Is it over and the US just doesn't know it

[Jackson]

(...)
Sure we have a mountain of debt, however we have a very good system in place so that that can be corrected.
(...)

Yes. UK is doing it right with austerity measures, they will even cut their Battle Tank size down to 50 pieces, share aircraft carriers with France and significantly cut down the Airforce and Army in general.
Army's 400 tanks may be cut to 50 - Telegraph
Off course the UK doesn't only cut expenditure in defense but also in public spending.


I don't really see the motivation for 'cutting expenditures' in the USA.
All projections tell us, the US's debt will rise, increasingly credited by non-Americans and that half of the debt the US is going to take in this decade is just for serving interest on existing debt.

Between 2010-2020, the USA will take another 9 Trillion $ in debt.
Half of it only to serve interest payments on existing debt.
In 2015, a third of federal tax income will go just to serve interest on debt.
Interest due on U.S. debt: Close to $5 trillion - Nov. 19, 2009

Once Credit Rating Agency's down-value the USA (it should already have happened), it becomes more sorrowful.

Ain't that just sweet? And they are our ally?

 

[Douger]

Is that what is happening to the worlds best country???

Of course not. Canada is in fine shape.

 

[nia588]

Time after time ,generation after generation governments at there populous requests and when allowed through there voting powers--the super power of the time is reduced to a small memory of what they once were.

Is that what is happening to the worlds best country???

Are we trying so hard to get it right that we are seriously destroying all that made the USA the most generious,compasionate,giving,industrious,educated,kind,wealthy nation in the history of the world that we are going to fail???

It is fact that you just don't know how great someone or something is till you loose them or it.

It's over because we've become a nation of fools. Subjects, not citizens. We celebrate greed and money over human life.

We fail because we deserve to fail.

ANY nation that wantonly attacks small nations for profit deserves to fail.

ANY nation that has the GROSS defense budget that we have deserves to fail.

Any nation that has become the greatest prison nation in human history can hadly call itself "great."

It's over because we've become a nation of fools. Subjects, not citizens. We celebrate greed and money over human life.

I realize this might be the start of another flamer thread but....
Greed is not an evil thing. Greed motivates people to do more. Without a greedy rich person there would not be any jobs.

Greed is an evil thing because makes people take dangerous risk and do horrible things to others just to make a buck.

 

[Big Fitz]

As long as America can pay interests on the increasing debt, America won't fall.
Or let's say, those who give you credit will not have an interest for you to fail as long as you pay good interest.

We're paying off our Visa with our American Express and Vice Versa while spending faster than we earn by many multiples for a long time now. So we started going to the banks for loans to pay the minimum balance. They won't loan us money to do it anymore so we're going to the payday loan places and they're getting ready to cut us off and file for collections.

Pay of the interest? it's done. We're in such crazy debt, we're fooked if we do not get our spending under control and start paying off creditors before the come to start seizing property to pawn.

This isn't a game for idle scroungers like we've been for too long. It's serious and can end this way of life for half a millenia if not forever. These are the stakes we're playing for whether we like it or not.

 

[Big Fitz]

Is that what is happening to the worlds best country???

Of course not. Canada is in fine shape.

won't be once they lose their biggest trading partner. Trust me. Canada will get sucked down like a lifeboat tied to the sinking ship.

 

[ekrem]

Ain't that just sweet? And they are our ally?

Yes.the UK is USA's ally.

 

[Foxfyre]

I am wondering at what precise point that striving to prosper came to be labeled as 'greed'?

I am wondering at what precise point that values of educating oneself, doing whatever menial work was necessary in order to learn a trade, hard work, individual accountability and responsibility took a back seat to rewarding and subsidizing dependence, irresponsibility, lawlessness, and blaming everybody else?

I am wondering at what precise point people started looking to government to take care of them and govern them rather than the people doing what was necessary to take care of themselves and govern themselves?

I am wondering at what precise point elected officials started seeing their offices as the vehicle to increase their personal power, influence, prestige, and/or personal fortunes instead of as a means to provide public service.

I believe those precise points mark the beginning of the decline of the USA.

I also think that decline can be reversed by rethinking all those points.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

I can remember pissing away trillions in asia for 20-years during the VN war. Then there was the "3rd world debt" crisis when we lent trillions to 3rd world countries instead of investing that money here. Then there was the Gulf war series of trillions more wasted because the government didn't think thru the transportation system mess and our gas guzzlers will leave us bankrupt as gas prices increase.
This ignores things like the "S&L Bailout" and TARP.

Eventually the $17-trillion DEBT will sink the US.....

Ah, yes....and, if we can KEEP convincing each-other the $17 trillion DEBT will sink the US....we've got the perfect-excuse to do NOTHING!!!!!

Great strategy, there. The more-lazy we get, the less-painful it'll be????

 

[Mr. Shaman]

Time after time ,generation after generation governments at there populous requests and when allowed through there voting powers--the super power of the time is reduced to a small memory of what they once were.

Is that what is happening to the worlds best country???

Are we trying so hard to get it right that we are seriously destroying all that made the USA the most generious,compasionate,giving,industrious,educated,kind,wealthy nation in the history of the world that we are going to fail???

It is fact that you just don't know how great someone or something is till you loose them or it.

It's over because we've become a nation of fools.

No, it's not "over".....but, we keep heading in that direction, because we've gotten so goddamned-LAZY!!!!!!!!



....And, I'm not talkin'-about working HARDER, but living SMARTER!!!!!

Who the FUCK convinced the Teabaggers we've gotta CAVE to the high-roller$/1%ers, because they've GOT most o' the ca$h??!!!!

Is this a result/extension o' the 'Baggers' younger-years....when they had some desperate-need to hang-out with the rich-kid (for what?....notoriety's sake?)....or, have 'Baggers convinced themselves there's something honorable about living like whores??!!!!

Hey.....you 'Baggers wanna bend-over for the hierarchy, at work? Fine! Knock-yourself-OUT!! Some people might never develop a sense of self-respect. That's your choice! The workplace (after all) ISN'T a Democracy.....but, you DON'T have to live that way, OUTSIDE work!!! You TALK about being Free....but, you've (obviously) FORGOTTEN what that FEELS LIKE!!!

Hell.....most of you have (already) traded-away your Freedom, for acceptance.....like some lil' Jr. High School chickie.

You say you worry about your children/grandchildren? I'm sure...one day...they'll understand why you wimped-out; why you decided acceptance (within your herd) was more-important and less-risky than (actually) concerning yourself with your childrens' future.

*

WikiLeaks Promises To Reveal Swiss Banking Secrets​

 

[Trajan]

I am wondering at what precise point that striving to prosper came to be labeled as 'greed'?

I am wondering at what precise point that values of educating oneself, doing whatever menial work was necessary in order to learn a trade, hard work, individual accountability and responsibility took a back seat to rewarding and subsidizing dependence, irresponsibility, lawlessness, and blaming everybody else?

I am wondering at what precise point people started looking to government to take care of them and govern them rather than the people doing what was necessary to take care of themselves and govern themselves?

I am wondering at what precise point elected officials started seeing their offices as the vehicle to increase their personal power, influence, prestige, and/or personal fortunes instead of as a means to provide public service.

I believe those precise points mark the beginning of the decline of the USA.

I also think that decline can be reversed by rethinking all those points.

I have kept a copy of this peice ever since I rea it.....

Steven Malanga

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues.


In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a “taste for physical gratification” that citizens would be “carried away, and lose all self-restraint.” Avidly seeking personal gain, they could “lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all” and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity.

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty—virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions, . . . imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism—the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith—who was a moral philosopher, after all—imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.


free un-reg. view of the rest;

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

ahh but he is.

But Glenn Beck !!!

Beck in merely an eager pawn.

Bedtime now, gnite.

Tool of whom?

 

[uscitizen]

work ethics began dying for more than one reason.
One was lack of returned loyalty from their employers.

 

[Intense]

work ethics began dying for more than one reason.
One was lack of returned loyalty from their employers.

That is a reason to quit, not a reason to cheat yourself or paying customers with substandard performance. Grow up.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

But Glenn Beck !!!

Beck in merely an eager pawn.

Bedtime now, gnite.

Tool of whom?

work ethics began dying for more than one reason.
One was lack of returned loyalty from their employers.

A less then coherent answer.

 

[Rousseau]

Our national debt is a running debt we have had since the inception of the United States, starting with debts incurred during the Revolutionary War.

The U.S. has never paid off it's national debt, EVER, it is a debt that we have incurred over the past 236 years.

This is how governments work, there is not a developed nation in the world that operates without a national debt. Stop trying to use your personal experience with credit and debt and apply it to an entire nation, you simple-minded fools.
.

 

[uscitizen]

work ethics began dying for more than one reason.
One was lack of returned loyalty from their employers.

That is a reason to quit, not a reason to cheat yourself or paying customers with substandard performance. Grow up.

All employers are pretty much the same on this, so quitting is not a viable option.

 

[Neotrotsky]

Our national debt is a running debt we have had since the inception of the United States, starting with debts incurred during the Revolutionary War.

The U.S. has never paid off it's national debt, EVER, it is a debt that we have incurred over the past 236 years.

This is how governments work, there is not a developed nation in the world that operates without a national debt. Stop trying to use your personal experience with credit and debt and apply it to an entire nation, you simple-minded fools.
.

I couldn't agree more...

We should soon catch up to the levels of Italy, Spain and Greece

 

[bigrebnc1775]

work ethics began dying for more than one reason.
One was lack of returned loyalty from their employers.

That is a reason to quit, not a reason to cheat yourself or paying customers with substandard performance. Grow up.

All employers are pretty much the same on this, so quitting is not a viable option.

You want to bet it's a viable option?

 

[Intense]

work ethics began dying for more than one reason.
One was lack of returned loyalty from their employers.

That is a reason to quit, not a reason to cheat yourself or paying customers with substandard performance. Grow up.

All employers are pretty much the same on this, so quitting is not a viable option.

Fucking people over somehow is???

 

[editec]

Is it over and the US just doesn't know it

The big bucks know it that's why theyre getting their money OUT,

Do bear in mind that FREE TRADE not only allows goods to flow in, but it also allows US investment capital to get OUT.