The Bitcoin Triples Again

by Jack Hough
Friday, June 10, 2011

The online currency has minted off-line millionaires. But for how long?

Regarding 1, 2 and 3 its really all the same: where you plan on closing the budget shortfalls.  My position is to go after the crooks, looters, plutocrats and the author of this article clearly (from this article) thinks that it is easier to squeeze the public that has little or no representation to ensure that his savings and holdings aren't devalued through inflation.  It's simply a matter of values.  With economics all the policies around employment, interest rates, infrastruture investment, bank withholdings, etc are all questions to which people will arrive at totally different conclusions based on what they want out of the system.  I'm no different, but neither are you and neither is this author.  If you can show me other articles where he goes after 1, 2 and 3 with as much force I'll be pleasantly surprised but that still won't mean that he wrote this piece, choosing to go after the little guy than the big crooks.

4.  "Surely the purchasers of the U.S. Treasury CDS have not overlooked this risk, which would be reflected in a lower annual premium for less-valuable insurance."  
Here he gives CDS (credit default swaps) an air of legitimacy by calling them insurance. CDS claim to be insurance without meeting requirements that insurance companies must: capital withholding.  Giving them the title of "insurance" is an endorsement.  Imagine your car insurance company didn't have any capital to insure you?  That's what a CDS is essentially: deregulated insurance.  More of a bet actually, a bet with borrowed money or savings deposits that shouldn't even be on the market to begin with.

5.  Cute.  I'm sure we could both come up with a bunch of made up taxes that won't work to solve our problems.  But what does that solve?  While a sales tax is what way to raise revenue there are many others and people need to start considering them.

if gavin reminds the cia to tell congress to take back the power to coin currency, i support his trip. fuck the federal reserve being a private company. i want that shit run by congress members.

well creighto, i don't like people with the kind of forum that stossel has who lie about facts to support a political point of view:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1133

...i don't like those who abuse the tax advantages of charitable institutions:

http://www.thenation.com/article/teflon-correspondent

...i am especially ticked off by global warming deniers - and hugely more so by those who lie and use unjustified character assassination to spread the disinformation that harms us all:

http://www.fair.org/activism/stossel-tampering.html

but other than that - and a few dozen more things about him that i won't burden you with - he certainly has a nice mustache.

Stossel's errors are often so obvious that one wonders how they could have ended up on the air. In a 20/20 report on medical research (10/11/99), Stossel complained that too much funding was going to AIDS research, claiming that spending on the disease was "25 times more than on Parkinson's, which kills more people."

In fact, AIDS killed more than 16,000 people in the United States in 1999--down from 43,000 in 1995. Parkinson's, which is not itself generally fatal but contributes to other illnesses, has a mortality rate of 2 per 100,000 to less than 1 per 100,000, depending on the demographic group (BC Medical Journal, 4/01)--which works out to a death toll in the United States of less than 4,000 per year.

all the hype and news surrounding bitcoins sound like they exactly did back in 1999 when pets.com stock was worth $600 per share.

More Austrian politics wrapped in the language of economics.

Problems with blaming "entitlements" for national bankruptcy in this article:

1) Doesn't include Missing Trillions from the Pentagon: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml
2) Doesn't take into account Trillions of dollars spent on pointless wars over the past 20 years.
3) Endless subsidy of nearly 0% interest loans to Wall St. banks.
4) Loves CDS (Credit Default Swaps) which are effectively insurance without any capital to back them up which used to be legal and still should be which had a huge role in the collapse and bailout.
5) Never considers any tax changes or increases to shore up whatever deficit these programs have.

But of course that's not a problem for him, because Austrian economics are often used in our modern time for the justification of the looting of what remains of our government.  The reason they preach that the sky is falling with regards to Medicaid and Social Security is that they don't want to pay for Medicaid (the rich) and they want to loot Social Security and privatize it.