That only counts if they're not using deceptive and immoral tricks to bring in more cash. There's two really nasty things the investor class is doing that invalidates your argument.

First, they pump, dump and then get bailed out as too big to fail. They've been doing this for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Please read this and maybe even the book it references.

Then there's the more recent phenomenon called getting "Bained". Remember Kay-B-Toys? Mervyns? They weren't failed companies. They were doing just fine. They got bought out by venture capitalists who used their good name & credit to borrow a tonne of money, pay themselves huge bonuses, and then shut the whole thing down. Ever wonder what happened to all those cool Sci-Fi anthologies from the 70s? Issac Asimov's Stories and what not. Folks didn't stop reading them, their distributor was sitting on a mountain of valuable property they weren't keeping track of. Some wealthy asshat noticed, bought them up and liquidated them. Suddenly no distributor and being small but successful they collapsed before they could get another one.

So even if I ignore the fact that just about every rich person relied on the gov't directly to make their fortune, even if I ignore the fact that they're wealth is largely build on the infrastructure and education system of our civilization, even if I ignore the commons and the meaning of natural resources. Even if I ignore _all_ that, you're still left with a bunch of dirty thieves who couldn't survive in the imaginary "real" world of capitalism that's never existed anyway.

We've been cutting taxes on the 1% while cutting wages for the only folks left to tax for 40 years. We're running out of money. Not because it isn't there but because we can't seem to give it to the rich fast enough.

It's practically free. Run the program, wait a bit and your done. A child or a well trained monkey could do it. You OTOH, cost dollars per hour. Seriously, is anyone else scared shirtless that something so abstract and complex as this can be automated? Is any job safe (outside of being a member of the ruling class)?

sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not just sitting around doing nothing. The ultra wealthy are hording wealth in order to create artificial scarcity so they can use their control of society's wealth to bend it to their whims. There's more too it than that in order for them to stay in power, but the basic element is conservationism. e.g. making sure _nothing_ changes. Controlling all of society's wealth is a very effective way to achieve that. The constant desperation brought on by artificially induced poverty makes everyone else very conservative and very opposed to change out of fear that things will get worse; that you'll lose what little you have. The 1% use this to keep folks from questioning why they have so little when the top guys have so much. It's also very important that no one ever notices that if the 1% didn't exist we could all live pretty well. This isn't me pulling $h!t out of my proverbial back side. We're already producing enough food to feed the world's population. And giving poor folks access to birth control & education has shown to control population perfectly (maybe even a bit too much). We can do it, but not when we've got 1% of the world consuming 60% of the resources.

Sorry, again it's complicated. I don't know how to boil it down to sound bites that work. I've got a few (e.g. "I don't want insurance, I want health care") but if I was as good as Karl Rove I'd probably use those skills for the other side. With everything in the world so horrible it takes a saint to use that kind of power for good... :(

but I'm not clever enough to explain why. Please read this. Also follow the link in the article to "This Time is Different" and read that too. We've been doing this little song and dance where banks screw up and blame the public for centuries...

Who gives a shit about growing food in the city. I just don't want to be stuck eating only potatoes on Mars.

"Hasn't it been proven that austerity measures don't work anyways?"

What austerity? They reduced the amount of money they were spending, but it was still more than they were taking in taxes. That's like only adding $1000 a month on your credit card instead of $2000. Ooooo looky I "cut" spending. Kind of like Obama and Congress here in the States.

The flip side of austerity is if you are unwilling to cut spending you have to make more money to pay the debt. The Greek people are unwilling to work nor are they willing to pay more, so they now have their current mess.

All that has been proven is that you should never loan money to dead beats and expect to be paid back.

"Funny fact" People die because that's what people eventually do after they are born. History is filled with deaths of billions of people. It's sort of normal. Now if you are suggesting the budgets are out rioting in the street murdering people then I would agree with you they probably need to be stopped. Since that is not the case I think your bias is showing.

The Greek people need to pull their collective heads out of their collective asses or they will starve, and die off, until they do. There is no free lunch. No one owes them a god damn thing. Grow up and stop behaving like socialists.

Greece is getting thrown under the bus, "austerity". Aka lower living standards for the working class. It's already " live within your means " with you people. The Greeks weren't living the high life. A bunch of Rick asshats were passing bad debt around during the housing boom and Greece got caught holding the bag. If a big country like Germany had done it no harm no foul. It was too much for Greece though. And the powers that be are gonna use this to steal a bunch of old v folks pensions.

You also have to have a decent place to plug it in. Most people do not have a convenient 110 plug right next to the car, much less a 220 plug, in their garage. That is if they can even get it in the garage with all the junk they have in there.

You first clue should be the word "Chevy" there are a great many of us who will NEVER buy a GM product again just on principle. Second, it's a dog for $35K. I could go get a much nicer car for the same price that has better performance and similar fuel economy. Third GM isn't exactly known for quality work. I wouldn't know anymore because I'll never make it past the 1st reason.

Show me an electric 4x4 truck under $50K that is as good or better than the gas ones and I'll take one tomorrow. The End.

_after_ gov't subsidies. It's also a tiny little car that does poorly in crashes. Why in hells name would I spend that kind of money? I could buy a Versa or an egg (excuse me, the Yaris) for $10k less and get the same features. There's no way in hell that car is going to save me $10k over the course of it's life. It doesn't help that it's a Chevy...

it's that wages aren't coming close to matching real inflation. By "real" I mean inflation of necessities (food, shelter and in this case transportation). It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years. Also when I was a kid I could get a pretty nice beater for a grand. Work part time over a summer and you had a car you could putz around in. That same kind of beater is $3-$5k now...

Seriously. I've got to see this.