Charlie Rose

vongleichent  02/13/2012 05:56 PM Report

Excellent, excellent, this is exactly the right pathway. Entrepreneurship will be the answer to growth and unemployment. Going back to the part of foreign students receiving an excellent education in the states. This is certainly true as I am one of them. After being done with college I stayed for a couple of months, and than decided to go back home. As there was nothing to go on about in the states. This will continue highly educated individuals like myself going back home.

crspivey  10/25/2011 02:58 PM Report

Charlie, not to be uncharitable, but Mssrs. Case and Dalio, just for two recent examples are taking away from "vital watch" status. Nice guys and successful, no doubt, but thought leaders? Not evident. Not valuable content take-away. You can do better. Think you could get Exxon's Rex Tillerson to the table, to discuss energy leadership out of the malaise?

Your friend and avid watcher,

charliefan2217  10/24/2011 01:26 PM Report

Obama needs to take a leaf out of clinton's book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta_SFvgbrlY&feature=related

REMant  10/24/2011 11:33 AM Report

Leaving Iraq, which began the show, I suppose will be trumpeted as another Obama success, but the fact is we were kicked out by the Shiites, or rather into our embassy compound where I understand some 15,000 will remain. NATO has also been kicked out of Libya, both their council and counsel repudiated, altho after spending around $1 billion on that adventure, they are no doubt happy to leave. Sarkozy, himself, spent nearly $300 million, and the new govt will adopt sharia law, which ought to dismay the coterie in the State Dept.

REMant  10/24/2011 11:29 AM Report

Unfortunately AOL exemplified how not to found successful companies. Laughably so. Just how really useful most of these tech cos have been is questionable. Internet users tho have done a lot to make information available, and that has been beneficial, tho at the expense of publishers. But entrepreneurship per se is not the solution to our problems. That assumes that the problem is simply risk aversion. R & D is more important in the long run, but business expansion in the short run is more a matter of capital, and it's the capital we don't have. True some businesses may have it, but consumers as a whole don't and they can't all work for them.

I've already written many times about Charlie's hobbyhorse that American growth is a matter of immigration, and how that plays in the places from which they come, but I'll acknowledge that we have for several hundred years operated on that plan, which has usually accrued to the benefit of the Democratic Party. It is certainly inconsistent tho to say that such foreigners come here because our education is so good and then complain it is not good enough. The implication is that our ppl are not good enough, which is not something I'd think any politician would want to run on. But like his great friend Tom Friedman, Charlie loves all things bigger and better. See a piece by Belen Fernandez who has a forthcoming book on the latter http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/20111012111830751959.html

"Living within Our Means and Investing in the Future: The President's Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction," including gratuitously all of the president's various previous pronouncements on the subject, continues to make the assertion the nation's latest financial crisis, which began in 2007, is ameliorating and that the bailouts have proved relatively costless, which is a pile of manure. The added debt made possibly by printing money has depreciated the currency and raised prices, costing the public substantially without improving the employment situation one iota. But this is blamed on natural disasters, past administrations, and revolutions actually created by the inflation generated by the world's central banks. Nevertheless, the president has graciously condescended to recognize the reality of having to reduce spending.

This has become, however, a situation in which you must come down on one side of the other: consumption, or saving. There is no point increasing the welfare component of welfare capitalism, when the effect of it is to decrease the capitalism part. And no one should get the idea that this spending is going to be anything but welfare unless it is productively invested. The president says it will, but the last such pkg cost well more than it brought in, or would have if the money had simply been given to the social safety net. Indeed, if such Keynesian theory were true, Japan, earthquakes and all, should be the world's leading economy by far, and Louis XIV's kin still in power.

The result of this kind of thinking, for example on the Colorado River, means there are so many dams there's no water left. Boondoggles of this sort have historically been lost on no one, least of all Democrats like Paul Douglas, who took on the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers, or Harry Truman, who made his mark against war profiteers, or William Proxmire with his Golden Fleece awards. FDR's minions were ridiculed publicly thru-out the '30s. Can't happen nowadays? See http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2009/09/poo_palace_the_national_park_s.html

Money is not the creation of the Federal mint. It must be earned or borrowed from those who did earn it and who expect something for their generosity. Those sources are fewer and fewer, and much of the support the dollar has had recently is from those either suffering from money illusion or who hope they can, by returning the money to the US, delude more, they having little else to do with it in any case. The rest are buying gold and speculating in the asset markets. The fact is this country has been living entirely on Monopoly money for quite some time.

Budget watchers find nothing new in the plan, not even the rhetoric, and it is full of the usual artful dodging, deceits and juggling, ploys, fakery and chicanery, circumventions, hanky-panky and general disingenuousness. It includes cuts in expenditures not made, nor likely to be, and excludes revenue to be gained when scheduled tax cuts expire. It offers nothing in the way of reforming tax expenditures, except to limit the amount of them the wealthier may take, and offers to trim farm subsidies and Federal pensions. It increases the penalty for stock sales, which will more likely hurt Fed'l income as such attempts have had in many other countries who've tried it. It is aimed I'd say at buying votes, or shall we say reconnecting with the Democratic constituency?

The president's plan attempts as well to evade responsibility for the present situation of the country by scapegoating wealthier Americans and corporations. Increasing taxes on them, however, will hardly cover what he proposes to spend on more pump-priming, er...jump-starting, which obviously didn't work the first time. Transferring their saving to consumption is guaranteed to make the economy worse, not better. This was done in the mid-'30s by FDR to get re-elected, resulting in the 1937 crash, and he likely wouldn't have in 1940 had it not been for war spending.

But Obama has been told by Keynesians they are just sitting on a bundle of cash. Earnings reports indicate this is true, but it was made possible by easy money, first by creating the monopolies, and then when trying to mitigate the consequences. If you really want to employ ppl, make their labor and savings worth something. But the idea is typical of those who blame everything on greed and prejudice. Adam Smith was concerned about possessiveness no less than Keynes, but the difference is that while the Keynesians attempt to cure the problem by flooding the nation with funny money, Smith wanted to increase productivity and break down trade barriers.

Taxing the wealthier is estimated to increase govt receipts by $65 billion/yr, hardly enough to make a dent in the Fed'l debt, fair or not, and certainly a drop in the Fed's bucket. The fact is that the lower and middle classes have been given tax break after tax break, subsidy after subsidy, and all it has done is to enhance the moral hazard. The rich are not at fault for this, nor the fact that because of chronic inflation they have become relatively wealthier due to the fact that they have capital gains when others haven't, tho certainly not for any lack of political striving toward that end. You can, in the interest of equity, tax it from them, but it would certainly be better to stop the inflation in the first place by making sure ppl earn what they spend. And, at the moment, better to see money invested than spent.

The president has remarked repeatedly the election is 14 months off and "the ppl" can't wait. I agree. I think he should step down, NOW.