bostonbubble.com

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

Lawyers and doctors had 200k+ school loans and a huge spread in salaries. Are you suggesting that government should be regulating how much people get paid? This is exactly what is wrong with socialism. If there is no incentive, nobody will do it. You can't equalize everybody. There will always be somebody 'unequal'. This is the nature of things in the universe.

Bush also followed some socialist tendencies and expanded the government. Unfortunately, this seems to be the trend regardless of who is in power. McCain would have been the same.

It has been shown that Depression was prolonged by the New Deal spending, rather than helped by it. There isn't even an argument there. The reason Obama is doing this is to increase government control and to make everybody dependent on handouts.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself. Do you want to live in a country which looks like Massachusetts? If the answer is yes, then keep voting for the people who bring you taxes and corruption, whether they are 'socialists' or Statists.

balor123 · Joined: 08 Mar 2008 Posts: 1204

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133593.html

Renting in Mass · Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 1:03 pm GMT Post subject:

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

john p · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 1820

Hi NickB:

You're one of the new crop of really great posters on this site, I'm enjoying reading many of your and the others posts. I actuallly am happy that not everyone has the same perspective because it makes you think more.

regarding this:

http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/us_homeownership_rates_small.jpg

You can see when Clinton came into office that home ownership took off. I think it was admirable for his administration to promote this, but I think that it was destined to get ungrounded and reality, gravity would catch hold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

If you scroll down to the Legislative changes of 1992, 1994 and 1995 you can see when the seeds were sowed for our current crop of problems.

Although John McCain tried to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2005 and was shot down by Democrats,

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/record.xpd?id=109-s20060525-16&bill=s109-190

These are McCain's words back in 2005, the height of the bubble:

ConcernedCitizen1 · Guest

One thing I'd like to add to the debate is a more rigorous examination of other countries. It's easy to generalise that x country is more business friendly than another but what I try to do is gather statistics. These all may have flaws but I think it's a better source of information than Fox News who have a decidely unrigorous approach.
I think an hour spent on cato.org is worth 10,000 hours in front of some of these garbage channels on the left and right.

Date set #1
http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/

Notice how the US is NOT the #1 ranking? Notice how they have really crap rankings in certain areas like Dealing with Construction Permits (rank = 26 vs Denmark at 7). I think Denmark is one of the supposedly socialist countries? US is not #1 at protecting investors nor at Trading Across Borders or Paying Taxes (a grim #46). US was #1 for Employing Workers. The US does have a good overall ranking, I'm just making the point that it's easy to generalise. Hong Kong is #4 and it's technically part of a COMMUNIST country!!??

China itself has a poor ranking, but how many billionaires has it just created over the past 10 years? Quite a few.

I repeat a prior post, that Russia, supposedly a communist nation, has a flat tax that would make Ron Paul proud.

#2
http://www.heritage.org/Index/TopTen.aspx
Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. Again US is not #1. Here's it's #6. of the top 6, 3 have nationalized healthcare.

We should also look at how much the US spends on health care as a % of GDP (it's massive, something like 15%, the highest in the world I believe) and look at the poor outcomes, in terms of the health of the nation, as meaured by obesity, infant mortality, hearth disease death rates etc

I am agnostic, still searching for a party or candidate who meet my needs, they all seem pretty lame.

If you click on the US's score of economic freedom over time, it's remained largely constant for the past 10 years in Democratic and Republican administrations (way to go gridlock!).

There are more such rankings around.

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

Totalitarian is different from Communist. Socialist countries all have varying degree of totalitarianism. Russia and China are totalitarian. You will not want to live there. Billionaires in Russia and China are created, exactly as you said, but not from just anybody. They are government monopolists, and those who don't play ball end up in jail or dead.

One can create any ruler they want to measure USA, but no ruler will measure the fact that we have a lot more rights than Europeans and anybody else. Socialized health care - I don't think you will want to experience that on yourself (try Freecare, or Commonwealth care for starters - I think you'll know its not good for you pretty quickly).

Both parties are now becoming Statist. A bunch of cultists elected an ideologue with the potential for becoming a populist dictator (watch him go for the 3rd term if he survives the first one). That US will not sink into another depression will only be due to the perseverance of our citizens, not due to (or rather, despite) any efforts by the Statist government to rob us to pay for its uncontrollable spending spree. There is no solution - at some point the socialists will run out of money to pay for their spending - we'll see if we can overtake Europe on the way down, that is, if we do not vote them out of office (which is highly unlikely, given current trends).

This crisis was engineered by the government run by socialists, but as usual, it turned out to be a side-effect of their policies. However, I don't think this crisis is a terrible idea. For those who are prudent with their money, this is an opportunity. Yes, for those unlucky to lose their jobs this is not very pleasant. But then again, we are not GM or FNM, and we can not expect to be bailed out, so our personal finances should be even more conservative than what is considered normal, given what we know about crises and what effect job losses may have on our ability to hold on to property.

balor123 · Joined: 08 Mar 2008 Posts: 1204

In an ultra-competitive market like Boston, I say what makes everyone else poorer makes me richer Razz

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30855847/from/ET/

This is fun reading. Take a look at what the states are doing. Those run by socialists want to raise taxes. I think we are pretty close to a mass migration of people from high tax states to low tax ones. And I think that just because the state has high taxes doesn't mean that the services are any better than in low-tax states - quite the contrary. Also notice, even though many states are getting 'bailed out', their deficits are set to skyrocket in a year. After a while, printing of more money will not help, but rather hurt our recovery chances, because no products or goods will be created in the process (printing money to pay city and state officials will not improve the economy). So cutting services and cutting expenses is the only way to fight this (i.e. cutting government). This is how you spearate big government socialists from the rest - they are always against cutting government.

john p · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 1820

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30855847/from/ET/

From that link:

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

Actually, per capita our debt appears to be ~2x 1.5B compared to IL's debt (our population is roughly 1/2 of theirs). So its 3 vs. 11.6. But don't forget, they are projecting MUCh higher debt the year after, so we may yet catch up. Also, their taxes are already much higher, so I'm not sure how much higher they can make their taxes before people vote with their feet. Its the productive half that pays them anyway. All they have to do is leave, and then the fig leaf will be gone. With nobody to pay taxes, they'll have to pack up their government (or else turn into Cuba).

john p · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 1820

My parents retired to Florida back in like 97. Their house in the North Shore currently has an annual real estate bill of something like $6,500. Their house in Florida is bigger and they pay something around $2,000. What do they care about the school system once their retired?

I think the diaspora that you're describing could coincide with people retiring to places where the cost of living is less.

The thing to keep in mind, however, is that if these cheaper States are painting themselves into a corner with their infrastructure and aren't planning properly to gear up for the new demands they will be forced to spend more later.

I am intrigued by Virginia, they seem to have their act together.

Boston ITer · Guest

My whole surprise about MA and it's whole Taxachusetts attitude is that companies are still here. Really, it's becoming more and more a stagnant corporate culture. Between 2002 and today, brand new technology highways/research triangle parks should have evolved between Nashua, Portmouth, and Laconia NH where in effect, everyone with the mojo to work would be there and perhaps, visit metro Boston on weekends for "the culture".

In a sense, that's what's always had me puzzled. There's a sense of nothing changes in MA where things always want to appear to be the same but if you really look around, Boston isn't a sort of a unique city anymore, it's flooded with national chains (Best Buy, Target, Macy), loss of local major *scene* identity (see Filene's/Jordan Marsh closings), and really, one can find 'Scrod/Cod & Chips' anywhere w/o needing to visit a local Irish (i.e. Doyle's) or Anglo-Yankee (i.e. Durgin Park) hangout. (Oh, I forgot to mention... we're all Yankees in this town, sorry to Sox fans who don't know that & think it's only a NY team). The local culture is that, for those who'd grown up in the area and want to hang out with old friends and neighbors.

Guest · Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 6:32 pm GMT Post subject:

"One can create any ruler they want to measure USA, but no ruler will measure the fact that we have a lot more rights than Europeans and anybody else. "

GenXer, I really respect your posts and most of all, your desire for empirical data, so I'm curious why here you are so unwilling to look at data? These are rankings produced by conservative or libertarian groups (Cato, Heritage

I think a good capitalist must always have an eye on the competition and what they do well / not well and we can always learn from other countries. The reason the US might (I repeat might) stay on top is if we keep innovating and competing and not automatically assume we're the best in the world at everything!

http://www.conservativeforchange.com/2009/01/new-ranking-suggests-us-not-most-free.html

This was before Obama even got in office.

Re nationalized health care, I am experiencing it. I live in the UK. So far I haven't noticed any difference from the private HMO experience I had in the US (Mass and NY).

My overall tax rate is same as it would be in the US, especially if I lived in NYC and maybe MASS. About to go up but that's also the case in the US.

The other weird thing I noticed here in the UK is that parts of the public sector (at least the units I've interacted with) are more efficient than parts of the private sector. I know this may seem hard to believe and I am really honestly telling the truth. The public sector here has all these timetables on how quickly they should reply to you, and they report on how they are performing etc.

I have had to spend much less time on the phone with the public sector than with the banks and utility companies.

I keep my eye on coming back to the US but one of the things blocking me is how uninterested many people seem in the rest of the world. I find this hard to stomach on many levels and it seems not even in line with being a good capitalist who can maximise profit by selling globally and by understanding other cultures!!!

And, by the way, the totalitarian state China pretty much controls the US's destiny by its holdings in Treasuries. If you have a mortage it's probably owned by the Chinese central bank. Thankfully the US and China are in kind of a face off where if China sells or stops buying Treasuries they create a loss on their holdings but they are definitely trying to unwind this concentrated trade they have on.