[QUOTE]It was devised in the billionaire-funded conservative think tanks of the latter 1970s in order to concentrate wealth in the wealthiest 1%, among other purposes.[/QUOTE]

Attribution of purpose in the above is not logically supported by other comments. In other words, you are spin doctoring. Simple statement: the U.S. debt has increased every single year since we first went negative about 40 years ago. There were times when it increased faster. There were times it increased slower. But every single year, we wound up borrowing more than revenues. That is independent of who was president. My belief is that the "politicians" did it irrelevant of which party was in control at the time.

Most of Clinton's presidency was at loggerheads with a republican controlled congress. I don't see you giving credit to the republican congress for the fiscal expansion. I also don't see you interpreting that fiscal expansion in terms like unsustainable and extremely destructive over the long term. It set the stage for the repeated bubble collapses over the last 15 years. I also don't see anything about the "next" great bubble collapse which will arguably be the most painful yet - the college tuition bubble.

Don't go overboard with this. I'm just challenging some of your assumptions so you can post something relevant to this thread.

DarJones

[QUOTE=cheesehead;299220]This change (inducing large deficits through tax-cutting) from previous conservative fiscal strategy (minimizing deficits) was very deliberate. It was devised in the billionaire-funded conservative think tanks of the latter 1970s in order to concentrate wealth in the wealthiest 1%, among other purposes. It has been very successful, but conservatives seem quite shy of publicly taking credit for it.[/QUOTE]

Indeed, Reaganomics has been exceptionally kind to the Looter Elite. However, Reaganomics encompasses multiple aspects in addition to its "deficits don't matter / tax-breaks0for-the-rich-are-key-to-national-properity" dogma. In its financial-market-deregulatory and [url=http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-alan-greenspan-asked-advice-do-people-ever-learn]central-bank's-only-true-mandate-is-to-support-equity-market-valuations-and-bank-profits[/url] aspects it has been carried forward through every presidency since, as well.

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;299240]Attribution of purpose in the above is not logically supported by other comments. In other words, you are spin doctoring. Simple statement: the U.S. debt has increased every single year since we first went negative about 40 years ago. There were times when it increased faster. There were times it increased slower. But every single year, we wound up borrowing more than revenues. That is independent of who was president. My belief is that the "politicians" did it irrelevant of which party was in control at the time.[/quote]
Also remember that the GDP charts in Mish's piece are strictly GDP versus *government* spending - if one adds private leveraging-up (i.e. deficit spending - the result is the Fed Z1-based chart Denninger repeatedly uses - one sees that in fact except for a very brief few months at the height of the 2008-2009 crisis, there has been *no* net inflation-adjusted GDP growth whatever in the past 30+ years which was 'organic', i.e. not deficit-expansion-based. And this was true under Clinton, as well as the other presidents of that era.

Unlike his Republican counterparts, however, Clinton did not commit the double insanity of slashing taxes and bloating spending simultaneously. OTOH, tax revenues during his second term were helped massively by revenues from the (obviously unsustainable, except to government forecasters and Wall Street touts) dotcom bubble, whose inevitable collapse occurred early in W. Bush's presidency.

[quote]Most of Clinton's presidency was at loggerheads with a republican controlled congress. I don't see you giving credit to the republican congress for the fiscal expansion. I also don't see you interpreting that fiscal expansion in terms like unsustainable and extremely destructive over the long term. It set the stage for the repeated bubble collapses over the last 15 years. I also don't see anything about the "next" great bubble collapse which will arguably be the most painful yet - the college tuition bubble.[/QUOTE]
Agree the selling-out of the nation's future to the bankster elite has been a thoroughly bipartisan affair.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;299215]And the bottom end of the price range ... ?[/QUOTE]
Apparently (via Bloomberg last week) according to the SEC documents they filed the minimum valuation is $75B. Interestingly enough, Burger King had a contest a while ago where they offered you a cheeseburger if you un-friended 10 people on Facebook, and a popular blogger used the price of a cheeseburger and the approximate number of friends the average Facebook user has, to come up with a $5-7B valuation for the company,

[url=www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/eduardo-saverin-gives-up-us-citizenship-avoids-us600mn-tax-on-fb-stake/story-fnb64oi6-1226354622304]Facebook's Saverin gives up US passport[/url]: [i]THE billionaire co-founder of Facebook has renounced his US citizenship, avoiding $US600m in tax when the company floats.[/i]
[quote]Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook who fled to the US as a teenager to escape the threat of kidnapping, has renounced American citizenship to avoid millions of dollars in taxes when the company goes public this week.

The Brazilian-born Mr Saverin, 30, who has lived in Singapore since 2009, joins a growing number of people giving up US citizenship before a possible increase in tax rates for top earners, [u]putting fresh pressure on President Obama to extend expiring tax breaks for the wealthy.[/u][/quote]
My take on the last sentence above is WTF? How about some "fresh pressure to not allow wealthy jet-setters to evade tax liabilities in such fashion?"

-----------------------------

Pair of obesity-related articles from Reuters:

[url=www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/11/us-obesity-stigma-idUSBRE84A0PA20120511?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Insight: America's hatred of fat hurts obesity fight[/url]
[quote]One night when Lynn McAfee was 5 years old, her psychologically troubled mother left her at the side of a road as punishment for a now forgotten infraction.

In the minutes before her mother's car returned, the terrified girl looked toward the nearby houses on the suburban Philadelphia street and wondered if she should walk over and ask for help.

"But I didn't," said McAfee, 62, who is now the director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination. "I didn't think anyone would want a fat child."

The stigmatization of obesity begins in preschool: Children as young as 3 tell scientists studying the phenomenon that overweight people are mean, stupid, ugly and have few friends. It intensifies in adulthood, when substantial numbers of Americans say obese people are self-indulgent, lazy and unable to control their appetites. And it translates into poorer job prospects for the obese compared with their slim peers.[/quote]
Rather ironic attitudes in a nation where 2/3 of adults are obese, no?

[url=www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/11/us-usa-obese-ohio-idUSBRE84A03L20120511?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]An Ohio juvenile court judge removed a protective order on Thursday in the case of a third-grader who was taken from his mother's custody last October after he tipped the scales at 219 lbs (99 kg).[/url]
[quote]Social workers were alerted to the child's medical situation in March 2010 when the boy, then 7, was hospitalized for two weeks with severe breathing problems.

He was removed from his home by court order in October 2011 after more than a year of supervision, and was eventually sent to live with an uncle in Columbus until April 23 when he returned to supervised-custody with his mother.

The boy is now 9 years old and weighs 173 lbs (78 kg), up from a low of 166 lbs before he returned to his mother's home.[/quote]
So since returning home a little over 2 weeks, the kid has gained 7 lbs -- yeah, this is going to end well.

------------------------

Back on the HFT theme (see the flash crash 2nd-anniversary posting above), a couple ZH readers cracked wise in response to [url=http://www.zerohedge.com/news/new-level-stock-market-quote-insanity]this latest Nanex analysis of quote-stuffing algo activity[/url]:
[quote][b]The Big Ching-aso[/b]
The Big Ching-aso's picture
[i]
"There is nothing wrong with your computer monitor. Do not attempt to adjust the stock price. We are controlling manipulation. If we wish to make it higher, we will HFT up the volume. If we wish to make it lower, we will HFT down the volume. We will control the bid. We will control the ask. We can roll the market, make it flutter. We can Algo the Dow to a soft close or bump it to a vigorous spike. For the next trading day, sit quietly and we will control all that you buy and sell. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your computer monitor. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — [b]The Stock Market Outer Limits[/b]."
[/i]

[b]Richard Chesler[/b]
Richard Chesler's picture
[i]
You unlock this door with the key of quantitative easing. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of fraud, a dimension of muppets, a dimension of Ponzi. You're moving into a banana land of both shadow and substance, of thieving assholes and corrupt hopium ideas. You've just crossed over into [b]The Bankster Zone[/b][/i].[/quote]

You know things in Greece (and the EMU in general) are hopeless when even a "deficits don`t matter" growthiness-über-alles Keynesian clown circus ringmaster like Paul Krugman finally gets it (complete with pompous-sounding Wagnerian blog-entry title):

[url=http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/eurodammerung-2/]Eurodämmerung[/url]

Which prompts me to attempt a rare Monday funny:
[b]
Q: How long does it take a Nobel-Prize-winning Keynesian economist to replace a burnt-out light bulb?

A: 20 to 33 years (give or take), plus 5 minutes:
[/b]
o - 10-20 years encouraging government deficit spending to "restore luminance growth", even though the bulb`s filament is clearly shattered, not merely suffering a "cyclical dimming". When asked why he expects this to work on this bulb even though a similarly-constructed Japanese-made bulb failed to respond to similar measures, our Nobelist replies "this is not a Japanese-made bulb";

o 5-6 years and a half-million in government grant money to have a dozen graduate students write PhD dissertations exploring "unconventional monetary stimuli measures to spur resumption of brightness growth at the zero bound";

o 3-4 years arguing vehemently on the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers and one`s newspaper-hosted personal blog that "this is an electrical-liquidity crisis, not a luminance crisis ... the government and central bank simply need to be more aggressive in restoring confidence by way of further stimulus";

o 2-3 years arguing vehemently on the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers and one`s newspaper-hosted personal blog that the remaining bright bulb in the room needs to subsidize the burnt-out bulb by funding a "luminance rescue facility" and signing on to a permanent "luminance transfer union";

o 5 Minutes for his long-suffering wife to throw up her hands in exasperation and change the damn thing herself.

Playing chicken with California's budget
 

Ewmayer, isn't it time you posted something about California's game of chicken?

Governor Jerry Brown has thrown down the gauntlet by proposing up to 8 Billion dollars in painful cuts to social programs and education along with a few trimmings from prisons, public employees, and state funded construction. On the other hand, he has proposed a 1/4 cent sales tax increase and a 1 to 3 percent income tax on taxpayers making over $250K per year. In my opinion, if he gets enough people screaming about the cuts, he might just be able to shove the republicans aside long enough to pass the tax increase.

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/jerry-brown-proposes-billions-cuts-californians-getting-message-233005895.html[/url]

Meantime, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history is playing out in Birmingham Alabama. It is amazing to see how much the bankers are screaming as they feel their tail feathers being plucked.

[url]http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/05/us_bankruptcy_judge_thomas_b_b.html[/url]
[url]http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/news/2012/03/05/judge-says-jeffco-qualifies-for.html[/url]

DarJones

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;299514]Ewmayer, isn't it time you posted something about California's game of chicken?[/QUOTE]

Thanks for reminding me ... I sent the following note to Mish yesterday morning:

--------------------------------

[url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/14/us-usa-california-budget-idUSBRE84D00020120514?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Brown pushes tax hike as California's money woes deepen[/url]
[quote]Brown has been warning of further cuts to education since his initial budget proposal in January. Local school districts, barred from raising their own revenue through higher property taxes, are heavily dependent on dwindling funding from the state government in Sacramento. Preliminary layoff notices for the next school year have been sent to more than 20,000 teachers.

State colleges and universities have implemented massive tuition increases in recent years. The University of California has said it may have to boost tuition another 6 percent this year if funding is cut further.

[u]But Brown has little choice but to propose yet deeper cuts to school spending[/u], which is guaranteed the lion's share of the state's revenue due to a law approved by voters.[/quote]
Little choice? How about slashing prison funding - which has grown 3x faster than educational spending for the past several decades - for once?

Time for you once again to trot out your laundry list of how-CA-balances-its-budget-without-tax-hikes, methinks...

--------------------------------

But shortly after hitting 'send' I saw that Mish had already posted on the story:

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/05/california-deficit-soared-to-16-billion.html]California Deficit Soars to $16 billion; Governor Brown Threatens Public Education Unless He Gets "Temporary" Tax hikes; How Brown Ruined California in His First Term; Four Point Solution[/url]

at which point I sent him a brief "ya beat me to it" e-mail and forgot that I also intended to post the above here.

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;299240]Attribution of purpose in the above is not logically supported by other comments. In other words, you are spin doctoring.[/QUOTE]But you offer no refutation.

[quote]Most of Clinton's presidency was at loggerheads with a republican controlled congress. I don't see you giving credit to the republican congress for the fiscal expansion.[/quote]That countercomment would have more credibility as criticism if you could quote an example where we had similar expansion with a Republican-controlled Congress and a [I]Republican[/I] president who, presumably, would not oppose the fiscal-expansion-friendly legislation from that Congress. But you can't point to that on a factual chart, can you?

[quote]I also don't see you interpreting that fiscal expansion in terms like unsustainable and extremely destructive over the long term. It set the stage for the repeated bubble collapses over the last 15 years.[/quote](... illustrating the conservative tendency to blame other-side predecessors for whatever goes wrong whenever their party is in power. Oddly, they don't think that fiscal predecessors have such administration-spanning effects whenever they want to take credit for what happens during a Republican presidency.)

[quote]I also don't see anything about the "next" great bubble collapse which will arguably be the most painful yet - the college tuition bubble.[/quote]You're criticizing my comments becuase I didn't engage in speculation about the future? How dismal an attempt to distract attention from what I actually did write about.

[quote]I'm just challenging some of your assumptions so you can post something relevant to this thread.[/quote]No, you're employing rhetorical trickery so that you can pretend that you're challenging my assumptions. Readers familiar with those tricks may not be so easily misled.

- - -

I don't consider that post typical -- your posts are usually more sound.

GreeceFire, PentagonPork, FicksingPublicSkewls
 

Would love to hear from any Greek (or Greek-connected) readers about the situation there. One of the better political comments I read today noted that the strong showing in the (first round of) elections by the anti-austerity radical-left Syriza party seems to have led the Greek public to "allow themselves to consider alternatives", as Syriza's lead (based on polls) is growing rapidly in the runup to the highly-likely next round of elections. There is also what appears to be a not-yet-panicky but nonetheless accelerating run on the banks, and growing rumors of a Euro-exiting "bank holiday" very soon.

---------------------------------

[url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/us-usa-defense-budget-idUSBRE84F01B20120516?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Obama issues veto threat against House defense bill[/url]: [i](Reuters) - President Barack Obama threatened on Tuesday to veto a defense policy bill in the House of Representatives that would authorize higher Pentagon spending and tie his hands on national security issues from nuclear arms reductions to handling war detainees[/i]

Remember this next time a GOP member blathers about being a "fiscal hawk". (The Dems are no better when it comes to supporting defense pork-spending in their districts, but at least they make fewer false claims about fiscal conservatism).


[url=www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/us-usa-education-rhee-idUSBRE84F03J20120516?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks[/url]: [i](Reuters) - During her tumultuous three years at the head of the Washington D.C. public schools, Michelle Rhee set off a lot of fireworks.[/i]
[quote]She's still doing it - on a national stage.

Rhee has emerged as the leader of an unlikely coalition of politicians, philanthropists, financiers and entrepreneurs who believe the nation's $500 billion-a-year public education system needs a massive overhaul. She has vowed to raise $1 billion for her national advocacy group, StudentsFirst, and forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.

StudentsFirst has its own political action committee (PAC), its own SuperPAC, and a staff of 75, including a cadre of seasoned lobbyists Rhee sends from state to state as political battles heat up. She has flooded the airwaves with TV and radio ads in a half dozen states weighing new policies on charter schools, teacher assessment and other hot-button issues.

To her supporters, Rhee is a once-in-a-generation leader who has the smarts and the star power to make a difference on one of the nation's most intractable public policy issues.

But critics say Rhee risks destroying the very public schools she aims to save by forging alliances with political conservatives, evangelical groups and business interests that favor turning a large chunk of public education over to the private sector. She won't disclose her donors, but public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations.

Rhee says she has only one goal: to make sure all children get a great education.

"We are about fighting for kids," Rhee said. "And whoever is standing in the way ... we are willing to go up against those folks because we can't maintain the status quo."

Few would argue that the status quo is working. In urban school districts nationwide, on average just one in four 10-year-olds is proficient in reading, and one in four 13-year-olds is at grade level in math. Many big-city districts have dropout rates of 50 percent.

Rhee argues the problem isn't a lack of funding: Average spending per student has more than doubled since the early 1970s, even after accounting for inflation, to about $10,500 a year. Yet test scores have improved only modestly.

Schools don't need more money, Rhee says; they need to be held accountable for how they spend it.[/quote]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;299641]
Few would argue that the status quo is working. In urban school districts nationwide, on average just one in four 10-year-olds is proficient in reading, and one in four 13-year-olds is at grade level in math. Many big-city districts have dropout rates of 50 percent.

Rhee argues the problem isn't a lack of funding: Average spending per student has more than doubled since the early 1970s, even after accounting for inflation, to about $10,500 a year. Yet test scores have improved only modestly.

Schools don't need more money, Rhee says; they need to be held accountable for how they spend it.
[/QUOTE]

The best, most efficient school in the world can't do anything with
students who come to school with a bad attitude toward learning.

The reason that urban school districts have such problems is the
following:

(1) Parents are poor and can't support their children properly. They come to
school malnourished, in shabby clothes, etc.
(1a) Why are they poor? Because they are uneducated!
(1b) Why are they uneducated? Because they don't value it.
(1c) Why don't they value it? Because their parents didn't. And on and
on it goes.
(2) They pass on their piss-poor attitude about education to their kids.
(3) As a result, their kids don't value education and don't give a sh*t
about learning.


Father Drinan (and Bill Cosby) said it best. The major problem with
Blacks today is the breakdown of the Black family. 70%+ of children
live in single-parent homes. Black men have a lousy attitude toward women.
The kids have bad role models. "Find 'em, Fool 'em, F*ck 'em, Forget 'em".

Yes, I am 100% sure that there are problems with schools, including
incompetent teachers, lack of supplies etc. But the root cause is
SOCIAL. Money won't solve these problems.

The real black marriage problem
 

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;299694]The best, most efficient school in the world can't do anything with
students who come to school with a bad attitude toward learning.

The reason that urban school districts have such problems is the
following:

(1) Parents are poor and can't support their children properly. They come to
school malnourished, in shabby clothes, etc.
(1a) Why are they poor? Because they are uneducated!
(1b) Why are they uneducated? Because they don't value it.
(1c) Why don't they value it? Because their parents didn't. And on and
on it goes.
(2) They pass on their piss-poor attitude about education to their kids.
(3) As a result, their kids don't value education and don't give a sh*t
about learning.


Father Drinan (and Bill Cosby) said it best. The major problem with
Blacks today is the breakdown of the Black family. 70%+ of children
live in single-parent homes. Black men have a lousy attitude toward women.
The kids have bad role models. "Find 'em, Fool 'em, F*ck 'em, Forget 'em".

Yes, I am 100% sure that there are problems with schools, including
incompetent teachers, lack of supplies etc. But the root cause is
SOCIAL. Money won't solve these problems.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/12533717-452/the-real-black-marriage-problem.html[/url]

I haven't read the article in its entirety, but it reads along similar lines.

[quote]After all, too many black children are being raised in single-parent households. I’m not saying a single mother or father can’t be a great parent, but the job is a lot tougher. Like women of other ethnicities, a lot of black women want to be in a committed and loving relationship. Unfortunately, many of these women are settling for far less, because they are unable to find a suitable and willing mate.[/quote]