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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (52574)	10/26/2000 10:46:25 AM
From: U Up U Down	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

The so called "Lock Box" is an accounting gimmick. The idea is to put a fire wall around the funds. Lock Box concept was passed by the Republican House before gore "created" the concept. Congress created the lock box, it can kill it anytime and spend the money on anything.

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (52574)	10/26/2000 11:57:47 AM
From: Les H	Respond to of 769667

The lockbox is phony. They're predicating the surpluses on Social Security trust fund buying out public securities and then holding non-marketable SS securities.

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (52574)	10/27/2000 2:01:59 PM
From: Joe Btfsplk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Flap, see if you can follow this, and string seemingly disjointed points into a coherent whole: Money, -- paper, electronic entries, or gold, whatever, -- itself ain’t wealth. At best, it’s simply an extension of language coordinating us, communicating, sometimes storing, bytes of information in a particular and crucial sphere of human activity: Ludwig Von Mises: ”To drink coffee, I do not need to own a coffee plantation in Brazil, an ocean steamer, and a coffee roasting plant, though all these means of production must be used to bring a cup of coffee to my table. Sufficient that others own these means of production and employ them for me.” A nation’s prosperity depends first on the amount of capital employed, the efficiency with which it is used, and the temporal span over which it is allowed to work IN SATISFYING CONSUMER WANTS. Goodies, and the leisure to enjoy them, don’t simply materialize out of thin air. The S&P compounded at about 7 1/2%, inflation adjusted, for it’s first seven decades. That included the Great Depression, a World War, Viet Nam, and a horrible depreciation of the currency (“..inflation engages all the hidden forces of economics on the side of destruction…”; Keynes got one right – see below). Compounding those impediments to better growth was almost solid control by those heavily influenced by Keynes flawed prescriptions – one intellectual source of the union goon line. There was a bias against capital formation, including ridiculous taxation on the productive elements and the “demand” side effect of making pensions a Ponzi scheme instead of a source of capital seeking employment. Reagan was wildly derided for claiming that his tax cuts would allow the economy to grow out of the deficits. Democrats scoffed. Too many Republicans lowered their eyes and shuffled their feet. Turns out the old boy was pretty shrewd. Hell, if his audience was smart enough to listen, maybe he couldn’t have elucidated dynamic analysis. But he had a firm intellectual grasp on economic processes. John Templeton has said the Dow will be around a mil in 100 years (with a passel of scary drops en route). His record would indicate a certain competence in that area. Now: Assume that we don’t know enough to whup a 7 1/2 % growth rate for the next hundred years. Assume that any major index drops by 70%. Next, construct a spreadsheet. Use the DJIA as a proxy. Assume it first plummets to 3,000. Assume we only repeat the measly 7 1/2 % historical return and use that as a proxy for a growth rate. Look at the results over any ten or twenty or thirty or fifty or hundred year time period. Compare it to Gruesome’s Rx, where money is invested in IOU’s that have to be redeemed with future grabs on potentially productive uses of capital . And pray that sorry SOB doesn’t instead interfere with the productive use of capital in years to come by putting hijacked funds in markets. Then tell me that Bush ain’t starting us in the right direction.