Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Congress is not all bad

So the plan to drive American into way too much debt and make Uncle Sam the first middle and last word in the home loan world was stopped, sadly not by much. On the news that tax payers would not compensate Wall Street for all there losses the Dow took a small crash. This would be is really bad for anyone wanting to cash out their stock this week. On the up side it is clear that Americans are not yet ready to sign on for wholesale government control of their lives. No we need to remove any regulations and laws that may have forced banks to issue high risk loans. Once this is done we can tell the banks that their problems are their problems.

Anyone who loans a person with poor credit way more money than their house is worth deserves to be bit in the hinny. I won’t pretend to understand the full extent of government causing problems for the banks to make good decisions on loans. In as mush as a bank was required by law to issue bad loans they should be compensated for losses on that loan. In as much as the school system has not taught people basic math very well the teachers union should be fined severely. Um let me see I can get a house and pay $X a year, but in 5 years I have to pay $x+500 but will only be getting about a $100 a month raise in that time. Yup I can do that. Okay its not the teacher's union fault entirely, but it is not the fault of the average citizen. Risk is a part of business companies that take risks they can not afforded to be wrong on go under. It hurts, but that is life.
If we bail out every business that goes south the country will be filled with failing businesses all demanding the tax payers pay them for their loses. The nations largest banks are not more entitled to tax payer money than Joe’s gas station on the corner. Again the one exception being for bad policies mad by the government, but this should mean we change policies not assume the debt.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Money issues

Today is Sunday September the 28th. The US federal government is about to take on 350-700 billion dollars in extra debt in order to save the economy. How is barrowing money from China or another country to give to a companies that made so many bad choices that they are going bankrupt is going to help our economy? A fool and his money are soon parted. The citizens of the US are soon to be parted from a lot of their money. (I think there is a lessen here).

A few thoughts on how we got here.

1. We stared out (as a country) with a gold and silver concept of money. These metals have worked as a type of money for many years and many societies. We stated there.
2. Than we made paper money that was a convenient means of handling money, but could be exchanged for its value at any time. Kind of like the concept of gambling chips where there must be cash kept to cover all chips issued (at least according to Oceans 11). In this system the dolor could not drop very far as a currency even if all other economic factors where falling like rocks.
3. We than decided that Uncle Sams word was as good as anything.
4. We now have a dolor that is worth very little compared to a few years back.

If we had stayed at step 2 this would not prevent the problems of counter fitting ether by locals or other governments. However the use of real gold and silver would.
I know packing around a pound or so of metal would be annoying when you go shopping, but would it really be worse then our current problem? A stable gold currency would almost eliminate inflation, but not harm economic growth. It could also limit crime as a person could only steal as much money as they could carry. :

I propose a rapid adoption of a Gold standard and the actual use of gold or silver for the bulk of our currencies. It is not a perfect quick fix to the problems we have, but it could effectively prevent these sort of problems from happening again. Yes if a major now unknown vain with millions of tons of gold is found in the world our currency would be in trouble. I’m not worried.

An intro to me.

Ramblings of a Societal Engineer.

This is my on-line thinking out loud place. I reserve the right to get smarter as I go along. If nothing else this blog will help me know when that happens. I’m always up for some feed back and even some constructive criticism. I’ll warn you now good grammar and I are not close friends.

I’ve been interested in what makes people tick for a long time. I’ve spent a good chunk of time in school studying human behavior. I’m currently working on my Masters in Social Work. After reading the writings of and spending time with some of the “experts” I’ve become convinced that the basics of logic and thinking where excluded from many of their educations. The lay of entropy tells us that things will fall apart unless we keep fixing them. This could also be called the law of used cars. Given that some of the ideas I’ve seen presented as “good car care” make about as much sense as adding a cup of salt to every oil change. I’ve decided to try and figure all the large and small social issues and than do my part to make positive changes. Sure I could just go join a large social or political movement, but sense I see so much of the problems we have now resulting from people talking about things they don’t under stand I figured I should get a better handle on things first.

I run with the following assumptions. I’m not going to change them. If you can’t stand one or more of them you will not like what I have to say a lot of the time and we probably won’t get chummy.

There is a God and he cares about us. Even if we lack in our understanding of him.

To have freedoms is better than to not have freedoms.

People are fundamentally equal.

The constitution of the United States is a good idea and despite imperfections omissions etc. it is correct in concept.