@TPTBNW - I finally figured you out - you are an optimist!
Correct. So many people thought I was spreading doom assuming I was pessimist, when in fact my goal was to wake people up and generate the demand for solutions.
I stay busy on finding a solution to anything that threatens me, including Multiple Sclerosis.
Some background information re China:
Prof Steve Keen expects a crash in China within the next two years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKy6_yy3C3U“This is the talk I gave at the FT/Alphaville conference in London, covering why we crashed in 2008"
Asia will decline from 2016 to 2020. Asia will bottom in 2020 and it will rise while the West will continue spiraling down for decades. But that doesn't mean Asia will a refuge for Westerners. I believe the Asian Union will enforce our home country's expropriation on us. Non-asian men can not obtain citizenship in Asia (except Cambodia but I believe these will be revoked later).
I would have thought that Martin Armstrong, after what he has been
through, would have a better insight into our future. He seems to believe
that if socialism is eliminated all will be well. It looks to me that he
may need to take another look at the output from his models.
He recognizes that. He has stated nothing will be a permanent solution. He is just trying to find the least painful way forward. (but imo his "solutions" are all wrong)
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/33825COMMENT: ...The Founding Fathers put restrictions in place to shackle government, but that didn’t seem to work for very long either. How long would it be before the 5% cap is moved to 7%, 10%, then 12%? Or they could simply change the calculation of GDP to boost their ability to spend.
The income tax was originally touted as only a tax on the “rich” or the top 1%. Now here we are with the average American having at least a third of their income confiscated and consumed by unproductive bureaucrats. Nothing ever changes.
REPLY: We are talking about a palatable solution, not a revolution. Ideally, you are correct. We should eliminate career politicians. But we must comprehend, they would never eliminate their own jobs. The best we can hope for is that the older ones will vote to end career politicians, imposing term limits on their way out the door. So how do we save our future without revolution and bloodshed?
The solution presented is one that assumes there are no benevolent politicians, but ones who would vote for something that makes the basic changes we need without driving a stake through their own hearts. So this is by no means the PERFECT solution, only a palatable one.
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/34699The only way to prevent this type of system was to adopt what the Founding Fathers did in the USA – two-year terms for Congress – because there was no pay and they met only for a few weeks each year. That was closer to a citizen government. The mistake was this should have been hard-coded into the Constitution for once they tasted power they began to pay themselves, becoming career politicians. Jefferson agreed to Hamilton’s proposal of a national debt, provided it was paid-off. This was actually accomplished, as illustrated above. You can see there was no national debt and there was no direct taxation (Income Tax) until 1913.
To solve the problem, there should be NO career politicians and the government should be barred from borrowing money. Those are the key issues. Claiming to make a gold standard or some other nonsense to make “sound” money is pointless. You cannot create sound money with taxes and borrowing intact. We had a gold standard and that failed because politicians borrowed and spent more than there was when gold was fixed at $35. Therefore, a gold standard will always flop because you are trying to use that as a restraint upon government. Deal with the problem directly, for indirect means will never succeed.
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/24607There is no single form of government that will ever be perfect. Whatever its form, government will self-corrupt and both sides will fight between the people and government perhaps eternally. The best form of government for brief periods of time are benevolent dictators, monarchs, or emperors, such as Julian II, who even decreed that whatever laws he passed must also apply to himself. Such individuals are rare indeed and once they are gone, the system will revert back to its corrupt state.