California on the Brink

[xoxoxoBruce]

SURPLUS.

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

SURPLUS.

Surplus what?

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Inherited a recession in 2000, not so? Recovered from same.

Inherited a recession in 1982 also. Recovered, and engendered a prolonged boom.

Republicans both times, btw, not that I think party has much to do with it. Maintaining an environment where profitability is both easy enough and reliably expected is the secret. No, I don't think you can honestly plead either poverty or even straitened circumstances attributable to anything but decisions you made. Not then, at any rate.

Now the story may turn out differently. What Obama's ideas will give us is an inflation cycle like the 1970s, which some few writing on this board are too young to remember, and apparently not sufficiently educated to know. Otherwise, you would have zero enthusiasm for the Democrats' inventing a couple trillions out of, well, nothing really.

Those recessions were quite different from what Obama inherited. We were on the verge of a complete and total collapse of the financial system. We were on the verge of another Great Depression. And we do not yet know what effect the stimulus and other actions Obama has taken will have. It is too soon to tell.

[TheMercenary]

Hardly. But that is the past and something for the history books. You should be more concerned with what is going on now.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

What surplus? Responsible people never found any. Irresponsible ones did claim one existed. Or that one would emerge any year now. To the rest of us, it looked like smoke and mirror tricks.

I have never heard of a balanced Federal budget since 1969. Yeah, I'm that old.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

What surplus? Responsible people never found any. Irresponsible ones did claim one existed. Or that one would emerge any year now. To the rest of us, it looked like smoke and mirror tricks.

I have never heard of a balanced Federal budget since 1969. Yeah, I'm that old.

[Shawnee123]

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

-e. e. cummings

[sugarpop]

UG, please stop thinking you know what is in my mind. You don't. You have NO CLUE what I am about, and that last post of yours proves it.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

My dear girl, I read your posts. What is in your posts is in your mind; what you write is my clue, and the evidence under consideration. Have you never noticed you never prove nor even try and show that what is in your mind is any different from what is in your posts? No. Never. Not once.

You are as much what you write as I am what I write, Sugarpop.

So kindly give it a rest; you are unpersuasive. And you have no cogent counterargument; I refuse to make you the issue.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

You're thinking, I suppose, "I don't have any class hatreds. I'm not conscious of any annoyance except at this UG guy. What is this peckerhead on about?"

Well, I know the language and the philosophy of class resentment. You have been so immersed in a class-resentment philosophical milieu during your short life that you think believing it's wrong to be too wealthy is right and normal.

It's not.

It is a tactic of the socialists, the fascists, and all the other leftists of every single available description to foster resentment of those more successful than their constituents.

And like most things Left, it is also Crap. It fueled the Russian Revolution, and made Mao Tse Tung feel needed -- and inspired the Great Leap Forward (made a lot of forward progress into graves, what with malnutrition, starvation, and a general Communist Chinese war on science) and the Cultural Revolution (which may constitute evidence that Chairman Mao had gone insane, and which lost a generation of economic and intellectual development for China) which had the Beijing government assigning people to careers as cooks, for Pete's sake. Grandiose micromanagement, and everybody gets an equal share of the misery.

In imitation of the Communists, the Fascists busily nationalized industries and ran command economies -- which really aren't economies at all. They are instead a symptom of economic illiteracy. A growing economy didn't happen, to speak of, in Spain until Franco was replaced -- and starting from a low, longtime-fascist baseline meant Spain was cheap for years after. The followers of Marx essentially seemed to pretend markets didn't exist, and the followers of National rather than International Socialism didn't quite think of going quite that far. The fascists didn't think an awful lot. The Communists tried to utilize the best brains, but they somehow never managed to pick the best ideas.

You write the words you do because you have certain values. They inform the thoughts you think, and hence the words you post. You could hardly post otherwise -- not and actually carry it off. I write the words I do because I have better values yet, and thus from time to time have better thoughts. So it's hardly difficult, nor at all illegitimate, to grasp yours.

If the best you can say is, "That is not what I mean," then how about trying to write what you do mean? Or ought you to reconsider in depth just what it is you're going to mean from now on?