and for you day traders – I woke to Cspan and Defense Sec Gates replay from Chicago – some systems are being nixed (attempting) if you haven’t heard .. it was a good speech (from paper) (not a techy teleprompter) .. and why bring this line up .. Guns or Butter? .. I think we all know our place is Guns 1st .. and his thoughts on $s spent world over and us (USA) .. and future threats and weapons systems needed to thwart .. you all know I’ve been saying how about tryin BUTTER

back to the meat .. the insurance bill as I’ve heard it supposed will allow moving out of an employer and carry a family over to a new job or over till a new job is found .. that is bad news for companies in a world that a business education is not really learned anymore in a school, but on the job vocational training .. the modern technologies of the 21st century are not in textbooks any longer and the TBTF corporations know that the insurance hold on its slaves is a just that

He was correct that the vast majority would always lead lives of barely-scraping-by subsistence because that is how people are programmed to expect life. It is in their genes to expect that life is a struggle to survive, so even when they find they have the ability to live with excess over subsistence, they squander it on trinkets and baubles and expanding waist lines so that they can return to their preferred bondage.

They are collusively encouraged to live beyond their means by virtually every cultural influence to which they are exposed. Thrift is shunned because the economy’s continued viability is predicated on continued growth, even when growth is not necessary for meeting the needs of the individuals making up the economy. Thus they remain in bondage.

The only way out of bondage is to learn to live simply and humbly, controlling the passions by a reasoned view of understanding and controlling them.

There is much more to this, but I have to go. Let me just say that a bit of ascetism can go a long way.

I used to think that everybody should live withing their mans and save but then I realized that probably more than 50% of families can’t save even if they tried.

They can only afford a home farther away for their work, both work so they have to pay daycare and need a second car because of the distance and the daycare.

Many angry savers will say that they could always rearrange their lives so as to cut something. Like rent an apartment… The reality is that this can be done at the individual level. If all the 50% did it they would arbitrage the savings away.

In Capitalism, the owners of capital want to increase their returns and cut costs as much as possible. The better they are at doing this the more wealth will be concetrated as time goes on. This is exactly what we have been seeing over the last few decades.

As the average Joe feels increasingly left out, his willingness to stick the capitalist with bad debt increases. We are there now. Many people had less to lose by going in debt than by not playing.

The same wealth concentration occured during the 20s. Something happened that managed to level the playing field for a few decades and gave birth the the American middle class.

We’re at a tipping point now. Either the rich get richer and we go into some remake of the feudal system or the wealth gets redistributed. It there is re distribution, the savers will get diluted.

So all of us positive net worth savers who are angy with GS and the elite are essentially full of contraditions because we are part of the problem!

Why should the savers make more money than they deserve thanks to overinflated asset valuations?

Both savers and spenders can be blamed for their greed. Spenders lived above their means now and savers were hoping to live above their means at retirement.

The reality is that most people were not saving enough and thought that the market would keep on doing the heavy lifting (other people working like slaves) for them.

People have to adapt, and if the spendthrifts win they will have proved to have better luck or a better survival instinct than mine.

In the last couple of years, while playing games with my children, I realized that people are born with the inherent knowledge that luck is very important. Kids inherently know this and we bash it out of them. We teach them skills because we know that luck can run out. And somewhere along the way, we manage to convince ourselves that if we are good enough, luck has nothing to do with it. We are deluded. Luck means a lot, skill or not.

That slower bug flying behind the pack, thus missing the pesticide spray survives not because it is the fittest but because it was at the right place at the right time. That’s life.

No doubt this will end badly.