Re: thank you (n/m)
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
....
[/ QUOTE ]
Its the same thing as if I loan my money to my friend who will repay me with interest. If you take a loan to yourself and promise to pay yourself back 2x, you aren't making any investment. This is because you would have the 2x ANYWAY.
I am not surprised by Copernicus's direct concealment of the program, but I am pretty surprised you fail to understand the difference.
[/ QUOTE ]
And Im not surprised that you let your polictical agenda cloud your reasoning or justify your lying about what you do understand.
"If you take a loan to yourself and promise to pay yourself back 2x, you aren't making any investment. This is because you would have the 2x ANYWAY."
This is obviously true, and has nothing whatsover to do with the prudence of doing just that. If your savings account yields 5% and you have an investment opporunity "guaranteed" to yield 8%, then "borrowing from yourself" makes perfect sense, even though your net worth is unchanged at the moment of the transaction.
If you're an investing savant and your investments are earning 10% (but have exhausted those opportunities), but you can borrow at 6%, then go out and finance the purchase of your guaranteed 8% investment..even though at the moment of your transactions your net worth is unchanged. Its not that hard to understand on a personal level.
When you escalate it to the government level the transaction is fundamentally the same as the first transaction, although the decisions carry fiscal/monetary/risk and intergenerational consequences that in fact make it MORE appropriate for the Government to "borrow from itself".
If a thread starts on deficit spending many of the issues overlap, and of course, there are situations where deficit spending is appropriate and others where it isn't. The conflation of spending and funding discussions only serve to obfuscate the issues, which are totally independent, but are a common tactic in these attempts to disseminate myths about Social Security, so keeping spending out of this discussion can only improve it.
[/ QUOTE ]
This makes sense if you consider the payments that the government makes as "investment". For example, if spending $x today meant an increase of revenues in the future by $2x, you could argue that this is an investment. Is this your position, Copernicus? That when the federal government spends money, its actually resulting in an asset? What assets do we have to show for the $1T spent in Iraq?
The key difference in our debate (and with natedogg) is that we think when the government spends money its like buying hookers and blow (or other things that are not assets), and investing in a company that will appreciate in value. Have I understood your position correctly? I don't think we disagree one bit about the accounting being done.
|