Your thoughts?

[Zevico]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...-demint?page=1

interesting read

[Zoetstofzoetje]

one penny pretty please?

[Zoetstofzoetje]

anyways its good to see that Greece has a good example

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I agree

Hopefully, Americans will finish the job in 2012.

and elect Michelle Bachmann, and Palin as VP (or the other way around) Rapture

[DaShi]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...-demint?page=1

interesting read

You're an idiot.

[Hauldren Collider]

I didn't realize the debt deal was that bad. I guess it's just not possible to actually cut spending with Obama in the White House. Romney 2012

[DaShi]

Of course you would swallow that article wholly.

[Fake Boris]

So:

1) Spendings are "out of control" because they're increasing at a slower pace than economic growth
2) Republicans are conspiring with Democrats to raise taxes

Only from Zevico.

[giblets]

Rather than letting the country rack up $23.4 trillion of debt by 2021, the supercommittee hopes to keep it to $21.3 trillion. It’s the difference between speeding off a cliff at 91 miles per hour versus 100 miles per hour.

Yes, if the national debt grows at a rate of ~3.5% a year over the next ten years, it's exactly like driving toward a cliff at 91 miles per hour. Even though we won't be moving any closer to a default because nominal GDP will grow faster. Interesting read! Analyzing mentally disturbed people can be fun

If nominal GDP grows at an annual rate of ~5% over the next ten years, we'll be driving away from a cliff at 30 miles per hour instead of 10 miles per hour.

[Barnabas]

The USA will never default because they have the machine of printing dollars, they just can't run out of dollars.

And there is no problem for the USA if the debt grows every year as long as it grows at a slower rate than the GDP.

[Zevico]

So:

1) Spendings are "out of control" because they're increasing at a slower pace than economic growth
2) Republicans are conspiring with Democrats to raise taxes

Only from Zevico.

Bless my heart, for it is broken.
First, this is an article I described as an interesting read. That's not an endorsement except in so far as it means "I think it made for interesting reading." I still think so.

As to your statement--it has little to do with the article itself. The article puts forward the following contentions:

1. Spending is out of control because it exceeds government revenue and there is no prospect of this state of affairs changing without spending cuts of a kind that the American Congress has simply proved unwilling to bring forward. Even the deficit reduction committee is unwilling to do so much as to cut the rate at which the American government spends more and more money. And that's a problem if the Congress and the United States expects to have this debt repaid. The United States received a credit downgrade for a reason, not from some idle whim of the ratings agency that issued the downgrade. Doesn't it mean something when people cease to have confidence in your ability to stop spending in ever greater proportions?
2. Nowhere in the article does the author assert that "Republicans are conspiring with Democrats to raise taxes." The author does assert that many (not all) Republicans and practically all Democrats are still agreeable to supportinng inordinate increases (rather than sound reductions) in federal spending. And the author asserts that this state of affairs should change. This is not a controversial or partisan proposition: it is a simple statement of fact.
3. The author is not confident that Congress is capable of enacting such changes of its own accord and calls for a constitutional "balanced budget" amendment.

My own view is that the debate between Democrats and Republicans should reasonably be about the programs they want to cut so as to reach surplus and why--not about the rate at which continued deficit spending should increase.
As to the constitutional "balanced budget" amendment, I think it is too vague to be properly enforceable; as a political cudgel it may have some merit but so too is the basic notion that a nation ought to repay its debts and wherever possible avoid incurring more. Does the American body politic simply refuse to conceive of the federal debt as worth repaying? As "its own"? And therefore, to even think of the possible consequences of default?
Has this blindness created an ineffectual political class?

In short, isn't about time everyone started electing Democrats and Republicans who actually cared about repaying the deficit, as so many of them are clearly unwilling to do right now?

[DaShi]

Interesting.

Baseball Joins Search for Abducted Nationals Catcher
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and SIMON ROMERO
Kidnappings have plagued Venezuela in recent years and occasionally affected major league baseball players. Some of them have had family members taken away at gunpoint and held for ransom.

In what appears to be a first, however, a major league player has now been abducted. On Wednesday night, Wilson Ramos, a catcher for the Washington Nationals, was taken by several men outside his parents’ house east of Valencia, a city of over 2 million people that is third largest in Venezuela.

Ramos, 24, was a highly touted prospect as he worked his way up through the Minnesota Twins orgnaization but he was then traded in July of 2010 to the Nationals in exchange for closer Matt Capps.

In 2011, in his first full season in the majors, he played in 113 games for Washington and had 15 home runs, 52 runs batted in and a .267 batting average, solid numbers for a player trying to establish himself at baseball’s highest level.

Major League Baseball’s department of investigations is taking part in the efforts to free Ramos and has several investigators now stationed in Venezuela and working directly with the authorities there.

In a written statement, Major League Baseball and the Washington Nationals said their “foremost concern is with Wilson Ramos and his family, and our thoughts are with them at this time.”

The State Department also weighed in on Thursday afternoon, with the spokesman Mark Toner using the daily press briefing to say that the incident was a “big concern for us.”

The United States knows the “real danger of kidnappings and violent crime in Venezuela,” Toner said.

Venezuela is indeed struggling with one of the world’s highest kidnapping rates. The National Statistics Institute estimates there were 17,000 kidnappings there from July 2008 to July 2009. Most of the abductions are never reported to the authorities, the institute said.

The large majority of abductions in Venezuela are so-called express kidnappings, in which victims are released within a day. But other cases, as Ramos’s abduction appears to be, are more elaborately planned by criminal gangs, which operate with a large degree of impunity in Venezuela.

While Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with the United States have soured, the countries maintain a strong baseball relationship, with American players and managers still hired by Venezuelan teams and Venezuelans emerging as a top source of talent for the major leagues.

Some relatives of professional Venezuelan players have been previously kidnapped. The 56-year-old mother of Victor Zambrano, a former pitcher for the Mets, was rescued in 2009 after a three-day abduction in Aragua, a state near the capital, Caracas.

The 11-year-old son of Yorvit Torrealba, a catcher for the Texas Rangers, was abducted on the outskirts of Caracas the same year, along with two of the boy’s uncles, but they emerged unharmed. The brother of Henry Blanco, a catcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, was fatally shot in 2008 after being kidnapped near Caracas.

Kathe Vilera, a spokeswoman for Ramos’s Venezuelan team, the Aragua Tigers, said Thursday morning in a message on Twitter that his family had not yet been contacted by his abductors. “All the authorities are working in the case,” she said. “We’re still praying.”

Law enforcement officials in Venezuela said the car used in Ramos’s abduction had been recovered Thursday morning. The officials said that the discovery of the car had helped their investigation and that they had their “best specialists” working on the case.

Major League Baseball’s department of investigations was created after the Mitchell report on performance-enhancing drugs was released in 2007. Since then, the department’s responsibilities have expanded beyond drugs; the investigators have worked in Latin America to combat identity fraud by players and bonus skimming by scouts.

The department has worked to establish closer ties with law-enforcement officials in the United States and Latin America, although it is unclear how receptive the Venezuelan government has been to its overtures.

María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.