And standards of living have been going up, because technology keeps advancing. Deficits don't matter. They are a distraction. The advance of knowledge and technology should be the real focus.

The private sector lives by kicking the can down the road. Banks borrow every day to kick the can down the road. Kicking the can down the road was invented by the private sector and is used all the time. To say government can't use the same mechanism is unrealistic, because it works so well for the private sector.

How about subsidies? The point is to encourage alternative energy sources, and government can invest without needing to make a profit. It provides for the General Welfare.

Here's a story about investors in traditional power generation plants in Texas looking at losses because of new alternative energy power production:

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

"the tradeoff of CLI is between working more efficiently (by typing commands and not having to use your mouse too often to interrupt your flow)
and a steeper learning curve (learn commands and their params, config file locations and their syntax etc.)."

Solution: use natural language to tell the computer what you want to do. "Copy myfile.txt to mydirectory." "Change my password from old to new." "Change the file permissions on myfile.txt so anyone can read or write to it."

http://www.milkeninstitute.org/pdf/riseandfallexcerpt.pdf

Kleinrock and others have explicitly said that economic gain was not a motivation for the beginnings of the internet. And Berners-Lee wasn't interested in profiting from the World Wide Web. How much did Mendel profit from his theory of inheritance? Why didn't Pasteur pursue profits instead of basic research? Were Watson and Crick thinking of money when they thought of the double helix structure of DNA?

Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.

Just use drones to drop some of the huge food surplus we produce on them.

For the link, google UBS Transparency Report: https://www.google.com/webhp?s...

It should come up as the first result. I don't seem to be able to copy a direct link.

Source for the UBS claim: file:///C:/trane/coursera/money/184614_Transparencyreport_en.pdf

On page 6, under "Remuneration", the incentive structure is described as encouraging "income generated by exploiting market advantages, such as low funding costs." Bonuses were paid based on future expectations of continued low funding costs, etc. I'm sure you can imagine how those expectations made their way onto the balance sheet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

For one contract, in July 2000, Enron and Blockbuster Video signed a 20-year agreement to introduce on-demand entertainment to various U.S. cities by year-end. After several pilot projects, Enron recognized estimated profits of more than $110 million from the deal, even though analysts questioned the technical viability and market demand of the service.[23] When the network failed to work, Blockbuster withdrew from the contract. Enron continued to recognize future profits, even though the deal resulted in a loss.

UBS did similar things with risk-free MBSes, because they were so risk-free.

Some dealers I knew said things like: if they leagalize drugs I'd have to find something else illegal to do. They were simply criminal-minded.

But the advantage of legalization is for the user who just wants to get his medicine without having to deal with criminals. Trying to buy pot or harder drugs led to violent incidences in my life in a way that going to a store to buy alcohol never did.

Sure you may still have some bootleggers. But the violent drug cartels will disappear because their market will be gone. The might become corporate crooks, but they won't be kidnapping and killing over territory.

The law said it was okay to steal people's labor if they had a certain skin color, once. Was the law right then? No, it violated unalienable rights, no matter what the Supreme Court of the time said. The law was morally wrong.

The law now as you interpret it says that the recent surge in children crossing the border should be met with indifference. Is it ethical to turn your back on a 6-year-old caring for a 4-year-old, send them back into violence and disease?

No. We have a humanitarian obligation to provide for the children. It comes from the General Welfare clause. How is it in the General Welfare to turn away hundreds or thousands of minors who need help?

The economic argument is simply wrong. The US is not "out of money". The Fed has proved that stimulus works for the stock market and the banks and corporations sitting on trillions. Fiscal policy can expand dramatically because, as Reagan proved, deficits don't matter. Saying that figures in a ledger book are more important than peoples' lives is to worship a golden calf. Money is a tool we invented to serve us, not the other way around.

Probably the best thing to do to mitigate this humanitarian crisis is to legalize drugs. Drug violence, caused by its illegality, is the primary cause of the children trying to get across the border. Legalize drugs and take the violence out of them.

US government has never lived within its means, since the first administration when Alexander Hamilton's doctrine of assumption allowed the federal government to assume the states' war debts.

The facts of history are plain: deficits don't matter. Debt is a distraction. Reagan proved it.