The Looting Machine Called Capitalism
Paul Craig Roberts
I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment. In other words, capitalists make profits because their costs are externalized and born by others. In the US, society and the environment have to pick up the tab produced by capitalist activity.
The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:
Having castigated Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates artificially low in order to help the Obama Administration keep a Democrat in the White House, Trump now likes Janet Yellen and likes low interest rates, too — so much so that he decided this week that it is finally time to get honest with America about his latest flip-flop:
America's snowflake millennials aren't used to being told 'no', especially by their parents. Perhaps that's why, as we pointed out a few days ago, more millennials than ever are now living at home with mom and roughly one quarter of them don't even both to enroll in classes and/or find a job (see "A Quarter Of Millennials Living At Home Neither Work Nor Study"). But, when it comes to racking up massive student loans for their lazy, millennial, snowflakes, we suspect a healthy portion of about 3.5 million Baby Boomers are wishing they had a do-over to do just that.
Authored by George Friedman, Xander Snyder, and Chyenne Ligon via MauldinEconomics.com,
Nuclear bombs have a strange quality: They are a type of weapon that countries spend enormous sums of money to develop but don’t actually intend to use. While chemical weapons have been frequently used in war, no country has detonated a nuclear bomb since the end of World War II.
Social Security, like America's trillions of dollars of underfunded public and private pensions, is nothing more than a ponzi scheme that will eventually fail. Any system that relies on capital drawdowns to fund benefit obligations while the number of beneficiaries continues to soar is, by definition, a rather obvious ponzi. That said, it's always easier to 'kick the can down the road' and hope for the best than to preemptively address the real problems that face retirees...after all, old people love to vote and taking away their retirement money is not a good way to earn their support.