TPS

No. Of course there are 1000s of people who uphold laws and are not crooks. Just like the middle class has always played by the rules. The game is rigged for the top. The rest of us who play by the rules are the pawns they use...

The top positions at the SEC are held by those who come from the industry, appointed by respective presidents, and they are going to go after their peers? Right...don't bite the hand that will soon feed you again... Almost all federal regulatory agencies have been coopted by the industries they regulate. As for the fraud, here's a good piece by former regulator Bill Black who prosecuted a number of cases from the S&L fraud in the 1980s. Bill Black

I guess it's time for all of the financial industry workers to white wash the past... Oh, no really, it's the poors' fault for taking loans they never should have...sheesh! Every financial crisis in history is littered with fraudulent activity. These guys simply bought protection from the mob in DC. I guess they learned their lesson and are now playing by the rules, right MF Global? The system at the top is corrupt. Rant over.

Any corporate tax is passed on as a cost, so, yes, I agree with that thought. There is one problem, you need some mechanism to ensure that corps don't hoard excessive cash as they are currently doing. Either pay it out as dividends to be taxed at the personal rate or spend it to get it in circulation. No sales tax? No gasoline tax? No payroll tax? No indirect property tax in the rent? Or just no income tax?

Do you mean "financial" investment or actual business spending? If business spending, then I'd disagree; if financial, yes there would be less money flowing into stocks and bonds, which might have a wealth effect on spending.

kind of a chicken-egg issue here. When the US went through de-industrialization and shipped high-wage jobs overseas, those who had to take lower paying service sector jobs didn't have much of a choice but to buy cheap Walmart stuff. In the long term growth is mainly a function of technological change--you want to provide incentives for R&D, innovation, etc; in the shorter term, growth is a function of demand. Giving the top 1% a tax cut doesn't stimulate technological change nor does it increase demand in the way an equivalent ($ for $) tax cut to the bottom 80% would. Everything else is rhetoric...

I guess it's a hard concept to understand. When you create an idea or product, you only stay in business (and create jobs) if it sells. The point made is that for the past 30 years the nation was sold a bill of goods called supply-side economics, which was fine if the focus was to lower business taxes and costs, but it was used mainly to lower taxes on personal income of the wealthy. Yes, taxing businesses adds to costs. However, the argument made is that taxing personal income of millionaires, of which 99.99% are not individual (defined as sole proprietor for tax purposes) business owners, has very little impact on job creation. No corporation reduces production because the top tax rate on the income of its managers, BoDs, bondholders, or shareholders is increased.

Agreed. I wouldn't molly coddle Merriman in training camp and pre-season though. Play him and test him. The decision could be made for the Bills.

Compared to the previous year's 3rd overall pick and a DT, there is no comparison. McCoy made it through 13 games his first year with 28 tackles and 3 sacks; he's on IR this year. And compared to a pro bowl player like Ngata: played all 16 games in his first year with 31TT/1S on a very good defense. Dareus is a stud.

Yeah, I think Miami beats the Jets, so that takes care of that. The problem is that Belichek will have the Pats lay down in the meaningless last game...

They never looked down; they seemed pretty confident the whole game. It would've been more interesting to be on the Bills sideline to see their body language and interaction up close. And they probably would've heard me when I yelled "put someone out there on defense with some balls! Like the Jills..."

I had him listed as my sleeper in the draft. I also thought he'd be returning punts by mid-season, and would like to see him replace McKelvin there. He is always around his receiver, and I think he will make a very good slot CB.

We sat right behind the Fins bench around the 20-yard line. After the nice 7-0 Spiller-led start, it was pretty much all down hill from there. The attitude of the team is pretty listless, to say the least. I commented several times during the game that the defense (especially) looked like they were out there to collect a paycheck and go home. So much for Gailey's mantra: "It's a tough game for tough people." Where's the toughness coach? The other comment I made on several occasions, "Why the Hell did he try to throw it in the middle of three defenders?!" I also had no idea who a couple of the Bills WRs were yesterday. A question: Why is it that you can't tackle a guy out of bounds, but it is ok to block/run a guy into the bench? (not that I didn't mind seeing florence get plastered). I was so disgusted that I decided not spend the $8 on a beer inside the stadium. Like Kelsey's reaction, this is a beaten team. No one seems to be trying to change the mentality, so it's really hard to care when the players don't seem to...

And people laugh when you mention that we're getting closer to a fascist police state.

No, not a war monger, just a shill. Please, Russia is going to attack! Oh, we're all doomed. What an anus. What exactly do you sell? It ain't the truth. Really, what is your job?

What democrats want Paul? Who does Germany need defending against?

-unemployment fell last month, so it's already declining as the economy picks up slightly. The argument: capitalism, dominated by big industrial firms, requires managing. The attempt to harken back to the good old days of unregulated markets created the conditions for another depression. The system as it's currently rigged is set up to reward those at the top even when they !@#$ up. My prediction: Either the system will become more fair and democratic or it will become more controlled by the top which will probably require a security state (We pretend to be democratic; at least there's no pretending in China and Russia where the structure is controlled at the top by the communists and mafia oligarchs respectively). Here's another prediction: Ron Paul will win the Republican nomination because he represents an attack against the entrenched interests. As he gains momentum, he will be attacked by all of those vested interests he threatens. As for the European model, the core countries have significant inmigration--millions of Turks, Poles, et al have immigrated to Germany for example. Yes, Euroland is currently having difficulty keeping the weak states from destroying the union. Greece was week before the euro too. They'd be better off defaulting and going back to the drachma. However, my point is that a country like Germany keeps inequality in check and provides a social safety net for the majority. In my not so humble opinion, that's a recipe for long term economic/political stability under a form of managed capitalism.

Schumpeter said in the preface to his book something like, don't mistake analysis for preference. He was trying to answer a morer philosophical question--would capitalism end? He answered yes. In fact, you would get a kick out of his explanation, so take a quick look at the wiki description. Schumpeter comes from the more interesting line of economists who try to look into the future based on the forces they see. Keynes was pro-market as well, but he realized the necessity of having to manage capitalism as it got bigger in order to restrain those tendencies for crisis--and yes, crises were less severe after the 1930s precisely because big government stabilizes capitalism by generating counter-cyclical deficits (at least until supply-siders came along and decided to run perpetual deficits). Capitalism replaced feudalism which lasted a hell of a lot longer, so a few hundred years of capitalism is not long in the context of historical time. Most people (like Schumpeter) who try to analyze the future are not being critical of capitalism, they are just wise enough to see it creates the foundation for an alternative--as Marx said, capitalism will deliver the goods to make socialism possible--one of the reasons Russia failed is because it didn't let capitalism do its job--deliver the goods). I personally don't think socialism/central planning can work. I described what I think may be the better outcome (as opposed to the "road to serfdom" we seem to be on) in my response to meazza, ESOPs for large-scale enterprise. In my view, a form of capitalism can survive, but it requires a broad overarching structure to prevent the problems of high unemployment and extrem inequality from creating its destruction. The problem I see is the broad structure that's currently in place is not responsive to the majority. It's a difficult problem to solve. How can you create an overarching structure to manage capitalism without the managers being corrupted? By a broad structure, I don't mean your words "picking winners and losers"--that comes from influence. I'll try to simplify it into 3 areas: 1. Maintain macro stability, as government does currently via counter-cyclical deficits to maintain aggregate demand. 2. Restrain finance and credit creation--we don't. 3. Provide a social compact more like European capitalism. The problem: who will manage it? Right now we're more like a plutocracy/corpocracy. A more democratically-managed capitalism in the US would probably demand greater "fairness" and we'd see more movement toward #3. All reports show the top has recieved almost all of the growth in income over the past 30 years because of this movement back to market fundamentalism. Capitalism and democracy won't survive if it continues. Just my opinion man.

I lean toward John Stewart Mill's suggestion that worker ownership would probably be the best way to organize large-scale production. That doesn't mean there is no room for traditional small business--classic American entrepreurialism. China uses what I'd call state capitalism. The Communist Party is still in charge there if you didn't know... Of the advanced countries, the US has the highest level of inequality. The most common measure is the Gini ratio, and Germany is half of the US (higher is worse). You can find the list from the CIA FActbook. Europe is truly more democratic in that way then--people are more free to associate with radical alternatives, and the communist party is one of many alternative parties across Europe. Do they wield power? Not really. If they have marginal influence, so what. Believe me, after some 15 years (?) arguing with GG, I do know most of his ideas on economics, and we do agree some things. However, I think this statement of capitalism as some natural order smacks of religious fundamentalism. Most laws related to economics favor the large corporations over small business, because they pay for the influence. Most American politicians somehow end up significantly richer when they leave office than when they started. Maybe fascism isn't the word, as I mentioned; maybe corporatism is a better word, but there is no doubt that government has become less responsive to the now cliched 99%. That seems pretty clear to a majority of the American people now. Btw, front page article in the Buffalo News today with headline: "Nearly half of America qualifies as low-income." That's a recipe for civil disintegration as Plato argued... He didn't say it was the inevitable solution, he said it was the inevitable outcome. There's a difference. Maybe you should try reading his work.

And on the 8th day God created capitalism...Amen brother! There is no natual design of capitalism. Capitalism as an ideal was a system of small, entreprenuerial individual owners--it started individualistic. The growth and evolution of capitalism created forces which will cause its demise. The tendency is for large, capital-intensive enterprise to dominate markets; enterprise is no longer managed by entrepreneurs, but professional managers and owned by absentee shareholders. The concept of the entreprenuer owner-innovator is overtaken by the corporate R&D shop. Bigger capitalism generates greater inequality and bigger crises. Eventually that pain and suffering from the "natural" crises of capitalism question the foundation of "private ownership" and large gains for the absentee few. The survival of capitalism has required government intervention to prevent a violent ending--keep the 99% pacified. There were a lot of violent riots in the 1930s that were quelled by force. Some countries turned to fascism. FDR, who came from the ruling elite, took them on and helped bring about a more humane, managed capitalism. European capitalism went in this same direction, and over time has done a better job of distributing the surplus to pacify/satisfy a greater proportion of the population, and meet basic needs. American capitalism, starting in 1980, tried to go back to the 1920s--market fundamentalism rules the day, but that market fundamentalism in an era of big capitalism generated another big crisis, one that would've been bigger than the great one without the interventions of a lifetime--and we're still not out of it. Your fanatical religious belief in capitalism would say "let it work itself out." Good idea. Let's just let the thing play out, and jolly old capitalism will endure, errr, sustain us. I'll be knocking Dwight Drane's door if you want to try that experiment... What are the options? We're at a crossroad. From my vantage point, it looks like we're moving closer to fascism--or maybe we need a different name now that corporations are people too? Eisenhower tried to warn us. The two parties need to be taken down. You guys trash OWS, but behind the "hippies" camping out there is a hell of a lot of frustration with the system. Something is about to give. DD, send me a map, I'll bring the beer...

It might take just a tad more to end a few thousand years of conflict...but nice try.

It's presumptuous to state that "capitalism is by design sustainable," as if it's some natural, God-given system. Hell, Joseph Schumpeter, as pro-capitalist as anyone, said he did not think capitalism would survive. I look forward to the interpretation...

Christ! You sound like an academic..."true cost of capital" sheesh! I suppose you're going to go Austrian on me and say there's a "natural rate of interest"? And, "Capitalism is by design sustainable"? Yeah, if left alone it would create the "best of all possible worlds" Mr. Candide...Nice fairy tale.

I second this opinion--they need 2 playmakers on the edges. I think Merriman added more to the D than most think.

I didn't think much of CWhite initially, but he's actually looked better than I expected when playing. He could be a solid backup for Shep and he is a good ST player. JWhite hasn't shown much at all.