Gold's value swung wildly throughout history, causing massive short-term inflation and deflation. A stable currency cannot cause short-term inflation and deflation. By it's very definition that is impossible. What people can do, and a scarce currency does exasperates the problem, is hord or rapidly spend currency during market shifts. Gold is hardly as scarce anymore and if was actually used directly as a currency one could easily deal with "deflation" by simply making much smaller denomations of currency.

The whole argument against deflation is a bogus one sold back in the day to justify price controls for farm commodities. Farmers didn't like it when they came up with better production methods or added capacity only to watch the prices drop, just as they should. Also farmers tended to hold large amount of debt and were more than happy to take a loan and buy stock, land, and equipment and pay the debt back with devalued (inflated) currency.

Of course once the gov't figured out they could tax the public just by printing currency they were on board.

For those of you are having a hard time grasping exactly what inflation is. Think of it this way. If you had a dollar and you wanted two so you ripped it in half would you really have two or would have two pieces worth half as much? That's exactly what happens when the goverment prints money, except of course they are not giving you the other pieces back of your now ripped in half dollars they are putting them in their own pockets.

Most things do not go up in price every year usually they go down, it's just that the value of your dollar is simply going down faster than companies can come up with ways of making things cheaper. Think about what that really means to your set amount of income now that most businesses are no longer giving "cost of living" increases every year.

Sooner or later these companies are going to figure out something, that competion means you either give us more for the same price or give us the same for less.

The fact that they even charge for txt message is a joke considering it costs them practically nothing to give.

They are going to like even less when people finally wise up and stop buying a seperate phone for each family member and just give their children Wi-Fi devices.

No it will still be very cheap to ship from China. What these devices give you is the ability to have 1 off custom work done on site within a day.

Until these things can take raw material, grind it up, and make a new item I highly doubt mass manufacturing in labor cheap places like China will ever go away.

I'm sure you mom is a lovely person, but exactly how hard is it to ride herd on 20 or 30 staff of adults?

I don't make 6 figures and I run a military aicraft maintance specialist shop full (15-20) of teens and 20-somethings that are on shift 24 hours a day 7 days a week with some deployed overseas. My "duty day" started 17 years ago and has yet to end, which is to say reguardless of what I'm doing I'm always on call. I've also benn the deployment manager for the entire squadron (290 people). Which means keeping up with all the paperwork and training that is involved before we can deploy them, and make arrangements to transport them to overseas locations. When I'm not working on the aircraft practically my entire job is nothing but admin duties, so I think I have a very firm grasp on the concept of what an Administrator has to go through.

For some odd reason I don't see working 5 days a week in an air conditioned office for 9-10 months out of the year somehow warrents a salary of over $100K. I don't want to hear how they have to work in the summer too, doing what exactly? Paperwork? Hire someone in China to do it for $10 a day or better yet hire some of the unemployed students to do it, because frankly if you can read you are qualified to fill out paperwork. Oh wait that seems to be one of the problems they are having with their students.

I get real tired of hearing how much teachers and admins sacrifice for their kids and especially how HARD their job is. A BS in education is pretty much a joke degree and a Masters in child developement is not much better. These people are paid way too much for piss poor results. It is time for a change. The first being that they need to shoot the sacred "education" cow.

It's not the super rich that are soaking up all the extra resources. It's everyone else wanting something for nothing that costs so much.

For example if Bill Gates was forced by taxes to give all his money to the government and they would in turn give an equal share to every person in the US. Each person, assuming there are 311 million in the US each would get $80.35. Barely enough to get a full tank of gas and take your girl friend to the movies.

Now if every college student in the US got a free ride for college assuming 19.7 million students going to a $12,000 a year public college it would cost $236.4 Billion. That is just 1 year of Freshman attending classes. $945.6 Billion for them to go all four years and then hopefully graduate.

Of course most don't graduate, and most that do don't get a real degree either. (I laugh when they talk about how many more women are getting degrees now compared to men as if it is some sort of crisis. Liberal arts degrees ares not worth the paper they are printed on.) So essentially we as a nation take somewhere in the neighboorhood of 500 Billion to 1 Trillion dollars every year and pile it up high into the sky and light it on fire for all the good it does us. This is just College mind you.

You would be disgusted with how much we spend, and waste, on K12 education. Like I said before this has nothing to do with the wealthy wanting to be richer, and everything to do with everyone else wanting a free ride and the politicians borrowing the money and taxing the hell out of those who are productive to give it.

Actually there is plenty of places for the 3rd party to succeed and that is at the State and Local level. Most Federal programs hinge on bribing the States to pass State laws that reflect their will in exchange for funding. The States can always refuse, and a few well placed 3rd party candidates can shut down things are just the trick.

Welcome to the 53%!

I've gotten some of my education through TA (tuition assistance) by being in the military. Unfortunately the course work you can take while being bounced from bases to base and deployment to deployment leaves much to be desired, so I'm heading back to school to get a real degree and boy is it fun to pay full price for classes in addition to Federal taxes and State property taxes to subsidize everyone else.

Pretty funny, all CEOs do is fly around, eat fancy food, and yell at people all day. Of course you also forget that they usually put in 60-72 hours a week, rarely get weekends off, have to be available on all holidays, and are blamed when everything goes to shit. Sounds like a fun job to me.

Jobs are paid according to difficulty. How hard is it to find someone to do this job? Stocking the freezers, special needs kids are almost over qualified to do that job. So essentially 99% of able bodied adults qualify for that pay, and conversly get paid the lowest 1% of the wage scale to do it.

I propose we adopt a model like this; we can call it the "fear factor model". You are compensated based on your willingness to do monotonous, disgusting, demeaning, or all-around shitty jobs.

We do. Upper level jobs are monotonous, you have to deal with stupid people all day, you have a boss too and their is nothing like getting chewed out in front of 10 other people which is not to mention demeaning, and like I said before you don't get to go home until the job is done and guess what the job is NEVER done. That is why the higher you go the more you get paid.

You can't just shrug off the responsibilty for the minimum wage idiot who didn't listen to how he was trained and screwed up and left all the freezer doors open to long while stocking them, which results in several customers getting food poisening and ending up in the hospital, one of which ends up dying. That's why the boss gets paid the big bucks, and you the whinny little mouth breather get's paid minimum wage.

There are two aspect. First the job requirements. Learning how to run a register or stock the shelves takes about a day to learn the basics, and then a month to master it, and the only requirement to do it is a basicly functional body and brain, so just about anyone can do it. That is my defintion of an unskilled job.

Now the definition of unskilled labor. "Anyone cannot or will not do more than an unskilled job, due to mental or physical defect, lack of desire or drive, and due to shear laziness."

You can have a PHD and be in an unskilled job. That doesn't make you stupid, that was your choice (or lack of choice) that put you in that job or maybe you are stupid. A college degree after all is a symbol a of lack of ignorance, not a proof of intelligence.

A CEO is a poor choice because there are only a few CEO jobs in the world compared to everything else. For example Bill Gates could give up every dollar he has to his name and divide it up and give every person on the planet a fair share. Each person would get a measly $4. So get overyourself on CEOs. If Walmart made all their upper management make the same as everyone else in the company the people at the bottom might see an extra 25 cents an hour in their paychecks. So now everyone is poor together that's fair right? Why would anyone goto school to learn if all they are going to get is minimum wage. Who then is going to build these companies that provide all these "shitty" jobs. That half dead elderly person that is getting a free paycheck standing at the door greating you when you come in, or that fat welfare chick with 4 kids by 4 fathers running the register #2?

Who exactly is supposed to create these businesses then? I'm waiting for an answer. To say "there has got to be a better way" is a cop out answer of either an ignorant child or an idiot adult. The whole point is their probably is a better way and eventually someone in business is going to come up with it, but he isn't going to put in 60 hours a week just to make minumum wage.

I do agree with you that time is selling your life. I'd like to see people who steal millions/billions of dollars be put to death or rott in prison for life because they are effectively murdering thousands of people's entire productive lives when they commit their "victimless" crime.

Well how much do you actually want to pay them? You want them to be able to "live" right. Two adults raising two children, relatively new cars, decent house, decent education, the occassional vacation, retirement, and health care. That ends up being about $100,000 per year.

You are right all the other stuff we end up paying for it. Which is why the gov't feels it has the right to step in, and if it is paying the bills it does, just the same as if you were treating everyone to dinner that you get to pick the resturant.

The real question is are they getting better results by stepping in and providing everyting and then having to regulate because people are adapting and taking advantage of the new system, then if they just left people to their own means. I say they are not.