08-21-2016, 09:58 PM
(08-19-2016, 04:20 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(08-19-2016, 02:51 PM)playwrite Wrote:You put a hedge fund manager from the Hamptons in a room with me, he'd end leaving the room broke and empty handed. Whether he's crawling like a liberal frat boy who was unable to convince me who didn't get his way who knows that he iand others like him are financially doomed or he decides to walk out like a real man should after being rejected because the global ponzi scheme that he and his pals made a fortune in worthless digits has failed because there's no hard money to back them up, depends on what type of man the Hampton truly is at the core.(08-18-2016, 01:16 PM)David Horn Wrote:(08-18-2016, 12:43 PM)playwrite Wrote: You all are way too pessimistic.
The infrastructure necessary for electric driverless vehicles will make Eisenhower's interstate build out look like a piker and thus the 50s/60s economy/bull market rather tame. It's a race but they are already testing Uber driverless cars out in Pittsburg. All that an economic contraction would do is hasten the Congress in reaction to provide the stimulus for the build out.
What you are also missing is that the GOP is effectively destroyed as a national political power. It was Bush, Trump is just the cheery on top of the sunday. Adams ending the dominate Jefferson party, Buchanan ending Jackson's, Hoover ended Lincoln's, Carter ended FDR's and Bush/Trump ended Ray-gun's. That paves the way for eventual recognition and full employment of our monetary system - deficit hawks will be eliminated from the federal government (perhaps taken out and shot for all the harm they have inflicted) and replaced by technocrats that will keep a controlling hand on inflation. There will be much more federal expenditure, but in a public/private partnership manner that will keep the deposed remnants of the GOP at bay.
The economy is going to boom and it will be done under an increasingly Progressive government, including the SCOTUS, that will seal the deal for decades. The hillbillies, like Classic, will eventually come around or at least their kids and grandkids will.
This may be true in the future, even the near future, but it's not true now. We have two parties consisting of illogical coalitions, and the fact that the GOP is hitting the wall first doesn't make the Dems any less at risk. So the Republican Party fractures, and then what? I believe that the successor has to embrace the money, and bid adieu to the rest, preferring that to the exact opposite. If the money stays, they will moderate all the RW nonsense and draw the UMC out of the Democratic Party. If the money leaves, the GOP will become the old Democratic Party of the late 19th century. They'll do better with the money, so that's what I expect.
That leaves the Dems with a coalition of niche special interests that tend to make demands on the party but fail to unite around any issues not their own. In the current environment, the system will only support two major parties. Money can fend for itself. What about the herd-of-cats party?
Eric's got this right for those niches that are not the elites- you add them all up, let them compromise among themselves, and you got Chomsky's "population" sans the financial elites and the hillbillies.
And the financial elites on the Dem side are either for greater taxation on themselves (Warren Buffet), giving most of it away (Bill Gates; and without the Right's religious strings attached), or lobbying hard for Progressive agendas that do little for themselves (George Clooney, George Soros, Hollywood, Silicon Valley).
Together, that is a pretty solid coalition and well-financed.
On the Right, it is fracturing and collapsing. Put a hedge fund manager from the Hampton's in a room with someone like Classic and see who crawls out alive.
Trump is not the only one making the mistake that about 35% of the electorate/population/culture of the Right represents the entire US electorate/population/culture - it just that 35% makes a lot of noise and scares people, and that should be expected from a cornered large dying animal.
No. The hedge fund manager from the Hamptons is going to find an alternative to dealing with you very fast. You will be the one who ends up flat broke because that hedge fund manager will take his business elsewhere when you try to brainwash him on politics.
Back in the 1970s, need I remind me -- the frat boys were definitely not the liberals. I knew them, and I had little to do with them. They knew that no matter how much they drank their way through their campus career, Daddy would come through and ensure a cushy job for them. It's the kids that they rejected for having a German-sounding surname (either some Jew or some hayseed that they wanted nothing to do with) from membership in the frat had to go to college for the right reasons.
Now if you believe that the financial system is again a house of cards... I am not satisfied that the financial wizards learned anything from the Crash of 2008 except that Uncle Sucker will bail them out rather than risk another Great Depression.
The financial system needs some reality behind it, as explained by the collapses of such entities as Lincoln Savings in the 1980s, Enron, and Lehman Brothers. Get egregious, and you become the whipping boy for the regulators and the legal system.
We will be going into a 1T in which people eschew public and private debt as if it were a filthy four-letter word (which it is if you are in hock to a loan shark) instead of a dangerous and capricious tool. The public will intend on paying down debt from the Crisis of our time, and it will insist upon pay-as-you-go even for recession-stopping big projects. The financial wizards will respond, paying more attention to the quality of the transactions than upon upon selling them. I can make a safe prediction that around 2030 banking will again be the home of the least-educated, laziest, and least-imaginative people in business, the people who say no to people who want easy access to other people's money. Add to that, executives will get ahead by giving their subordinates an cause for loyalty to the company for which they work instead of treating them like livestock at best and vermin at worst.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.