Spain is collapsing. Europe is vexed at stupidity. It is all going DOWN!

[California Girl]

Britons should be seriously glad that they kept their own currency instead of jumping onto the Euro bandwagon.

 

[Neubarth]

Neither party in the US is offering solutions to the CREATION of jobs. It is time we form a new political party. I will name it AMERICA FIRST.

We all need to run as write in candidates with a strong platform of job creation. Now, how do we start job creation?

 

[loosecannon]

War war war war war war?

 

[loosecannon]

The US has fewer entitlements per capita when adjusted for income than just about anybody.

amazing stat if true. Not that I doubt it but I never believe anything I read online...

We spend a lot on defense and have a low tax rate compared to most developed nations. So you must be right, but I gotta think about your "per capita when adjusted for income" qualifier a bit. Does that qualifier matter? Or is it the skew?

It's a fudge against the black market and strange tax laws. Brazil is an out and out welfare state where a guesstimated 50% of the economy is off the books but the range of guesses is 1/3 to three times the size of the legitimate economy. When the published data is anywhere near that bad there are serious problems in calculating actual real per capita income. In Japan somebody somewhere at sometime pocketed the money for part of Tokyo's sewer system and it is taken away by truck to make compost for rice. The information on how extensive this problem is is not collected by any government agency because Japan has had modern sewer systems in all of its major cities since shortly after the Korean war started and that is the word. Similar problems abound in Brazil. In most of the world government statistics are so bad that sites like SGS have effectively nothing to work with when it comes to error correction. What can be said with fair certainty is that based on life style the amount of time and resources spent gaming the system makes most of the world much poorer than advertised.

Strange tax laws are best seen in the credits for movies and TV shows. If I read the credits properly last night tax schemes for three or more countries are involved in every episode of "Stargate Universe" produced. Germany, Canada and the US for sure with perhaps others that I did not spot. Germany has a tax law that gives a tax credit for film and TV so each episode or season is a separate corporation that is bought by German investors and then sold or leased back to the production company. The show is shot in Vancouver to get Canadian production tax credits for major distribution in the US. I think there is a Japanese scene production company in there too and perhaps others as well. So there is a great deal of uncertainty as to how much GDP anywhere is real and how much is tax gimmicks.

Sorry I couldn't give a more exact answer.

yeah, I think fully half of Mexico's economy is off the books and even much of what is on the books is shell companies laundering drug money. Expect more of this as the corporate economy washes out to sea.

 

[Douger]

The US has fewer entitlements per capita when adjusted for income than just about anybody.

amazing stat if true. Not that I doubt it but I never believe anything I read online...

We spend a lot on defense and have a low tax rate compared to most developed nations. So you must be right, but I gotta think about your "per capita when adjusted for income" qualifier a bit. Does that qualifier matter? Or is it the skew?

Medicare and SS is a bigger chunk than defense.

As it should be, but I believe the correct term is OFFENCE.

 

[Trajan]

the euro's half life is coming closer to the end....

 

[william the wie]

the euro's half life is coming closer to the end....

Milton Friedman made that same observation in the 1990s. Since I do not truly believe I am smarter than Nobel laureates even though I sometimes fake that position on the internet I am agnostic on this point.