Sunday, May 9, 2010

So maybe the Mayans were right?

I've been a firm opponent of the 2012 myth since I first heard about it, some years ago but lately I find myself believing it more and more. Not because I suddenly have a lot more faith in a fairly primitive people who didn't even know what a bacteria was, or that Cortez was coming to more or less rape and pillage them, but because I have little faith in humanity.
At the moment the Greeks are rioting because their country has maintained an artificially inflated lifestyle with borrowed money. Greece is the equivalent of someone who pays off their credit cards with other credit cards and have more debt than they will ever be able to pay back.
In essence Greece is one of the more extreme examples of what I like to call "The Tea Party Stupidity" or rather the idea that you can reduce the deficit, reduce the debt, reduce the cost of Government and Public Programs such as medicare, while reducing taxes, creating jobs, and increasing peoples standard of living. In essence wanting money for nothing and chicks for free.

In every transaction something is exchanged for something else. So if you want to reduce debt, the money must come from somewhere. It can come from increased taxes, it can come from reduced spending but it has to come from somewhere. If I have $100, and I need to buy food for 5 days and I have to pay back $50 to a friend of mine that I owe him, aka my debt. In order to manage my debt without going hungry, I need to buy food that will feed me for 5 days, for under $50. I can also pay back the $50 I owe my friend, and then borrow from another friend, but what I'm doing is simply procrastinating doing something I hate doing, curb my spending.

Now here is the problem, very few people are willing to pay more taxes or give up any of the benefits they get from the state. Now I'm not talking benefits as in unemployment, and so on, but the things we don't think of. There are such things as roads, public schools, defense budget, war on drugs and so on.
Money does not appear out of thin air, and when someone lives beyond their means for a long time, there will be blowback.

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