Charlie Rose

doodahdaze  02/27/2010 07:58 AM Report

Hopefully it's enough to keep our balloon afloat. What's the use in having a bubble-head that don't float?... Just keep pumping that hot air Mr. Chairman and we'll keep those rioting crowds far enough away so you can enjoy your 'perks' (like eating them gourmet beans) (who said, you can't mix pleasure with work?)(must have not worked 'in' The Private Federal Reserve Of Hot Air.). I'll attest to that.

doodahdaze  02/27/2010 07:48 AM Report

Well my broker is, The Chairman of The Private 'Federal Reserve' Of Hot Air, and when he farts, people listen. ... they also smell.

snif snif... wewwwwwww

doodahdaze  02/26/2010 09:43 AM Report

EUREKA!!!

They want us to invest in 'Corruption'! 'Corruption' is the 'Gold' of today.

Now that I've figured it out, maybe I can get a job with, no, I mean 'in' The Federal Reserve.

SHHH... hush hush

doodahdaze  02/26/2010 08:52 AM Report

Has anybody considered fixing 'health care' while when the nation is a strong robust economy?, instead of when the economy is struggling to get traction.?. What about all the brilliant talk about privatizing social-security and tying it to the stock market?. What happened to that 'brilliant' idea?. :)

doodahdaze  02/26/2010 08:39 AM Report

uh, yeah. A zero here, a penny there. Next year, last year. In the year 2525, if man is still alive.

CarbonFoil  02/25/2010 03:53 PM Report

...and I had to laugh when Charlie used the term 'austerity measures.' This is the term used in Europe, where massive strikes and demonstrations have been organized in Greece and Spain recently. Chances are, Americans won't mobilize nearly enough in their own self-interest (teabaggers excepted).

CarbonFoil  02/25/2010 03:40 PM Report

It's infuriating to hear the bipartisan line of 'shared sacrifice' once again being floated as our only solution. It's all too easy to predict that 'entitlement reform' will end up raising eligibility ages or reducing benefits. Yet Obama has already stated that Social Security is relatively easy to fix: lifting the cap on income exempt from Social Security would go a long way toward addressing future funding shortfalls.

In other words, we should tax the rich. Who else has benefited from the last 30+ years of economic policy? Energy policy? Agricultural policy? Defense spending? And let's not forget the TARP program. We have a monstrous corporate welfare state; it is unconscionable to ask the poor and what's left of the middle class to pay for the misdeeds of the oligarchs. If they're suddenly so damned concerned about the deficit, then let them pay for it.

It is well-documented that labor unions and manufacturing have declined in this country, and that the gap between rich and poor is increasing while middle-class wages have stagnated. Neoliberal policies have been a disaster at home and abroad. The end of the American Empire is already at hand. How much longer can we tinker with the system before we realize it must be dismantled and rebuilt?

REMant  02/25/2010 01:45 PM Report

Health care in the US is in exactly the same situation as education in the US (and you might add as government in the US and a large number of other things in the UD). They both enjoy something approaching a natural monopoly as a result of social pressures and anxieties, and they both are producing less and less, which unfortunately increases rather than decreases their position. The underlying reason for this in both cases is the steady contraction of the economy in the past half-century, which has been met with continual measures to increase debt, perversely accelerating this contraction. To put it in plain language the monetary and fiscal measures we have taken to "juice" the economy have instead weakened it. The accompanying un- and underemployment, the increase in ppl seeking employment and better paying jobs, and the increase in unearned income as a result of a succession of bubbles, have pushed up prices for services such as these, while the number of ppl actually being employed on the front line in these professions has declined, as well as the plant and equipment, despite technological improvement. In other words, we had more doctors and nurses and teachers, and more classrooms and hospital beds years ago than we do now, AND, we had more affordable and undoubtedly better education and health care. Similarly, we made more cars then and the ppl who could build and thus afford them, than now. These days we have instead massive bureaucracies and associated interest groups, really interested only in what they can leech from the government, and of course from 3rd world countries, which, hypocritically, we turn around and patronize just as we do school children and those without health care. Instead of being given more money, these "professionals" deserve to be fired like the teachers in RI, but as I say, it is not entirely their fault. And how ANYONE can think that dispensing borrowed and/or printed money constitutes economic recovery is beyond me.