Quote:
Originally Posted by foreverfan
(Post 271879)
Things are so much different now. Our economy is on the brink of disaster as the government prints money without nothing to back it up. The Chinese and Saudi's could stop lending us money at any time. Although this is unlikely in the short term it is very likely in the long term as we continue to devaluate our currency.
So what happens to society when the Chinese say "We no lend you anymore money"? Ask Beck that.
YouTube - Glenn Beck-Greater Depression, economic collapse coming soon!
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I'm not just trying to be argumentative... promise... but videos like that are why Glenn Beck is widely ridiculed...
he is basically saying we had MUCH less than 500 billion dollars in paper money before the 1960s... if I understand the video correctly... and that then we just started printing it like crazy? what's his source? And if he is saying that we literally just printed 5 trillion dollars... which I believe is his final assertion... where the hell is it? Is he really saying that we are trying to pay off our debts with literal paper money? (see my last paragraph before you react to this)
Let's say his 1960 figure was 100 billion dollars... there were 190 million people in the US at that time. That means that for every person, there were 526 paper dollars. If he is correct that there are 5 trillion in circulation today- again, the video never made it clear what he was actually talking about... then that's $16,000 dollars per person.
I know the whole theory of the gold standard and all... but there is no such thing anymore. Every nation in the world relies on a fiat currency today.
I don't believe that the US has had a zero deficit for some time now, definitely not in any of our lifetimes...I'm pretty sure that the last time we had zero debt was after WWI, and then it ballooned during WWII and went down, only to shoot back up during the Cold War with a final spike under Reagan....
Seriously, I understand the point of Beck's rhetoric. I grew up in a very Republican household and went to Jesuit, where 82% of people (myself included) voted Bush in a 2000 mock election. But the more I look at the numbers being presented by the right, the more fudging I see... it's an easy sell... "don't borrow more than you can pay".... but the intricacies of International Finance are much, much more complex than that...this whole country was built on debt that took years to pay off. Debt is what drives private industry; without it, there are no capital improvements, no new companies, etc.
Do I realize that we may be coming to a point where we have to devalue our currency in order to pay off our debts? Yes. But I still think Beck et al's rhetoric is bombastic and does a disservice to the people who he's trying to persuade. That's my issue with the Tea party, the palin lovers... all those people. We already tried the "aw, shucks" schtick with Bush, and not only did the economy grow less than it did under Clinton, the Census... just released today... showed that it was the second-slowest decade of growth since 1910. To me, it's the equivalent of saying "just put some oil in it" when you're dealing with a computer.