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To: Abner Hosmer who wrote (9839)	4/12/1998 3:55:00 AM
From: Ahda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116762

Tom Tom Tom systems fail man kind tries. It is the individual effort that matter and to teach that individual by basis of broad respect. I know compounds don't work it has to be addressed in system of education that at least gives a relatively fair start to all. I tell my children i have tremendous respect for bag people they survive. I cannot as you broad base circumstance, you survived but many bend to nothing under that pressure. Many are born into entitlement and fail. It goes back Tom to self esteem and that our education system has to address. Totally of subject what i came to write as you darn well make me think and i love it. Tib bit we have a surplus right of 50billon i believe what we loan out re imf is carried as asset if we do this right we can be debt free in zip flat. As long we carry and no one defaults we are sailing. To me this is about as flimsy as we can get. Origninal thought condensed. I read what you have stated and imply said to US. and all like powers. My question becomes not one of altruistic but self-centered under the auspices of altruistic. But does not that adapt to all embracing and is the benefactor not the one who one who benefits? Cripe my hours are becoming wild. Goodnight or Good Morning pends on where you are.

To: Abner Hosmer who wrote (9839)	4/12/1998 6:23:00 AM
From: Bobby Yellin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116762

I detest the words "downsizing","ethnic cleansing" and "entitlements".. Major Barbara" by Shaw has always stuck in my head..(no not because of the title) by because of the two characters Undershaft who did more good for all the wrong reasons and Major Barbara who tried to do good but did nothing.. Not exactly certain what Shaw was trying to accomplish..but If we were a bright and selfish society...we would give free education,free daycare,free althletic equipment,free afterschool programs and free healthcare and charge high day rates for prison rooms to people who afford it and charge high court rates to people who could afford it and are found guilty... If we were a bright and selfish society we could grant government workers the same pension plans and healthcare packages that were granted to the average American worker.. If we were a bright and selfish society :>

To: Abner Hosmer who wrote (9839)	4/12/1998 10:11:00 AM
From: Alan Whirlwind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116762

I agree with you Becker about entitlements. Problems I have with entitlements: A. In many cases those who have been on welfare take in more from the government than those who opt to rough it on their own with lower paying jobs. B. Human nature. Here in Wisconsin we began "Welfare to Work" recently and when people came to the realization that they had to sign up for jobs to be given them after so many months on welfare, a great number of them left the program or declined to apply. I wonder why? C. Welfare encourages crime and fraud. There is a notorious couple in my area who've been on welfare for years and their kid is out driving flashy vehicles dealing drugs. The labor market up here is tight. They could get jobs! Social service apparently could care less. D. Money thrown at a problem is money thrown away. Remember LBJ and his "Guns & Butter" program? Scores of rowhouses were built across the country to house the poor. What the bozos who dreamt up this dogooder scheme (and who would never have lived themselves in such dwellings) didn't realize was that people are people and not animals to be assigned cages or chucked into holes. The apartments were shoddy, cramped together, and in some cases windowless. They had no gardens or back yards. I've seen the patchwork barrios of Guatemala City and Bogota, Colombia, and even there the poorest of the poor have a courtyard or backyard and small garden, and windows to the world. LBJ's rowhouses became conduits of crime and many if not most have already been condemned and demolished. You might just as well have dumped the money spent on them in the Atlantic Ocean for all the good it did. The money spent on those rowhouses was borrowed, by the way, so we're still paying for them. This all is not coming from one born with a silver spoon in his mouth. In 1980 I borrowed $45 and with that and the clothes on my back hitched a ride to Western Wisconsin with a friend, did odd jobs and sat 2 months behind on my rent until I got a job on a farm where I milked 500,000 cows before I could pay off my debts and make it through school. So I know what the end of the rope is like too. I'm not saying every government program is evil, but private charity seems to be more answerable to its patrons than government entitlements. --AG

To: Abner Hosmer who wrote (9839)	4/12/1998 10:22:00 PM
From: Enigma	Respond to of 116762

T. thanks for your lengthy reply, which as usual was interesting and instructive. Maybe it's a case of 'the road to hell being paved with good intentions"? I guess one point I was trying to make is that everything is relative. I don't suppose our society would put up with the poverty of the streets of Delhi, where you trip over beggars at every step. We have enacted laws against child labour and foul working conditions. We have tried to provide a system of minimum support. I believe there was a (Christian?) consensus which made this happen. I am not an American . There are situations in the States where a person without insurance can be bankrupted by ill health. It is an ongoing debate with you, and I don't know enough about the specifics to debate it. In the 20s in Ceylon my father wrote a paper arguing against the introduction of income tax. Nowadays we accept it and the transfer of wealth which in part it implies. Transfer of wealth is a misnomer, because the wealthy remain so and 'the poor are always with us' Part of tax (in whatever form) goes towards entitlements. Good or bad there seems a general consensus in this area, and politicians are dead scared to tackle the sacred cow. On the subject of political icons and mythology - Reagan being a prime example- politics seems to occupy the same corner of the human make up as religion. Belief in a politician is almost identical as belief in a religious figure. A new biography of Reagan is coming out by a person who had unprecedented access to Reagan and his circle - a fly on the wall apparently. He observes that Reagan suffered steady mental and physical decline from the third month of his Presidency, after the assisination attempt. By the time of the Iran Contra fracas he was pretty well out of it. Yet in spite of all this there are many who have adopted Reagan as a 'Great President'. He fits into a particular myth, and in this territory we are dealing with something akin to religion. There seems to be a tendency to invest American Presidents with the aura of royalty. Maybe the reason why Clinton seems to attract such visceral hatred from some quarters (but by no means all - look at the polls) - is that he does not easily find a place in the mythical/royal presidential personage. We seem to live in an era of instant exposure and scrutiny. Hypocricy abounds. The press and many pundits (George Will, just to mention one) bandy about allegations however spurious or politically motivated as if they were the truth - the word 'alleged' forms no part of their vocabulary. Even papers like the NY Times and Washington Post follow stories first picked up by papers dealing in cheque book journalism. Plaintiffs and other complainants against the President usually have a book deal in the works. If we can't kill each other with guns by all means let us try with words. Libel laws are so loose that a public figure seems almost powerless to respond. Will can call the President a 'liar' on TV knowing that he won't be sued. The adage 'the truth never catches up with a lie' could not be truer today.

To: Abner Hosmer who wrote (9839)	4/14/1998 9:21:00 AM
From: Gabriela Neri	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 116762

Another Steve Roach classic on the Yen and Japan: G-7: Yen Meltdown Averted -- What Comes Next? Stephen Roach (New York) While there is still a solid case for a further weakening in the yen, it now seems as if world financial markets will be spared the pyrotechnics of the meltdown scenario. Japanese authorities have moved to contain the downside of the currency by deploying the classic combination of a policy shift and direct intervention in foreign exchange markets. Yes, Robert Feldman cautions that Japan's latest fiscal initiative hardly qualifies as an aggressive policy action. Nevertheless, I am gratified that at least the Japanese authorities seem to be taking a stand at Y130 in front of this week's G-7 meeting. It is now conventional wisdom that FX intervention rings hollow unless it is backed up by policy actions. But considering the extraordinary political gridlock that continues to grip Japan, the LDP, Hashimoto, the BOJ and the MOF must now be given some credit for attempting to draw a line in the sand. Only time will tell if this strategy succeeds. If the yen's free-fall can be averted, it pays to probe what comes next. In my view, two key implications could quickly come into play -- the first being heightened concerns about the downside risks to the US dollar. Ravi Bulchandani, our resident dollar bull, has argued consistently (and correctly) in favor of strength in the US currency. But in the end, it really boils down to which factor drives the foreign exchange outcome -- relative interest rates, the excesses of monetary expansion, or the potential imbalances of global capital flows and current account adjustments. In my view, the capital flow model is likely to loom increasingly important in shaping the next major move in foreign exchange values, and it spells nothing but trouble for the US dollar for the first time in three years. In brief, the currency ramifications of the capital flow model will be dominated by the mounting current account imbalances between the US and Japan. In 1997, the US balance-of-payments deficit totaled 2.1% of GDP, the highest such reading since the late 1980s. Moreover, this widening of America's current account imbalance predates any meaningful impacts from the Asian crisis. I continue to believe that the US balance-of-payments deficit is headed toward at least 3% of GDP over the 1998-99 time frame, as the strength of American domestic demand continues to boost import growth and the problems in Asia crimp export growth. Nor should this prognosis be considered a low-probability doomsday scenario. The just-released global economic update of the OECD now calls for a 2.8% current account deficit in the United States in 1999, matched by a 3.7% surplus in Japan. In my view, it would not be surprising to see imbalances of this magnitude trigger a balance-of-payments financing problem in the United States -- precisely the outcome that was evident in the latter half of the 1980s when a similar dollar overhang emerged. Moreover, if EMU goes ahead as smoothly as now appears to be the case, an externally vulnerable US currency could well face some new and tough competition in world financial markets that could also exacerbate the vulnerability of the greenback. A second implication of a yen-containment strategy is that it finally unmasks the cyclical risks of the US economy and, as a result, pushes the Fed into action. I, for one, continue to believe, that the sharp strengthening in the dollar over the past three years has been key in limiting US inflation in a climate of exceptionally tight labor markets. According to our estimates, CPI-based inflation would have been 0.5 to 0.75 percentage point higher were it not for the nearly 25% appreciation of the trade-weighted dollar since the spring of 1995. In the current economic climate, any dollar depreciation would be most worrisome - not only would it eliminate the headwind that has been critical in containing inflation, but it would boost import and commodity prices at precisely the moment when labor cost pressures are beginning to accelerate. The result would be a confluence of labor cost and currency pressures that an inflation-conscious Fed could ill afford to ignore. In short, if a yen-containment strategy tips dollar risks to the downside, it could well unleash the cyclical endgame that financial markets have long been unwilling to face. It's always possible that I'm making too much out of the latest signals from Japan. After all, there is an eerie similarity with the events of December 1997, when an earlier tax-based fiscal initiative was last accompanied by intervention in support of the yen. But with the heavy artillery of the G-7 now aimed squarely at Japan, I think it now pays to ponder the other side of what has long been a fool-proof trade. If I'm wrong, and the yen resumes its steep slide, then the worst-case meltdown scenario would quickly come back into play. Either way, it's hardly a rosy outcome for world financial markets.