Jim,
The risks between borrowers and lenders aren’t one-sided. If borrowers default, they will excluded from being able to borrow in the future, or at least have to pay much, much higher rates. Hence, municipalities tend to be careful about ensuring that the bond holders get paid, because it’s in their own, long-term interests to do so.
Charlie
Jim,
We --meaning the legal citizens of this country-- are NOT a civil society, nor are we one community. Never were, Never will be. Local control and local autonomy are the principals enshrined in our constitution, which is exactly why the US does not have a national educational system, nor a national religion, nor even a national language.
Charlie
We know. The 10% is the approximate total cagr of the market over long periods of time, which also include inflation. The 7% (Actually I think it might be closer to 6%) is the risk premium for US equities over long periods of time.
Extremist views are seldom useful. A country as large as the USA cannot ever be a homogeneous blob. Mao tried it in China. Not good.
A reasonable alternative is to have a terraced government, federal, state, municipal, interest groups, family with as many or as few terraces as is practical for any one area. Central planning in not the solution.
The Captain
I apologize for my uncivil comment. I was feeling a bit cranky. I need to eat better!
JimA
Rather than hangry, you were hranky?
ralph
Superb discussion on how the USA is more and more failing our young people, especially the middle class and below, and dooming the future:
Scaramucci, after leaving Investment Industry and then serving on Trump’s political team, has reformed himself into jewel. With NYU Professor Galloway he does an incisive fast dive into a subject METAR looks at regularly but not deeply. The upper class has taken over our politics and is enriching itself at the cost of our mutual future.
d fb
A conspiracy to create scarcity in higher education may work for Harvard, but that does not explain the large drop in enrollment at the second tier state universities in Michigan, as an example. I have posted the numbers before: small increases at the two best: U of M and State, and drops of 20-40%, over the last ten years, at the second tier universities.
As stated before, USian ideology, since the embrace of “supply side economics” is that everything must be rationed by ability to pay, rather than the government giving people a leg up. University tuition has soared, because state funding has been cut. Trades training in high schools has been defunded. Even driver’s ed has been defunded in some school districts. Mental health has been defunded. Most of Michigan’s mental hospitals were closed, and the people left on the street.
This is all by design. As I heard Jack Kemp say, years ago, “the rich do all the saving and investing, so the rich should have all the money”.
Meanwhile, the “thought leaders” blame everyone’s problems on minorities.
Steve
The rich ARE a “minority”–so they are the ones to blame for the problem.