Quote:
Originally Posted by aceventura3
There are many different types of investors. Most serious investors simply factor in certain assumptions regarding what governments may or may not do. Then they allocate capital accordingly. They do that with "confidence".
|
And right now, there is decreasing confidence that the US is going to come out of this without at the very least suffering a hit to its credit rating.
Quote:
|
Investors still look at US debt as the virtual risk free investment that it is. The rates and demand for US debt has not changed as a result of this alleged crisis.
|
Bullshit. Investors are already skittish about T-bills. If anything, the market shows that investors have faith in the solvency of the US ten years from now. Next month, not so much.
Quote:
|
Additionally, people are generally misusing the term "default". At this point when ever two or more people use the term, odds are they are thinking of different possible outcomes. The President has suggested that there is a possibility that the US won't pay interest on debt, that the US government won't pay Social Security - both things will not happen. There is no reason not to pay US obligations, and I believe the President has no choice. Shutting down some government services is not "default" in my book.
|
Wait, so people are misusing the term "default", because they aren't using it with respect to your personal definition? Seriously, that's dumb. I'm not saying that you're dumb, just that your propensity to define words that are already in wide use in ways that diverge from the commonly accepted definition and then call people out for not using your definition is dumb. It makes discussion impossible. It also allows you a convenient means of backing out of the flawed arguments you present by deflecting with some form of "well that's not what I meant because I was using a different definition of that word". It's like some Bill Clinton "well, that depends on what you're definition of 'is' is" bullshit.
Quote:
|
This "crisis" is manageable, even given the worse case.
|
The "crisis" that would result from letting the Bush tax cuts expire would be magnitudes more manageable than the one that will result from failing to raise the debt ceiling or failing to take a balanced approach to controlling the national debt in the long term.
Why is it what the tea party solution always favors the wealthy and always asks the common person to sacrifice? Here's the answer: implicit in the tea party philosophy is the idea that the common man is scum, not fit to lick the boots of the average wealthy entrepreneur. Anyone who hasn't made their mark on the world by earning millions is a sap, a sucker, a leech, selfishly suckling at the resources provided by the put-upon class of wealthy economic elites.
That's the funny thing about the anti-elitism endemic to certain right-ward folks: their fundamental philosophy is wholly focused on the deification of elites at the expense of the common person. Rich people are better than poor people. Us leeches from the poor and the middle classes should just shut the fuck up and be happy for the fact that the wealthy elites who make everything possible are willing to let us live off more than just their refuse. How dare we expect them to contribute to society via taxes proportionally to the amount of benefit they've derived from society? Don't we understand that without them we'd be nothing?
There's a pretty fundamental disconnect between this way of looking at the world and how it actually works. Though I could see how it might be psychologically beneficial if one is exorbitantly wealthy (or if one sympathizes more with the exorbitantly wealthy than with one's peers) to convince oneself that wealth is created in a vacuum. It can help stave off those pesky pangs of conscience that arise when one accidentally bumps into evidence of the widespread inequity produced by an economic system such as ours.