Rose Kennedy Greenway

ablarc said:
Put out fires, police the streets, provide health insurance.
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I'll give you the first two. But the third ... Medicare does have $86 trillion in unfunded liabilities (about 6 times the roughly $14 trillion US GDP) and is expected by the Congressional Budget Office to be insolvent (bankrupt, belly up, bust, go the way of the Lehman-dodo bird) within 7 years.

And some doctors won't even see new Medicaid patients. So for all the bad rap the private insurers get and for all the very real problems with the private insurance system (some of them created by the insurers, some by the government, some by the very nature of comprehensive insurance), they have a more sustainable model than our elected officials have been able to cobble together.
 
Truth is, the government can afford to pay for almost anything: ruinous wars, social security, bank and insurance company bailouts, tax credits, medicare ...

It's all done by printing money, which in a deflationary economy such as we have, does no harm at all.

Most of my life, I've been hearing: "The bill will come due, eventually we'll have to pay the piper." But it hasn't happened yet, and I've been around long enough for it to have happened if it was going to.

It's called deficit spending, and it's scary if you believe in the bogey man.
 
Well, the government can "afford" to do things if it requisitions money from taxpayer pockets. But if it does a little too much of that, it kills its golden goose as incentives to build businesses and hire workers disappear.... And while it was able to afford two recent wars that have thus far cost an estimated $1 trillion (but have also meant lots of orders for large US employers), and it's generally considered that Social Security's $13 trillion or so of liabilities is manageable, and the banks are paying back most of their bailouts, 600% of GDP is thought to be beyond the ken of any creature known to man ... except maybe the controversial creature known as the VAT, which may well dent that 70% of GDP that is consumer spending.

There are a few maxims that can put a banal face on the situation: "What goes around comes around," "There's no free lunch," "What is unsustainable, ultimately, will not be sustained," "We're in the money / We're in the money / We've got a lot of what it takes to get along!" Maybe there'll be a new one yet: "The entitlements business is an ugly one."
 
How did we get so far off topic? This thread is about the Greenway.
 
^^We all jumped on the Rifleman's hobby horse and rode it here.
 
Let's talk about the Greenway, folks. I'm happy to have vendors, but there should be more of them spread throughout the park. And they are not a substitute for a public market, which is an entirely different concept.
 
Ron, I agree. I public market is different in concept from vendors. I also agree that both can exist and serve to improve the space as a whole, provided there is sufficient traffic and business to sustain them.

Blade, interesting article. Thank you for pointing me to it. Not sure they'd fare very well against Uncle Sugar though :).

As far as the efficieny of the government police and fire departments, it is, at the very least a debatable point. My argument that they are not terribly efficient can be made with a single word: unions.
 
Are unions to blame for the trillion dollars the last Republican administration borrowed and spent on nothing? Are unions to blame because the Greenway is an over-grown median strip? Nope, unions are the straw man in this argument.
 
Don't take the BujuB bait. He/she blames unions for everything from bad architecture to poor policy. Let's keep the discussion on the Greenway.

Does anyone know when the RKG planning study is supposed to be unveiled?
 
Scott said:
Are unions to blame for the trillion dollars the last Republican administration borrowed and spent on nothing?
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Are you referring to the "stimulus"? :D

Let's get back to the Greenway...
 
itchy, I think the Stimulus is the reason we don't have a full-fledged Depression at this time.
 
Nope, the $280 billion in stimulus funds that have been spent to date is about 2% of GDP -- hardly enough to stave off Depression, if it was impending. Of it, $110 billion has been in entitlement spending and $90 billion in tax breaks. Spending on contracts, grants and loans that were supposed to spur job creation has been about $80 billion.

In 2009, the US lost about 2.4 percentage points of GDP, versus 6 percentage points for Germany -- so even if every dollar of stimulus spending came back as GDP growth, we still wouldn't have been as badly off as Germany minus the stimulus.

The thing that kept us out of Depression would be the TARP -- the bank bailouts. I can't resist this pun: Let's give credit where it's due (get it?). A trashed financial system is what would have been really dangerous; a few road-paving projects and Medicaid grants to states equalling 1% of GDP may have sounded more productive to people, but it was the loathed bank bailouts that kept things from looking like It's a Wonderful Life.
 
ablarc said:
itchy, I think the Stimulus is the reason we don't have a full-fledged Depression at this time.
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We are in a depression. The Fed is trying to keep prices inflated so the major banks don't end up bankrupt with all those bad housing loans. Bottom line The american people don't make enough money to maintain these McMansions or their lifestyles. The stimulus money was just a waste and no matter how they play it, the inevitable will happen. A crash maybe 2011 or 2012 who knows but the amount of Debt this country has with unfunded liabilities is over 100 Trillion. So you do the math? The country tax revenues are probaby 1.5 Trillion a year. The current financial path the country is on is unsustainable.

This Country is bankrupt
 
Holy Shit! Bankrupt! Crash in 2011! What are we all doing on this message board? We've got to load up our bomb shelters with canned goods and chlorine tablets . . . Wait!! What was that?!?! I think I heard something? Oh god! The sky! It's the sky!!! It's falling . . . .
 
One thing I find reassuring is that if America ever does go down hard, we're taking the whole god damn world with us. And the super rich and old money have a bankfull of meaningless dollars.
 
On Thursday the Greenway is organizing a Neighborhood Cleanup on the NE Parks. Will be interesting to see what the turnout is. Might have made sense to do this on the weekend?

Neighborhood Cleanup Thursday, March 18, 2010, 9am ? 12pm
Location North End Parks

Work with the Rose Kennedy Greenway Horticulture staff to help clean up your neighborhood! Activities will include raking, weeding, deadheading, picking up trash, washing benches etc.
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