I mean, to some extent, I think it's overdue, for a lot of goods and services. I can buy a brand new, non-toy, guitar for $80 shipped, that's just silly. It might possibly require a couple of extra hours of barely-above-unskilled labor, of the sort that ordinary folks formerly took for granted, in order to turn it into a decently finished product. The prospect of paying an extra $1 for a sub sandwich so that the person who makes it for me receives a living wage instead of a kennel-chow wage does not fill me with dread, either.
One of the main problems with money is how we've gotten to think of it as the Universal Solvent. As such, money often acts more like Vitriol than Water. We need to revamp the entire idea of money, to account for the requirements of human needs (as opposed to whims), ecological sanity, and the health of local economies.
You should read The Bling Ring, by Nancy Jo Sales.
In this day and age, in order to obtain a truly well-rounded perspective on the subject, it's imperative to get some factual insight into (as the legendary TV series would have it) Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous, as well as the values of the children of the top 10% who aspire to emulate them.
Thanks. I've never heard of the book or movie. Due to fate, I actually know a few of the rich and at least a bit famous, albeit very few in the US. I like Emma Watson very much and will put the movie on my list - or is it very different than the book (my book backlong is long!)?
It's been going on your whole life. The supply of dollars doubles roughly every 11 years, and the trend is only speeding up.
Many people didn't notice because both spouses were working or they were able to buy cheap crap from China, but inflation has been stealing away your savings and labor since we fully went off gold in the 70s.
Experientially, I can attest that the only meaningful driver of expenses in the US in the past 40 years has been the cost of housing. Not consumer price inflation.
(And don't even fool yourself into thinking that a bunch of all-caps "lol"s followed by an unsupported claim and a link to a single metric passes for a reasoned argument.)
once again, the veracity of a claim ultimately depends on the support provided for it, not on how dramatically it's stated.
I get that you don't care about backing up your overcooked rhetoric. As with so many other right-wing pontificators who rattle on about the merits of a work ethic and superior intelligence, and then walk off the job when someone challenges them to demonstrate an ability to back up claims with factual support and a coherent set of on-topic logical inferences that focus on a topic, instead of misdirecting away from it.
Meanwhile, I defy anyone to look at those charts and assert that the gains for the wealthy and the comfortable middle class haven't handily outstripped any penalty exacted on their wealth by inflation.
Population also increases fairly rapidly. The thing about devaluation is that you can keep doing it just as long as all the other countries you're competing with keep doing it.
The trick is to not get caught without a seat when the music stops.
Meanwhile, the "elites" continue stealing our real wealth through devaluation.
I understand why the people benefitting from the policy want to continue it, and they can "keep doing it" as long as we don't catch on, but it's still robbery.
lol, you think "devaluation" (from consumer price inflation, presumably) has been the way that the wealthy have gotten wealthier in this country? That explains how it is that someone can repay double the principal on their student loans, and be in worse debt than ever after 20 years?
The wealthy get the newly printed money. It's handed out politically. This is obvious when you look at production vs. wages. Once you can counterfeit the currency, you no longer care about productivity. The fake economy of being close to the printing press means more than satisfying your customers.
This isn't capitalism. In real capitalism you can't just print your currency into oblivion. It's the fact that we're not sticking to capitalism that's the problem.
The more we fake the economy, the more rent seeking there is by the elites.
If you add "free school" onto the pile of problems, you add to the problem.
No, "making money with money" is the essence of capitalism! What gives you the sentimental idea that capitalism has some inherent ethos?
Unchecked, raw, uncut, "real capitalism" is inherently Inertial. That's the problem with enshrining a mechanical process as an ideology, or a religion. You end up explaining away your cognitive dissonance with drivel.
Once again, you don't understand macro economics or ratios for that matter.
As long as you destroy enough currency you can print more.
Free school helps people help themselves, there's no better ROI than education. You keep bitching about people's poor choices yet refuse to educate them enough to recognize a poor choice set up by a capitalist trying to make a profit at the expense of society.
Capitalism is exploitation as is every other kind of 'ism" leading up to capitalism.
Capitalism is just modified feudalism that is merely modified slavery.
Time for an entirely new system that excludes rent seeking and speculation. Unproductive labor should not be rewarded.
Let's be clear about this: American consumers don't just buy "cheap crap" from China. We buy cheap stuff of all sorts, not just "crap." From around the world, not just China (although they make an awful lot of it.) Even I buy new goods from the global marketplace now and then, despite the fact that my material wants are not extravagant, and I rely overwhelmingly on the secondhand recycle/upscale market to fill them.
I suppose that the Uber-Wealthy have the option to buy everything they own in the form of hand-crafted American made goods in boutique marketplaces. But I'd bet that even the wealthiest Americans find difficulty in doing that. After all, at this point, most of our pharmaceutical manufacturing has been outsourced to India and China. And, you know, everything- glue, paper clips, books, plastic bags. "Cheap", though. In terms of the cost in dollars and cents.
Wow that's a lot of words for an irrelevant point.
The point is that inflation has been eating away at your real wealth, but since we can buy stuff from China instead of America, we don't notice. Just like now it takes two salaries to raise the kids.
In the US, the rate of inflation hasn't been above 5% annually since the late 1980s. Only rarely has it gone over 3% annually in this century. As of last year, 2020, the annual rate was measured at 1.36%. https://www.statbureau.org/en/united-states/inflation
"inflation has been stealing away your savings and labor since we fully went off gold in the 70s."
No, that's a canard. From personal experience, I remember the last time consumer price inflation was a concern in the US: the late 1970s. What we've undergone in the arena of consumer goods- and service labor- since then is price DEflation. To consider the basics- food, clothing, shelter, and energy: both grocery goods and clothes are cheaper for US consumers than they were 50 years ago. The cost of shelter has escalated, but not because of fiat currency: in most areas of the country, people are in a squeeze between the unsafe environments (urban, suburban, and rural) of low-income housing that are de facto at the mercy of the Drug Prohibition-generated illegal economy, and the gentrification of the most desirable locales at the hands of the new millionaire-multimillionaire classes that emerged from the class stratification of the 1980s (read the disillusioned Kevin Phillips on that.) And then there's the real driver of inflation in the 1970s: the steep rise in energy costs, particularly fossil fuels. Putting that all on "reserve banking" is misdirection.
The prospect of returning to the gold standard is absurd. Reliance on hard money standards led to the biggest financial panics in American history in the 19th century. That's how we got the Federal Reserve; J P Morgan and his buddies got tired of having to bail out the Federal Treasury with cash every time it had a liquidity crisis. Of course, we got a private reserve banking system as a result, not a public national bank credit reserve. That's a different issue; the point is that there's nothing inherently stable about gold or silver, enshrined as the monetary standard. The only guaranteed outcome would be the despoilation of ecosystems like Bristol Bay, in Alaska, in the unconstrained effort to plunder the earth for the remaining troves of elements 79. What for? You can drink water, and eat salmon. Not gold. (Or fiat currency, for that matter. We need more than one kind of money, in order to stop it from acting as some universal solvent that reduces everything on the planet to a dollar value. There's no sense in being richer than ever in an impoverished biosphere. That logic leads to the futures predicted in dystopian sci-fi literature like Soylent Green, On The Beach, and Nature's End.)
Hard money economics is the real con game these days. Like the conjuration of post-Revolutionary Utopia by Marxist-Leninists, it makes for endless theorizing on paper, and has an internal logic that's all very wonderful, but it's an obsolete system- a convention of a time when there were many fewer people, and a lot less stuff to buy. And those who advocate for it sound like an anarchist I once encountered online, who advocated for anarchism based on some bygone era of governance of Icelandic society from centuries ago. His idealism was undeterred by the fact that I pointed out that the population density of Iceland at that time was less than one person per square mile. There are still places like that in the world, and my advice to anarchists and radical libertarians is to move to one of them, rather than imagining that they can re-vamp the social conditions of the rest of the world to conform to the preferences of their personal fantasy.
Cybercurrency- now, that innovation in exchange is intriguing. But as long as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. are NOT legal tender for all debts public and private, they're inherently relying on the system that IS legal tender for all public and private debts in order to underpin their workings.
Even a national economy tied to the gold standard relies to a large extent on "central planners", and that was also true in the 19th century.
To the extent that there are controversies in that regard, they're more about who gets to do the planning and how competently and ethically they manage it, not over the reality of the planning.
The point is -- devaluing is already happening and to put it on those who want a real tangible resource in an economy (investing in young people to solve problems of the future) seems odd when the defense budget is bloated with $1000 toilet seats and F-15 fighters that do not fly ($1 Trillion worth).
Every time someone makes a comment like this I roll my eyes. F-15s do fly, but are being phased out at this point. $1000 toilet seats have a story behind them - usually some weight or environmental issue, they're making it out of titanium or whatever. You can argue with the premise but it wasn't malfeasance that created the situation. The real wastes of money in the military are on useless people, but that never gets mentioned. All those acres and acres of office dweebs. Because the military is a jobs program first and foremost.
That's not how it works in practice. To get paid on a federal contract, a number of things have to happen and a number of government officials have to collude to make it reality. But the issue isn't taken care of there. That just creates the "vehicle". Then you have task orders placed against those contracts which are funded by completely other organizations which apply dollops of their funding against the contract to fund their task orders. Bottom line: you have to have a lot of people within the government agreeing to do something before a contract is placed. That is one control against what you are talking about. There are others.
Maybe examining a real case that I know about and was peripherally involved in is useful. There was a pair, married couple who were West Point grads. They got out of the service after some service in SWA (Iraq/Afghanistan) and got government jobs, actual civilian appointments. They have preference for that, you see. They got themselves into a good position to impact the issuance of task orders, in related organizations but not the same - there are nepotism rules. They colluded with a third West Point grad, who was running (but didn't own) a contracting company and steered work to him for kickbacks. Their buddy got fired from his company because he was playing games with money - as you'd expect. Then he started to make in-person payments from his newly created contracting company and they started buying boats and other stupid stuff that any Mafia dude would laugh at. That's when they got busted. All three did jail sentences, the husband by far the worst. All are scheduled to come out of the can sometime in the next couple of years. They were kicked back about ~250k. Wasn't a huge amount of money. A few salient points though: first, skimming a huge amount of money is not easy. Second, they got caught pretty fast, within about 3 years of the scheme's creation.
I'd also point out that the Soviet people had a lot of complaints about the nomenklatura on this point (stealing money/goods to build dachas, etc), and the CPC's local bosses aren't known for their honesty either. Corruption sucks, but it also exists everywhere.
Makes more sense. The F-35 program was stupid from the get-go. Every time the military tries to make a plane for all comers, you end up with this craptastic plane that suits no one. The main killer of the F-35 is the wide fuselage, for the F-35C V/STOL variant. For the Marines, of course. Since the other variants have to incorporate this dog of a fuselage design, they all suck. Same story as the F-4, but the Navy flipped the bird to the rest of the services and instead got the F-14.
That's the entire point. To worry about the devaluation of the dollar in a rigged system is akin to worrying about what music is being played on the Titanic right before it sinks. You have zero control over the devaluation of the dollar --- and the debasement of the currency has been going on for so long now, it seems almost cute that this is your focus now -- at this point in history.
Happy you are experiencing the benefits of your awareness. I do not begrudge an investor that. But I do think the manipulation of certain markets makes for a basic lack of trust in all markets - permeating even the most carefully considered plans. Hope you have the ability to make flexible movements when things change.
No it's not okay.
Any other questions?
When does this "devaluation" begin?
I mean, to some extent, I think it's overdue, for a lot of goods and services. I can buy a brand new, non-toy, guitar for $80 shipped, that's just silly. It might possibly require a couple of extra hours of barely-above-unskilled labor, of the sort that ordinary folks formerly took for granted, in order to turn it into a decently finished product. The prospect of paying an extra $1 for a sub sandwich so that the person who makes it for me receives a living wage instead of a kennel-chow wage does not fill me with dread, either.
One of the main problems with money is how we've gotten to think of it as the Universal Solvent. As such, money often acts more like Vitriol than Water. We need to revamp the entire idea of money, to account for the requirements of human needs (as opposed to whims), ecological sanity, and the health of local economies.
Actually, you'd only pay about 5-15 cents extra for your sandwich. Labor is one of the much smaller components of the price of a sandwich (or burger).
I was exaggerating, for effect.
It worked! ;-) Cheers!
You should read The Bling Ring, by Nancy Jo Sales.
In this day and age, in order to obtain a truly well-rounded perspective on the subject, it's imperative to get some factual insight into (as the legendary TV series would have it) Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous, as well as the values of the children of the top 10% who aspire to emulate them.
Thanks. I've never heard of the book or movie. Due to fate, I actually know a few of the rich and at least a bit famous, albeit very few in the US. I like Emma Watson very much and will put the movie on my list - or is it very different than the book (my book backlong is long!)?
It's been going on your whole life. The supply of dollars doubles roughly every 11 years, and the trend is only speeding up.
Many people didn't notice because both spouses were working or they were able to buy cheap crap from China, but inflation has been stealing away your savings and labor since we fully went off gold in the 70s.
There hasnтАЩt been significant inflation since the late 70s - early 80s.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
That's hilarious. What changed is HOW THEY MEASURE INFLATION.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Experientially, I can attest that the only meaningful driver of expenses in the US in the past 40 years has been the cost of housing. Not consumer price inflation.
(And don't even fool yourself into thinking that a bunch of all-caps "lol"s followed by an unsupported claim and a link to a single metric passes for a reasoned argument.)
Hey if you want to keep holding your saving in dollars, you can do that. I really don't care.
But to pretend inflation isn't stealing your wealth is insanity.
once again, the veracity of a claim ultimately depends on the support provided for it, not on how dramatically it's stated.
I get that you don't care about backing up your overcooked rhetoric. As with so many other right-wing pontificators who rattle on about the merits of a work ethic and superior intelligence, and then walk off the job when someone challenges them to demonstrate an ability to back up claims with factual support and a coherent set of on-topic logical inferences that focus on a topic, instead of misdirecting away from it.
Working people have lost a lot more over the past four decades from failure to index the Federal minimum wage to increases in the cost of living than from inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&height=440&id=FPCPITOTLZGUSA
An inflation rate averaging <3% annually over three decades is trivial- except when wages don't keep pace, in which case the problems compound the way they do with any other kind of debt. https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household-incomes-mean-nominal.gif
Meanwhile, I defy anyone to look at those charts and assert that the gains for the wealthy and the comfortable middle class haven't handily outstripped any penalty exacted on their wealth by inflation.
Now you are starting to understand. If the measured "inflation" is 3% but money growth is 9%....
6 trillion dollars created this year. Ultimately we all pay for this from our savings and labor.
And this year's 6 trillion will likely be nothing compared to what they print in 5 years.
There's no floor to the value of the dollar. They will print all your wealth away. This is not capitalism.
All the markets are rigged so it won't matter what currency you hold.
Go buy some groceries or pay some bills with bit coin or precious metals and see how it works out fore you.
I do that all the time. Plenty of places accept bitcoin.
Especially gun shops.
Money stock and inflation are not the same thing.
Not anymore, are they?
That's why you have people saying inflation has been low recently.
Yet the wealth stealing continues unabated via currency debasement.
Money stock and inflation were never the same thing.
Population also increases fairly rapidly. The thing about devaluation is that you can keep doing it just as long as all the other countries you're competing with keep doing it.
The trick is to not get caught without a seat when the music stops.
Meanwhile, the "elites" continue stealing our real wealth through devaluation.
I understand why the people benefitting from the policy want to continue it, and they can "keep doing it" as long as we don't catch on, but it's still robbery.
lol, you think "devaluation" (from consumer price inflation, presumably) has been the way that the wealthy have gotten wealthier in this country? That explains how it is that someone can repay double the principal on their student loans, and be in worse debt than ever after 20 years?
The wealthy get the newly printed money. It's handed out politically. This is obvious when you look at production vs. wages. Once you can counterfeit the currency, you no longer care about productivity. The fake economy of being close to the printing press means more than satisfying your customers.
The facts about American worker productivity vs. wages support my position, not yours.
https://www.eclectablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/WagesVsProductivity.png
It really really doesn't. Look at the chart BEFORE we went fully off the fiat currency. That's when it tracked.
Once we decoupled productivity from money, this outcome was certain.
You're missing the big point. We cant' and aren't coming up with a better system because of the people benefiting from the graft.
No one needs multiple billions of dollars, it just ruins the economy for everyone else and necessitates more currency creation by the fed.
The problem is capitalism's inherent flaws. The biggest flaw being extraction by rent seeking elites who produce nothing but corruption.
The have declared siege warfare on the entire planet.
This isn't capitalism. In real capitalism you can't just print your currency into oblivion. It's the fact that we're not sticking to capitalism that's the problem.
The more we fake the economy, the more rent seeking there is by the elites.
If you add "free school" onto the pile of problems, you add to the problem.
No, "making money with money" is the essence of capitalism! What gives you the sentimental idea that capitalism has some inherent ethos?
Unchecked, raw, uncut, "real capitalism" is inherently Inertial. That's the problem with enshrining a mechanical process as an ideology, or a religion. You end up explaining away your cognitive dissonance with drivel.
Capitalism is people making voluntary transactions. In a real capitalistic society, that creates wealth.
When you fake the money, the "wealth" you have is fake too.
Like I said, keep your money in dollars if you want. I don't care.
The money has nothing to do with the motives of the elite. They'll do the same thing to any kind of currency.
It's not about money it's about power.
Money is a means to an end.
You're losing a class war no matter what the currency or economic system is.
Obviously we're losing it. The difference is that I'm actually protecting my wealth and you're demanding more free stuff and accelerating the decline.
When was capitalism not cronyism ?
Once again, you don't understand macro economics or ratios for that matter.
As long as you destroy enough currency you can print more.
Free school helps people help themselves, there's no better ROI than education. You keep bitching about people's poor choices yet refuse to educate them enough to recognize a poor choice set up by a capitalist trying to make a profit at the expense of society.
Capitalism is exploitation as is every other kind of 'ism" leading up to capitalism.
Capitalism is just modified feudalism that is merely modified slavery.
Time for an entirely new system that excludes rent seeking and speculation. Unproductive labor should not be rewarded.
Starve the parasites not the workers.
"they were able to buy cheap crap from China"
Let's be clear about this: American consumers don't just buy "cheap crap" from China. We buy cheap stuff of all sorts, not just "crap." From around the world, not just China (although they make an awful lot of it.) Even I buy new goods from the global marketplace now and then, despite the fact that my material wants are not extravagant, and I rely overwhelmingly on the secondhand recycle/upscale market to fill them.
I suppose that the Uber-Wealthy have the option to buy everything they own in the form of hand-crafted American made goods in boutique marketplaces. But I'd bet that even the wealthiest Americans find difficulty in doing that. After all, at this point, most of our pharmaceutical manufacturing has been outsourced to India and China. And, you know, everything- glue, paper clips, books, plastic bags. "Cheap", though. In terms of the cost in dollars and cents.
Wow that's a lot of words for an irrelevant point.
The point is that inflation has been eating away at your real wealth, but since we can buy stuff from China instead of America, we don't notice. Just like now it takes two salaries to raise the kids.
no, the history of the inflation rate looks like this https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&height=440&id=FPCPITOTLZGUSA
In the US, the rate of inflation hasn't been above 5% annually since the late 1980s. Only rarely has it gone over 3% annually in this century. As of last year, 2020, the annual rate was measured at 1.36%. https://www.statbureau.org/en/united-states/inflation
As long as you define inflation like that, they will continue to steal your wealth.
The money base is growing at 9% per year, and it's accelerating.
By the time you understand this it will be too late for you because everything will be too expensive for the wage you negotiated.
This happens all the time all around the world. There's no reason it won't happen here too.
"inflation has been stealing away your savings and labor since we fully went off gold in the 70s."
No, that's a canard. From personal experience, I remember the last time consumer price inflation was a concern in the US: the late 1970s. What we've undergone in the arena of consumer goods- and service labor- since then is price DEflation. To consider the basics- food, clothing, shelter, and energy: both grocery goods and clothes are cheaper for US consumers than they were 50 years ago. The cost of shelter has escalated, but not because of fiat currency: in most areas of the country, people are in a squeeze between the unsafe environments (urban, suburban, and rural) of low-income housing that are de facto at the mercy of the Drug Prohibition-generated illegal economy, and the gentrification of the most desirable locales at the hands of the new millionaire-multimillionaire classes that emerged from the class stratification of the 1980s (read the disillusioned Kevin Phillips on that.) And then there's the real driver of inflation in the 1970s: the steep rise in energy costs, particularly fossil fuels. Putting that all on "reserve banking" is misdirection.
The prospect of returning to the gold standard is absurd. Reliance on hard money standards led to the biggest financial panics in American history in the 19th century. That's how we got the Federal Reserve; J P Morgan and his buddies got tired of having to bail out the Federal Treasury with cash every time it had a liquidity crisis. Of course, we got a private reserve banking system as a result, not a public national bank credit reserve. That's a different issue; the point is that there's nothing inherently stable about gold or silver, enshrined as the monetary standard. The only guaranteed outcome would be the despoilation of ecosystems like Bristol Bay, in Alaska, in the unconstrained effort to plunder the earth for the remaining troves of elements 79. What for? You can drink water, and eat salmon. Not gold. (Or fiat currency, for that matter. We need more than one kind of money, in order to stop it from acting as some universal solvent that reduces everything on the planet to a dollar value. There's no sense in being richer than ever in an impoverished biosphere. That logic leads to the futures predicted in dystopian sci-fi literature like Soylent Green, On The Beach, and Nature's End.)
Hard money economics is the real con game these days. Like the conjuration of post-Revolutionary Utopia by Marxist-Leninists, it makes for endless theorizing on paper, and has an internal logic that's all very wonderful, but it's an obsolete system- a convention of a time when there were many fewer people, and a lot less stuff to buy. And those who advocate for it sound like an anarchist I once encountered online, who advocated for anarchism based on some bygone era of governance of Icelandic society from centuries ago. His idealism was undeterred by the fact that I pointed out that the population density of Iceland at that time was less than one person per square mile. There are still places like that in the world, and my advice to anarchists and radical libertarians is to move to one of them, rather than imagining that they can re-vamp the social conditions of the rest of the world to conform to the preferences of their personal fantasy.
Cybercurrency- now, that innovation in exchange is intriguing. But as long as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. are NOT legal tender for all debts public and private, they're inherently relying on the system that IS legal tender for all public and private debts in order to underpin their workings.
Awesome. Keep all your savings in dollars if you're happy with it. Nobody cares.
It's up to each person to decide if their currency is being ruined by the central planners and find an alternative.
Even a national economy tied to the gold standard relies to a large extent on "central planners", and that was also true in the 19th century.
To the extent that there are controversies in that regard, they're more about who gets to do the planning and how competently and ethically they manage it, not over the reality of the planning.
This is why I put my trust in a system with no planners. It wasn't possible then but it is now. Hurray human innovation!
The point is -- devaluing is already happening and to put it on those who want a real tangible resource in an economy (investing in young people to solve problems of the future) seems odd when the defense budget is bloated with $1000 toilet seats and F-15 fighters that do not fly ($1 Trillion worth).
Every time someone makes a comment like this I roll my eyes. F-15s do fly, but are being phased out at this point. $1000 toilet seats have a story behind them - usually some weight or environmental issue, they're making it out of titanium or whatever. You can argue with the premise but it wasn't malfeasance that created the situation. The real wastes of money in the military are on useless people, but that never gets mentioned. All those acres and acres of office dweebs. Because the military is a jobs program first and foremost.
The military is the biggest money laundering operation in existence. They can't even audit themselves properly and have lost trillions of dollars.
Most of what has been stolen is by the private contractors and of course the politicians raid it for bribe money.
That's not how it works in practice. To get paid on a federal contract, a number of things have to happen and a number of government officials have to collude to make it reality. But the issue isn't taken care of there. That just creates the "vehicle". Then you have task orders placed against those contracts which are funded by completely other organizations which apply dollops of their funding against the contract to fund their task orders. Bottom line: you have to have a lot of people within the government agreeing to do something before a contract is placed. That is one control against what you are talking about. There are others.
Maybe examining a real case that I know about and was peripherally involved in is useful. There was a pair, married couple who were West Point grads. They got out of the service after some service in SWA (Iraq/Afghanistan) and got government jobs, actual civilian appointments. They have preference for that, you see. They got themselves into a good position to impact the issuance of task orders, in related organizations but not the same - there are nepotism rules. They colluded with a third West Point grad, who was running (but didn't own) a contracting company and steered work to him for kickbacks. Their buddy got fired from his company because he was playing games with money - as you'd expect. Then he started to make in-person payments from his newly created contracting company and they started buying boats and other stupid stuff that any Mafia dude would laugh at. That's when they got busted. All three did jail sentences, the husband by far the worst. All are scheduled to come out of the can sometime in the next couple of years. They were kicked back about ~250k. Wasn't a huge amount of money. A few salient points though: first, skimming a huge amount of money is not easy. Second, they got caught pretty fast, within about 3 years of the scheme's creation.
I'd also point out that the Soviet people had a lot of complaints about the nomenklatura on this point (stealing money/goods to build dachas, etc), and the CPC's local bosses aren't known for their honesty either. Corruption sucks, but it also exists everywhere.
So they weren't well connected and went to prison is what you're saying ? That's the only take away I got from that story.
However, being a jobs program is much much better than paying people NOT to work.
I think he meant F-35s, which are absurdly expensive.
Makes more sense. The F-35 program was stupid from the get-go. Every time the military tries to make a plane for all comers, you end up with this craptastic plane that suits no one. The main killer of the F-35 is the wide fuselage, for the F-35C V/STOL variant. For the Marines, of course. Since the other variants have to incorporate this dog of a fuselage design, they all suck. Same story as the F-4, but the Navy flipped the bird to the rest of the services and instead got the F-14.
If you don't care about the devaluation of the currency and want it to continue for whatever you want, you're damned right I'm going to put it on you.
I'm already against the bloated defense spending. And the endless wars. And the corruption that is government contracts.
That's the entire point. To worry about the devaluation of the dollar in a rigged system is akin to worrying about what music is being played on the Titanic right before it sinks. You have zero control over the devaluation of the dollar --- and the debasement of the currency has been going on for so long now, it seems almost cute that this is your focus now -- at this point in history.
It's been my focus for years, that's why I started buying bitcoin @ $20. That's worked out pretty well.
If your thinking is "we're all fucked so might as well get something out of it too", then say that.
Happy you are experiencing the benefits of your awareness. I do not begrudge an investor that. But I do think the manipulation of certain markets makes for a basic lack of trust in all markets - permeating even the most carefully considered plans. Hope you have the ability to make flexible movements when things change.
Manipulation of those markets is another reason the whole house of cards is doomed to fail.
It just takes one debt jubilee and we can start all over with a blank slate.
All we have to do is convince the elite that all the war crimes and fraud is much more work than just starting over.