Milton Friedman – the Free Lunch Myth

Federal Revenues and Outlays

Real deficit in 2011 was $5 Trillion

The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Link

The War on Boys

Interesting article talking about how young men are losing ground in education, emotional health and jobs

Part 1

Part 2

Milton Friedman, Phil Donahue and Greed (1979)

Debt Limit – A Guide to American Federal Debt Made Easy

Socialism in the Classroom

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little..
The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that.
Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

Disruptive Innovation by Clayton Christensen

I recently attended Gartner Group’s Annual Symposium held in Orlando, FL Oct 2011. At the symposium Clayton Christensen gave the best presentation/keynote that I have ever heard in the 12+ years that I have attended. He talked to the IT audience about Disruptive Innovation. This presentation is an hour long, but it is incredibly good and would highly recommend it:

LINK

Hilarious video from Jon Stewart about Unions using cheap labor

Link to video

50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy

Link