"There's only an IOU there with no economic value"

IOUs written by the US government have economic value. They have so much value that over the last few years, investors have occasionally paid the US government for the privilege of being allowed to hold those IOUs, as in a negative interest rate.

If John has the right to print currency, then yes the trust fund can be relied on and no he is not broke.

Yes, those fascist universities are much more authoritarian than prisons or the military.

There's a joke that "Christ, what an asshole." can be fittingly substituted for the caption of any New Yorker cartoon. It works on Wall Street Journal articles just as well.

You drive your car on roads that our taxes paid for.

During Katrina FEMA was slow and let people die. The director of FEMA didn't know, three days after the storm hit, that there were refugees in the convention center. Anybody who had been watching television during those three days knew.

The head of FEMA during Katrina was appointed because he was Bush's campaign manager's college buddy. His previous job was as an inspector of Arabian horse judges.

The current head of FEMA's previous job was 8 years as director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

Seriously. You are going to try to compare the two situations? You're doing a heck of a job.

Let us know how that inland harbor thing works out for you.

Here are the average salaries from the 2010-2011 Dice survey, by programming language:

ABAP $105,887
Korn Shell $96,886
Perl $94,210
Java/J2EE $91,060
C $90,346
Python $90,208
Ruby On Rails $89,973
PL/SQL $89,742
Shell $88,918
C++ $86,648
COBOL $85,847
C# $85,501
Javascript $81,576
VB.net $79,646

Doesn't look to me like Java engineers are particularly cheap.

You argue, in effect, that a US software developer and an Indian software developer are close substitutes. Close substitutes should have similar prices, or people would choose the cheaper option over the expensive one.

US software developer: $80-130K.
Indian software developer: $10-25K

These are not close substitutes. IT jobs that can be sent offshore have been sent offshore. The jobs remaining in the US are the jobs where a local resource is, for whatever reason, an order of magnitude more productive than an offshore one.

What would happen if H1-B visas were eliminated and salaries rose would not, for the most part, be a move by executives to offshore more jobs. There may be a few situations in which executives would say, "Well when we could get 10 Indian developers for the price of one US developer, it made sense to keep the job here, but now that we can get 10 and a half, let's send the work offshore", but only a few. What would happen would be that some marginal projects wouldn't get done - the rising wages would simply make it too costly. Some people in the US who would have gone into other areas would go into tech instead. And some of the profits being made by companies would go to tech workers instead.

Well, they are either objects or primitive types.

China was not in a recession in the 1990's. Do you not even know what a recession is?

You gave China as an example of a country that had used austerity to get out of a recession, but China wasn't in a recession. Not recently and not in the 1990's. Do you even comprehend that a country that is not in a recession can not use austerity to get out of a recession? This is like arguing with a retarded dude who is on angel dust.

Germany IS currently "slipping to malaise of the rest of the west" as you so eloquently put it. It grew at 0.1% last quarter which is a rounding error away from a recession. It was growing at 2% a year in the summer of 2010. Then it implemented austerity measures. Now it is near a recession. Do you comprehend that a country that isn't in a recession that implements austerity measures and then is near a recession isn't an example of using austerity to get out of a recession?

Fucking idiot.

Krugman could have predicted what would happen to Germany. I think he did, actually.

You are an idiot.

Shrinking government spending (while deregulating private activity) caused a boom in China.

China did not shrink government spending. It massively increased spending in 2009 when its economy began to slow down. It also was not in a recession, it was growing by at least 6% a year throughout the world economic crisis. So you are citing non-existent Chinese austerity to claim that a boom in China, which wasn't in a recession, is evidence that austerity has gotten someone out of a recession. That is idiotic. You are an idiot. Anyone who thinks anything you are saying makes any sense at all is an idiot.

As for Germany, it implemented austerity measures a year ago, after it had seen its GDP growth go from negative to around 2%. After it adopted the austerity measures, when it was not in a recession, its GDP growth trended down and last quarter it grew at a rate of only 0.1%, which is almost a recessionary level. So you point to austerity measures that have gotten a country close to being in a recession as evidence that austerity has gotten someone out of a recession. That is an idiotic argument. You are an idiot.

Yes, people still use vacuum tubes, typewriters, vinyl records, CRT's, and incandescent lightbulbs. But I'd argue that with the exception of lightbulbs, they're all seeing dramatically reduced usage these days.

VINYL SALES up 55% in first half of 2011
...
The UK numbers follow hot on the heels of figures from Nielsen which showed vinyl sales up 41% in the US in the same period.

2010 marked the fourth successive year of growth in vinyl album sales in the UK.

link

30 to 50% sales growth for half a decade isn't what I would call a dramatic reduction.

And that's just new sales. Vinyl lasts for generations, it's not going away any time soon.

Entitlement happy? Paying money out of every paycheck you get your whole life so that you have income and health care when you are old or sick isn't an entitlement. It's called insurance, you stupid asshole.

If Judith Miller isn't an example of "state-controlled media" I don't know what is.

this is a cruel position to take

It's a cruel position to take.

It it also the least cruel position to take.