Bigthink - User Ideas Feed

Farmers are the economy's litmus test

Bigthink — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:29:57 +0100

I am a farmer my family owns and operates a fairly large grain farm in Southern Illinois. Everyone is worried about the economy latly and i just really dont think its as bad as everyone else thinks. Grain farmers like myself are doing extremely well right now. If you look at history farmers are the ones who feel the pain or prosperity before everyone else and right now we are feeling some serious prosperity.

the theory... farmers are the economy's litmus test

my reasoning behind this theory... farmers constantly face huge adversities everyone faces adversity but not on the same scale or frequency as farmers the ability of farmers to make it through these trials (without HELP OR HINDERANCE from the government) tells how everyone else will be doing in the next half decade because farmers are somewhat average income people who are connected to international trade between the U.S. and other countries so whether or not they are doing good tells whether or not everyone else will do good when the big economy catches up with local economies

who do you think is the most overrated president in history?

Bigthink — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:12:16 +0100

: in my personal opinion Theodore Roosevelt is the most overrated president in history. He had bad foriegn policy and took America off the gold standard (the worst move in the history of economics as far as i am concerned) then he left after four years in office then came back after four more years and ran against taft splitting the republican party and handing the country over to the democrats during on of the most important times in history had he just let taft win his second term the american economy would have become better even after roosevelt messed it up because taft was good with money

stocks or realestate?

Bigthink — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:31:06 +0100

personally i prefer to invest in stocks because of the tax advantages and the lack of requirment to deal with people who tend to complicate things but if i can be convinced that the advantages of realestate far outway its disadvantages i am willing to look into it so if anyone has any opinions one way or the other i would be very glad to hear them

Replacing Income Tax with Sales Tax is the best thing to do

Bigthink — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:38:21 +0100

: Let me start off by saying that it is wrong to tax people for being smart with money! Taxes should be based on the standard of living that you have. Currently the way that the tax system is set up actually discourages people from being smart with they're money because the government will tax the life out of you for any profit that you make on stocks and even more so in real estate and other investments. This would make all Americans smarter with their money because there is nothing that we hate more than paying our taxes. People would save more of their money because there would be more tax incentives to do so. (you wouldnt pay taxes on anything that you save because you arent buying ne thing) In turn this would make the need for things like social security and medicare less so it would be better for the nations economy. Some people say that doing this would stop the economy but it most certaintly would not. People would still buy stuff and most people would pay about the same in taxes but people who sacrifice things they want for a better net worth. And, people who don't take out loans to buy things that they cant afford in the first place would be rewarded because they are not being a burden on the system.