Because it’s worked everywhere it’s been tried;
“We are spending money we don’t have,” Mr. Bloomberg explained. “It’s not like your household. In your household, people are saying, ‘Oh, you can’t spend money you don’t have.’ That is true for your household because nobody is going to lend you an infinite amount of money. When it comes to the United States federal government, people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money. … Our debt is so big and so many people own it that it’s preposterous to think that they would stop selling us more. It’s the old story: If you owe the bank $50,000, you got a problem. If you owe the bank $50 million, they got a problem. And that’s a problem for the lenders. They can’t stop lending us more money.”
Soooooo, Detroit has NO problem then, just borrow more
Bloomberg, just another idiot lefty jooo
“Listen, I’ve worked now in government for 11 years,” he said. “One of the problems is the definition of ‘waste.’ You think the programs that I want are waste. And I think the problems that you want are waste. It’s not like somebody is taking wheelbarrows full of dollar bills and throwing them out the window. It’s a question of definition, what is ‘waste’ and what is not. Everything we have was put in by Congress, signed by the president. There was a reason for it or a constituency for it. Most of the tax breaks are designed to encourage or discourage economic activity. There’s a reason for it.”
Bloomberg’s right, as far as it goes. Problem is, Bloomberg, of soft-drink Nazi fame, is on the side of the people who have a screwed-up definition of what constitutes “waste”.
I smell a photoshop:
Buzz Lightyear, “To infinity and beyond!”
The Peter Pocklington Principle…if you owe the bank $500,000.00 you have a problem…if you owe the bank $5,000,000,000.00 they have a problem…
His existence defines waste. It’s obvious that he has no understanding of basic economic principles. It does not matter if you are a household or a government, the same principles apply; you cannot borrow yourself rich. What a fool.
Borrowing money you have no ability or intention of repaying is theft.
The lender has a problem whatever the amount. The difference between 10’s of thousands and 10″s of millions or billions is when does the bank pull the loan.
They pull it when they are not making $; they pull it when their shareholders (including Sovereign funds);get scared; they pull it when policy changes. e.g. when their approach to allowing credit is concerned more about cash flow than equity.
At this stage the loans have been based on equity. The U.S.A. was the best equity based country. Is this still true?
How do you look at the U.S.A. cash flow? Do you think that quantitative easing has made the U$ dollar stronger? Do you think the cash flow is going to improve for the government with 10,000 baby boomers entering retirement every day and expecting, no demanding every perk their parents spent decades to get.
Bloomberg once again is angling for a Cabinet position and I do not know why he cannot get it through his thick head the scurrilous people from Chicago, now firmly entrenched around the major sourcing of other people’s money, are going to let scurrilous people from New York to position them seves under the $$ spigot. Cheers;
And from where will the lenders who are not being repaid find more money to lend you, Mr Bloomberg?
Got to give the ****er credit for pointing out the elephant in the room, especially since he and his fellow travelers are the ones that put it there.
Not sure if he had an attack of the truth or a case of the stupids when he called attention to it. Could be a cunning (but subject to backfire) plan to try to undercut fiscal conservative / small government types by stealing their talking points and then explaining why the problem is minor and they’re panicking over trivial details.
Truth spoken in just twelve words, Margaret. Sounds like the wisdom in Proverbs.
I’m surprised that he didn’t end with “We have nukes.” Remarkable that he would publish something like that, if in fact he did say it.
And from where will the lenders who are not being repaid find more money to lend you, Mr Bloomberg?
Posted by: Al_in_Ottawa on March 2, 2013 12:31 PM | Reply
Pshaaawww. Won’t have to.My buddy,Mr Big ears Obummer, will just print more! See? It’s easy.Now back to your hole,thale.
Mr Obama doesn’t feel the government is going to run out of other people’s money anytime soon. He is sure government truly has unlimited power of taxation (ie-security on government debt instruments) with many more rich to soak if need be.
He is wrong. At some point people will stop or slow paying taxes to and lending this government money (or will at least demand higher interest rates). At the rate they’re borrowing now that will happen sooner rather than later. Downgrades is US debt ratings will the leading edge of the financial tsumanmi headed their way, followed swiftly by inflation and higher interest rates feeding on each other as economic productivity slows due to declining baby boomers’ economic output and health.
Though decline is inescapable at this point taking on higher and levels of debt can only make things worse. Why don’t the “intelligensia” understand this? They probably do but don’t care because they’re doing just fine.
Very simply this is a bad time to take on debt, so one should be careful. Instead this administration shoots itself in both feet – it accelerates borrowing to soon to be unmanageable levels and then fires off the second round by taking on insurmountable medical liabilites plus fighting climate change lunacy. Only the rent seekers win in this environment, everyone else pays.
I believe this behaviour is predicated on the mistaken belief that public “enterprise” is more efficient or “better” than private enterprise (aka the real thing), that forcing transactions of decline magically results in not only a more “just” world but apparently a more prosperous one, with the great leaders steering not only the ship of state but also its economy.
For the many reasons opined in this thread, government never has, isn’t now nor will ever be able to better allocate resourses by deciding winners and losers. When they try the quest for cash and fulfilment of their fatal conceit becomes self-sustaining and economic activity plummets. Think of Greece at one end and North Korea at the other end of collectivism, then do the math. While there are no examples of state socialism succeding there are many of its failure to provide prosperity, freedom or security to people. I offer two (not exact) quotes to illustrate:
Government is to taxes what a heroin addict is to heroin. The least they need is the most they can get.” David Frum (I know some don’t think much of the guy but it’s a good quote).
“Government is bad at picking winners, but losers are good at picking government” (Andrew Coyne)
…the problem starts when a loaf of bread costs $150
From a commenter on politiker.com…
“Mayor Bloomberg, if the government can borrow an infinite amount of money, why are we still paying taxes?”
Methinks that China wouldn’t hesitate to call in its debts when it feels the time is opportune. May we live in interesting times indeed.
Methinks that China wouldn’t hesitate to call in its debts when it feels the time is opportune…and that’s what we call a World War.
Bloomberg’s remarks remind me of the “funny money” policies I vaguely remember were associated with the SoCreds – print and give everyone a million bucks and everyone is a millionaire.
Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) on Douglas and the Social Credit movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
As to why tax people if the government doesn’t need the revenue, why that’s simple: it’s to remove money from people who are deemed not to “deserve” the amount of wealth they have. (The government via funny money can provide those “deserving” more wealth than they have earned with additional money, without limit on the aggregate monetary mass.)
The phrase “to each according to their need” has been updated to “to each according to what they deserve”, to be paid for by funny money or retrenched by punitive taxation.
because lefties can drive farm tractors:-))))
There is an infinite supply of trillion dollar coins available to pay them back. No need to worry.
Anyone gets too upset, there are drones available to settle the matter promptly.
“When it comes to the United States federal government, people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money.”
I believe that became untrue when QE3 was initiated.
This will end badly. Of this, I am certain.
It gets murky and confusing shortly beyond that point for me. Try as I might, I fail to see how this will play out in time and direction.
Does anyone dare offer some insight?
“Borrowing” makes it sound almost prudent. The reality is that there isn’t enough money in the world, literally, to repay the U.S. debt or even cover more than a few deficit years. What happens is the U.S. Treasury auctions bonds which are in turn mostly “bought” by the Federal Reserve. And where does the Fed get the money? They print it out of thin air. It’s a giant Ponzi scheme that will last until buyers get tired of selling real goods for funny money. Then it will collapse, and quickly. See: Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe.
Who knows..?..interesting times and all that…
He’s looking like that special kind of stupid that fails to see the tar and feathers until it’s too late.
Doesn’t stupidity like this represent a “clear and present danger” to a nation?
Apocryphal story:
An advisor comes to Idi Amin and says, “Sir, the country is running out of money.”
Idi Amin replies, “Well, just print more.”
This story was supposed to demonstrate what a rube Idi Amin was. Maybe he was just ahead of his time.
Must have graduated from the “Buzz Light Year School of Economics”:
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND…!
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Well, with respect to all this monetary stimulus stuff, which is designed to increase aggregate demand by supressing interest rates and increasing liquidity, I’d offer this, as near as I can understand it. From the stand-point of the United States (in this case), the theory is that monetary growth in excess of real output growth will lead to inflation (demand-side bidding-wars, in essence, financed by money-supply increases, for a given amount of goods and services). That should lead, in the absence of inflation changes in other countries and declining real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates in the US, to related declines in the value of the US dollar.
All of which should make a complete mockery of Mr. Bloomberg’s pronouncements — who’s going to buy US-dollar denominated debt securities at (let alone above) par at current nominal interest rates in the face of US inflation? All of which is mind-boggling to me: here’s a self-made entrepreneurial genius from a financial information services business background worth something over $25 billion saying a bunch of disjointed and rambling stuff which makes no sense, as least by the normal standard of international financial economics.
So what gives? Given Jim303’s comments @4:58p.m., you could make the argument that the vast majority of stimulus at the federal level in the United States is actually monetary, with only a small amount being real-borrowing fiscal (I understand that about 70% of the federal government deficit is being financed by that little Fed’s mechanism thingee Jim describes). By my training, inflation takes about four years to set in from the onset of monetary expansion, and generally is accompanied by structural upward changes in consumer expectations about higher prices, which is usually supported by some sense of stable or increasing demand for goods and services. While we’d be getting on close to four years of monetary expansion now, clearly consumer expectations of price increases have not yet set in (although that might be starting to change now with some firming of housing prices).
How they unravel all this monetary expansion stuff once aggregate demand starts to pick up and inflation appears, and when any of that is going to happen, is something I’m guessing they have a plan for, or not, or something. Everything sounds more like Bernanke than Krugman, but maybe Krugman’s bought into this idea of federal spending really being government-directed monetary stimulus.
“people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money.”
Right up until they don’t. Then we have a global economic catastrophe on our hands.
I thought one of the purposes of intelligence was to foresee events before they happen and thus take preventative action, rather than assuming that since everything’s fine now that it will always be so in the future.
Even squirrels know that summer doesn’t last forever.
Genuine stupidity from a well educated moron. Considering 42% of that debt is against US citizens and institutions and the unfunded liability against every taxpayer now exceeds 1 million dollars. Only someone completely out of touch with the real world could come up with such nonsense. If Bloomberg lived in California he would fit right in but there seems to be some kind of competition between New York and California on who can come up with the most idiotic leadership. I think NY is winning.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html
what rabbit said about squirrels..
re: “It gets murky and confusing….Does anyone dare offer some insight?” Woodporter on March 2, 2013 4:27 PM
It costs money but you should obtain and read “At the Crest of the Tidal Wave: A Forecast for the Great Bear Market”
by Robert R. Prechter, Jr., 2002, and his “Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression,” 2009
You may want to start with this book “The Great Reckoning: Protecting Yourself in the Coming Depression,” 1994, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg .
Dan Kurt
People seemed willing to lend Greece an infinite amount of money too, for a while…..
Bloomberg is a brain damaged moron (much worse than just the garden variety moron). That such an individual is in a position of leadership augers badly for the USA – rapidly becoming the USSA.
Likely Bloomberg thinks that the hurricane which hit NYC was a wonderful economic stimulus because of all the economic activity it generated. By the same logic, we should have one group of workers shooting out windows at random and another group of workers replacing them. Somehow I doubt this will lead to prosperity.
The one advantage of a barter system is that it lets people know that one needs physical goods or a unique skill to trade with other people. Printing fancy patterns on pieces of paper might result in a few buyers, but only a farmer in need of dollar bill sized toilet paper would trade a load of produce for a load of US $100 bills.
Bloomberg belongs in the category of morons who advertise for sale devices that let cars run on plain tap water. Both have a complete disconnect from physical reality. Bloomberg might be convincing the typical innumerate uneducated Obozo voter who thinks that a government that gives them free cell phones is worth voting for, especially if they promise a unicorn in every garage at some unspecified future date.
When so many politicians spout off material that would be likely to get them committed involuntarily under various mental health acts were they bedbug infested homeless people preaching on street corners, one knows that the end of western civilization is nigh. I hope to be alive to see the day when Bloomberg and similarly deluded statist morons are hanging by the neck from light posts when the portion of the population who deals with objective reality on a daily basis has had enough of their crap.
The closer the government gets toward borrowing an infinite amount of money, the closer the value of the currency gets to zero.
I wonder if this hurt Bloomberg’s feelings. He was probably at a loss to understand it.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/mayor_in_ire_land_pMrncLdQ64TBe94q9LxwsN