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Old 12-18-2009, 03:48 PM   #41
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It will print the monies necessary to retire its debts.

The real concern is the value of the $ relative to other currencies or commodities (oil).

Not sure creditors will accept Monopoly Money as payment.

How much gold does the US own? How would it's value be set? I guess gold would be accepted as payment, maybe if start drilling for oil and export enuf for someone to care. What else can we sell/trade for debt? Mt Rushmore, rent space for whomever's likeness for a small fee?
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Old 12-18-2009, 03:57 PM   #42
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Still, as an aside I question why the president would use a term like this when not all that long ago, he was chiding his opponents for using scare tactics about health care reform. Is it any more likely that we'd go bankrupt than, say, Grandma not getting a hip replacement because she's over 70 and we're rationing care?
While there is a level of "scare tactics" in Obama’s comment, I think his real point was that we, as a nation, have to get the cost of health care under control. If we don't, it will cause tremendous economic dislocations in the future. Whether the current Congressional approach will achieve that is clearly an open question.

Where I find fault in Obama is that I see zero leadership on his part on the health care debate. He does not appear to be in the trenches leading the discussion. His approach is one of platitudes (i.e. “we’ll go bankrupt”). The President (and his staff) should be guiding this process; instead, we have Pelosi and Reid calling the shots with the obvious results (or lack thereof).
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Old 12-18-2009, 04:00 PM   #43
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While there is a level of "scare tactics" in Obama’s comment, I think his real point was that we, as a nation, have to get the cost of health care under control. If we don't, it will cause tremendous economic dislocations in the future. Whether the current Congressional approach will achieve that is clearly an open question.
I've long been saying that any health care reform is futile until the issue of cost containment is addressed. No amount of single payer or universal coverage or elimination of medical underwriting willt stop an eventual train wreck if we keep getting 10-20% cost increases every year. It's pretty bad when I'm ecstatic that my portion of the Megacorp premium is "only" up about 5% for 2010. (Of course, that was for the HSA/HDHP option. The other traditional PPOs were up 12-15% or so.)

And that's where I fault Congress the most: very little of the energy is even being spent on the cost containment issue, which I feel is absolutely central to the problem.
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Old 12-18-2009, 04:05 PM   #44
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Not sure creditors will accept Monopoly Money as payment.
Which has to be offset with the realization that if foreign creditor nations stop taking the U.S. dollar and start selling Treasuries, they are in effect likely to trigger a global depression. China is making a lot of noise about the U.S. debt and the dollar, but in reality they are smart enough to know they would be slitting their own throat if they as a nation dependent on exports started massively dumping Treasuries and destroying their largest export market.

At some point, though, you do have to wonder when enough is enough.
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"Hey, for every ten dollars, that's another hour that I have to be in the work place. That's an hour of my life. And my life is a very finite thing. I have only 'x' number of hours left before I'm dead. So how do I want to use these hours of my life? Do I want to use them just spending it on more crap and more stuff, or do I want to start getting a handle on it and using my life more intelligently?" -- Joe Dominguez (1938 - 1997)
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Old 12-18-2009, 04:05 PM   #45
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Not sure creditors will accept Monopoly Money as payment.
Existing creditors have no choice but to accept the “worthless paper”.

The real question is new creditors, or more importantly the sellers of oil, etc., as they will not accept dollars as a form of payment and therein is the problem with printing our way out of the problem.

We will destroy the value of the currency, which is a problem given we are not self-sufficient. So one can only hope idiots like Bernanke (and Congress) understand this and when push comes to shove, he (they) will defend the dollar (i.e. increase interest rates/cut spending).
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