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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (62009)	2/14/2013 10:04:22 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

One major problem with allowing politicians to tinker with the economy is that they all want to look good. They will even do things designed to apply lipstick to a pig in their lame duck terms so that they will look better in the eyes of history. Nobody wants to be ridiculed as the next Herbert Hoover. Only fools who misinterpret history would want to be recorded as the next FDR, who caused a recession to become the Great Depression. I am not arguing that having a national debt is a bad thing per se. I have argued in the past that running a small deficit is not always harmful. I would however like to amend my previous position. When a government is free to spend whatever politicians say it should it always ends up destroying the economy. If this country is going to be anything other than a minor footnote of past great nations by the time my children reach old age something has to be done to start extinguishing the debt. Keynsian economics only seems to work. John Meynard Keynes disavowed himself from the economic theory named after him before Britain ever implemented it. He recognised that there would ever be the political will to repay the debt. Has anyone come around looking for your share of it? As a matter of fact yes. I remember the asset bubble that followed the Arab Oil Embargo. Arabs bought a lot of real property in America after that. There was a time after that when the Japanese overpaid for real assets in America. You will correctly recognise that this was not trading public debt for personal property. It was however using debt from unfavorable trade balance to finance the sale of our most valuable assets. The same thing is happening now. Chinese are buying whole industrial facilities (sometimes financed by public debt) and moving them to China. The Chinese however are buying at fire sale prices unlike the Japanese. You may wake up one day and find that a substantial portion of your town's best real estate are owned by the Chinese. Of course the good side of that is it might them less likely to bomb us. :-)