It this far-fetched? I never claimed true and pure libertarianism would be stable.

Power abhors a vacuum.

No, a morgage is an option, not a fact of life. It is a useful option, but you can live your life without relying on debt.

You are saying 'other people should carry a debt, so I can pay back my debt' when you are asking for tax cuts before debt repayment.

It is the same lack of personal responsibility that lead to the debt problem in the first case. People decided to spend money, and foist the balancing of the books onto the suckers who came later. Those suckers would be us.

You want to foist it (debt) onto other suckers, rather than deal with your responsibilities. I don't like passing the buck.

What happend on 08-29-4004 BC at 9 PM? (hint: what happened about a week before this date, at the nightfall before 08-23-4004 BC, according to Bishop Ussher)

Sorry, just a joke.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.