You know what, you don't have to talk to me like I'm some little kid who doesn't know what the grown ups are on about. You have a strong grasp of economic issues, but you filter everything through your "I hate Bush" filter before you're willing to accept certain truths. This is what I got my degree in, so don't think I just don a pair of rose colored glasses and spew things that don't make sense out of love of the President.
I find it interesting that I'm talked to like I'm some sort of extremist by you and Ron for having a more centrist view on events than hard left.
I didn't say the oil under Iraq wasn't important. I said it wasn't the end of the world if we didn't get exclusive dibs on it. We get our oil from very diverse areas, and just because Iraq happens to have a lot of it, doesn't in ANY way mean they have all of it.
Technology has advanced to the point where we can live through cuts in our supply. We haven't had to yet because even at $100 a barrel, oil is still dirt cheap. Extremists want us off oil so bad, but they bitch a storm about it costing too much. That like everything else must be President Bush's fault. Fortunately the global warming hype is giving us a jump start in renewables. Normally we would have had to wait until oil really was hard to come by.
You're talking about the problems with the weaker dollar in terms of rock bottom strength. I don't see ANY reason to think in those terms. Our economy is massive and diverse. The world bases their economies off of ours for a reason. Last week when all the hype was how bad the economy was, look at what happened to the rest of the world in comparison to us.
If the Euro is so powerful that it overtakes the Dollar as the world trade unit, why is that the end of the world? The Euro made gains and overtook us, so why couldn't we do the same later? The EU is obviously humming along alright without everything being counted on their currency.
You're pissed about our debt and spending. We had two large wars, and a terrorist attack that took the wind out of us something fierce. Despite ALL of that, every indicator we use to judge the health of the economy says it is strong. All time low unemployment, all time high home ownership, all time high tax revenue AFTER the Bush tax cuts, etc....
This is a graph of our debt using adjusted dollars. If the graph went back a few more years, I believe we toped out at 110% GDP. How is 68% the end of the world again? Why will we never be able to pay this off? We're set to run surplus in 2012, why does nobody talk about that?
Even if everything is Bush's fault, I'm okay with it. I don't know many people who are worse off today than they were 5 years ago. (All this with the added bonus of one less evil dictator in the world, and one less government of totalitarian extremists. Problems or no, we have two historically volatile nations with democratically elected government with constitutional rule of law on the mend.)
How much stronger did you say you wanted to the dollar? Do you have a sweet spot balance picked out? I'm thinking if you sat down with a pen and paper, you would come up with a number not much higher than it currently stands.
