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It's not just the exponential rise in US debt that threatens the future 'freedom' of Americans...
Source: Goldman Sachs
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I did not guess correctly.
This is why CONgress should only be in session every other year, or every fifth year. They make laws just for the sake of making laws. Nothing is ever repealed, only new laws are enacted on top of the pile of old laws. Its an inverse pyramid of laws, and we are getting crushed under its weight.
CONgress not making laws and not reading laws - they are accepting them or not. Corporates and banks are making laws.
To my eye this isn't an exponential rise, we're climbing the left side of a Gaussian distribution and will peak in about 30 years at 100,000 pages. After that the size will fall due to the drop in literacy. I conclude that by the year 2165 there will be no IRS. :)
Byzantium
I guessed pages of the United States Code.
Oh well...
It is not Horseshoes, Hand Grenade or Atomic Warheads. Close does not count. Damn. I failed the test.
Maybe in 30 years literacy won't be needed (some say it's been suppressed now for many years already.) The Herd will have NewSpeak, and machines (that can read) will be available to regulate, transact, enforce, etc. Maybe even legislate?
Somewhere, Ron Goulart is laughing his ass off.
I'll bet you they've been decreasing the font size all along too though
By then we won't need an IRS. Our overlords will employ killer robots to enforce global compliance. They will come to be seen as gods to whom virgins must be sacrificed. This will continue until they have secured themselves the ultimate get away car and leave the utterly toxic and uninhabitable planet behind. Sometime long after that humanity, if any survive, will rebuild and the evil amongst them will rise to preeminence and repeat the cycle.
Or it could get really bad.
I always liked what John stossel calls 'the stossel rule'. It is simple, it states that before they can pass any new laws, they first have to repeal two old, dumb ones. Two is probably a little low ball, that number should probably be more like 10:1, at least, but its a nice idea
That's the way it used to work.
An alternative is to require ALL laws to have a time limit. To retain the law in the future means re-debating and passng it. Keep them busy.
The best idea I've seen is to only let them hold federal office for one term, 2 years in the house, 6 years in the senate or 4 years as president and no round robin between offices.
I like what ancient Swedes did. When the chief promised rain but couldn't make it rain they sacrificed him.
How about no congress at all?
Anarchism is just denying anyone the right to regulate or distribute aggression.
Lovely idea but simply impossible. Humans will group together and continue the leader/follower dynamic. You cannot stop that from happening. You can never have true anarchy nor true communism. It simply cannot be done with humans.
Correct. Our only hope is to have a government that we can influence on an ongoing basis.
Who said anarchy implies no leaders?
All it means is that your association with leaders is VOLUNTARY!
Thus you still have companies (not corporations, mind you) with CEO's, religions with leaders, families with parents, schools with teachers.
The only difference is there are no agents with legal justification to take your money and force you to follow certain people.
Private competitive courts, private security organizations, all funded through your voluntary contributions (Purchases!) instead of tax (theft/extortion).
You Scotty, get the award for the day - hell, maybe even the year, for recognizing and underscoring what probably 75% miss as being the source of the problem, instead choosing to forever chase after the symptoms... States government as well. The problem is Full-Time Political office.
Me either, my guess was high school students losing their virginity before the age of 16.
one half of Golden Gate bridge?
urgh 70k I should have guessed/known
Number of psychopaths per 100,000 people.
Talmud for idiots
Oh hell...but it figures...
Prisoners?
US debt held by the Federal Reserve at the end of 2013: A new record high!
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/06/us-debt-held-by-federal-reser...
Give that poster a babies arm holding an apple !!!
Hey Hulk! I just got a call from Lennon Hendrix and Dr Paul Krugman, they said to tell Zero Hedge that a Major Bank is short oil and it will go bankrupt in the next few months. Good day, sir ;)
That wouldn't be the bank located deep within the bowels of the Eccles Building would it?
The Bank of Hot Potatoe I believe.
Excellent description.
I understand completely !!! Great to hear from you and Welcome back !!!
It's great to see LH's name (even if second hand) back on the Hedge. I miss that cat.
(happy holidays to you and yours Hulk while I am here)
Hey BoNeSxx, tried to get a holt of you last summer when I was in the area. Give me a shout...
Will do brother. Same e-mail still work I assume?
no longer works, go online zh chat...
I'll keep an eye out for you on chat.
If you have a new addy you can reach out to me at my user name @ gmail.
Thx.
...or a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.
I'll take the king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum....
US debt held by the Federal Reserve at the end of 2013: A new record high!
The article said that it was NOT DEBT.
It's not just the exponential rise in US debt that threatens the future 'freedom' of Americans
A trainee secretary's bonus at Goldman?
Ah......she must be a fast learner.
Any chance she/he/it sits at the HEAD of its class.
Christmas.......that time of the year for Happy Endings and the bonus round.
Before looking at the answer, I'll guess it's the cost of a one week stay in a hospital.
After looking at the answer, I went back to my normal sentiment of thinking we're so fucked.
If five of those seven days are in the ICU, the bill is $140k for just the rooms (in 2013, anyway). Insurance was my friend.
.
Govt lies?
there are less than 2000 pages in the bible...
Look on the bright side at least we are in the parabolic blow off stage.
.
A babies arm holding an apple ???
P.S. I had no idea Joe Cocker was Britiish...
The Tubes
white punks on dope
best Joe Cocker was John Bulshi impersonating on SNL -
noVa
What do you want from life,
to kidnap an heiress and threaten her with a knife?
What do you want from life,
to get cable TV and watch it every night?
swimming pool in the backyard!
just read yopur post - got distracted with Temple basketball beating Kansas - go Owls
Gawd bless Fee Waybill... Good days those were, the Tubes.
actual footage fo Cocker with Bulshi on SNL -
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=26b_1315119865
"Stuff"
First it was not the lyrics of the Tubes' song, "White Punks on Dope".
It is part of the lyrics of the Tubes song, "What Do You Want From Life" of of their album, "Remote Control", an entire album dedicated to demonstrating the destructiveness of Television. (It was extremely influential.)
"A Dream Date in kneepads with Paul Williams.." LMAO/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV_jD8K3p6Y
Next that riff was also inspired by a Frank Zappa riff that was produced in 1972 off of one of Zappa's movies, and album "200 Motels", the song was "Does this Kind of Life Look Interesting To You?"
http://youtu.be/uL63MuKDyIg
Average american consumer debt.
And the sad part? some (probably about) 30% do not even have a salable asset other than maybe a used car yet to stick on the other side of ye olde balance sheat.
"Missed it by that much," Maxwell Smart
Cost of bribing a congress critter?
No those whores go for less than that.
You're not free now slave nor have you ever been.....haven't you noticed?
1945 British National Archives Document Calls For New World Order Now
There Are No More Nations Mr Beale
Debt built to Fever Pitch means acceptable devastating war on our (perceived) debt-holders. The sad thing is our able-bodied will fight anybody other than our own piggled authority.
Look at the bones, mon.
The chart should have started a few years earlier when there were zero pages. It is not the complexity of it that is the problem, it is the mere existence of it.
The paper has gotten so large that its pointless.
Lets take laws and codes and such for example . . .
If I wrote a law that everyone had to obey and it was 90,000 pages . . . there should be a law against writing long laws.
If the bill being passed or has been passed has more than 20 pages it should be null and void.
You could write one page on nuclear fusion and the general public could explain it, but somehow government cant create a law that governs toothbrushes without consuming the Amazon rain-forests weigh in paper.
No one reads this shit, not even the people who write it.
It's become hard to write short laws because usually they amend already existing code, which has to be amended in numerous ways for a desired effect. Also, the tax code is not 90,000 pages, or anything remotely close to that. In addition to the code, itself, the publication referred to in the graph also contains: an index, including tax calendars, tax tables, an inflation adjustment guide, other special tables, checklists, a glossary, and tax planning sections; legislative committee reports; regulations; explanations; summaries of court decisions from 1913 on; tax practice articles; tax court rules of practice; Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure; an entire volume covering the IRS organization and procedures, the IRS Statement of Procedural Rules, Circular 230, IRS forms, publications, and personnel; an entire volume covering Treasury decision preambles, hearing notices, legislative status tables, summaries of Tax Court decisions, full text of IRS rulings and other releases, Supreme Court docket, articles on tax topics, and an index of new tax cases; and three volumes devoted to organizing the full text of tax cases for easy lookup. Among other very numerous non-statute writings. Basically, the publication referred to the in graph is a tax practitioners' handbook for those who want to make money representing others in matters of federal income tax or selling pages of tax-topic writing.
Number of women raped by Edward Cullen
I am guessing the number of folks with EBT cards.
I guessed wrong - since I thought it was the number of ass lickers in Congress
I guess world GDP in USD millions....now to check....
WRONG!
but thanks for playing....
I guess Lobby Dollars & Campaign Contributions for US Congress or Presidential Election Campaign.
Russia will use Gold to weaken and destroy the west?
http://investmentwatchblog.com/russia-will-use-gold-to-weaken-and-destroy-the-west/
Why would they bother ? We're doing such a good job all by ourselves ? Are they impatient ?
Yes! Someone else gets it too :)
And this is how Russia is defeating NATO in the Ukraine too. By waiting for us to hang ourselves with all that extra rope we bought.
Didn't a Russian promise to be the salesman?
How barbaric.
Buy some gold, sell some gold, buy some gold, sell some gold......west collapses. Sure, I could see that happening.
Tulips!
An implied inverse of efficiency. And some are still claiming its not intentional.
Tortured folks?
Is it the number of lobbyists?
Prisoners in jail per million
Unfunded liabilities in billion$.
I thought it was health care liability cost.
But the answer was not so surprising.....it is very true.
hero
How many guesses do I get?
1) Number of people murdered by cops.
2) Per capita prison population.
3) Number of laws on the books.
4) Average cost to defend yourself against a misdemeanor charge.
5) Number of words in a Steven King novel.
[clicks answer]
Hey, that was going to be my next guess.
I can't solve it. But I did write a book that helps people ride it out: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1907498524
Pages in the tax code/ Federal Register.
But how much of that growth is due to court cases and administrative rulings? Your hyperbolic post suggests the statute is growing exponentially. Almost certainly not true. The proper curve fit is not even exponential, but sigmoidal.
Lawmaking needs to be modernized, to include this new-fangled thing called the Internet.
No reason we can't have much better understanding of the consequence of laws and be able to get much better participating from the taxpaying population. We need a way for taxpayers to affirm each law on a regular basis. The scope should be both laws passed by Congress AND executive orders issued by the POTUS.
Here's how I think it could work:
1. Require every law (and backfill old laws) to have expiration dates. I think the max should be 3 years, but many would be less than that.
2. Withing 2 months of expiration, the law would be posted onto a web-based queue to be renewed. There would be lots of infomation about the law including (but not limited) the following: the cost of enforcement; list of states, congretional districts, individuals and businesses that have benefitted from the law; estimated amount each has benefitted from the law, net revenue received by the law's enforcement; the difference between the income and expense for the law; projections for future P&L; quality of life improvements from the law (if any) that are intangible; other items.
The total annual cost that appears on the website would have to equal the total annual budget for the US government. Any differences would have to be explained.
Again, only taxpayers would be able to vote. Voting would occur during a two-month time span. A minimum number of taxpayers would have to vote in order for the law to be renewed. Perhaps that number could be proportional to the cost.