Ron Paul "The Only Candidate I Trust" Famed Black Swan Economist Reveals (Video)

Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable spent 17 weeks on the NYT bestseller list for good reason: it enlightened us to the vulnerability of, among other things, our financial system to random unpredictable events. Published in 2007, boy wasn’t that message timely, even if ignored?

This week, Taleb gave a rare interview in which he highlighted yet another timely message too many people seem to be ignoring. He warns the U.S. economy is in an even more precipitous position now, and more shockingly for such an academic, he explains, “Only one candidate, Ron Paul, seems to have grasped the issues and is offering the right remedies.”

Taleb refers to these issues as “the big four”:

1) deficits

2) the Fed

3) militarism (as opposed to defense)

4) resilience versus bailouts

On the issue of the Fed, Taleb says Paul “is going after the Fed; he’s only one with the guts to do it.”

He is quick to point out, “I am not a Libertarian, and I am not coming from a political standpoint, but from a risk-based view of the world.”

On risk, Taleb agrees with Paul: “You don’t gamble with future generations’ money, and you don’t gamble with hyperinflation.”

2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s economic platform of fiscal restraint, Federal Reserve skepticism, and antipathy toward self-feeding bureaucracies was praised today by one of the world’s premier risk managers, who endorsed elements of the 12-term Congressman from Texas’ path-breaking ‘Plan to Restore America.’ 

Nassim Taleb told CNBC that Dr. Paul’s fiscal Mayday in areas such as the threat of an impending hyperinflation tax that will harm low- and fixed-income Americans would further harm the nation’s overall economic standing. . . . In doing so, the best-selling author . . . praised the self-trained free-market economist Paul and said of Paul, “I’m a risk-based person. From my vantage point there’s only one candidate representing the right policies.”

Finally, Mr. Taleb said that Paul is the sole person in the American political landscape that has the courage to take on the Federal Reserve and recognizes that there is no conventional, quick fix to the ruinous financial situation.

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Former US Comptroller General David Walker: US Will Look Like Greece in 2 Years

In two years, the U.S. economy will resemble that of Greece when the debt crisis began there, says David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General and current CEO of the Comeback America Initiative.

The United States has never carried so much debt as it does today ever save during World War II, when such hefty borrowing and spending was needed to halt a devastatingly widespread war.

The United States, Walker tells the Worcester Economic Club, ranks 28th out of 34 countries in terms of fiscal responsibility, with the debt-heavy Greece coming in at last place.

"We’re about two years away from where Greece was when it had its debt crisis," Walker says, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

"The fact of the matter is government is not the engine of growth, innovation and job creation," Walker says, adding "spending is a bipartisan problem" that has gotten out of control in the last decade.

While federal spending was 2 percent of the gross domestic product in 1800, it hit 23.8 percent in 2011 and is on track to hit 36.8 by 2040, according to Walker.

Furthermore the U.S. spends double per person what other industrialized nations do on healthcare and education, while military spending should not be immune to budget cuts either.

"We can, we must and we will reduce defense spending," Walkers says.

President Barack Obama sent a $3.8 trillion budget proposal to Congress recently, and Republicans have pointed out that while the president is quick to hike taxes on the wealthy, he's not so quick to cut spending, which the country really needs.

"Instead of leading the effort to bring down our debt and make tough choices, the president is proposing that we spend more and more," says Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington state, according to CNN.

"All his wasteful spending puts us deeper in debt to China. All his tax hikes would destroy jobs and make it tougher to compete with China."

Money News

DEBT LIMIT - A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY (VIDEO)

This video parody of how Congress is handling the debt crisis is as funny as it is embarrassing. Vote out the bums who are running this country in 2012.

Wake Up America!

Great Graphic Showing National Debt as a Household Budget

 

America's ever-growing debt crisis is in the trillions -- more than $14 trillion, give or take a few billion.

That's a lot of zeros, numbers so large they're sure to make Americans numb when trying to get their arms around what it means to them.

But what would the federal debt crisis look like if you set it up as a household budget?

A heck of a lot simpler, according to new figures from one Tea Party group, which estimates the government "household" spends nearly twice as much as it takes in every year, has a credit card bill nearly seven times annual income and cuts back less than 2 percent of that spending in an effort to control the debt.

"We had discussed about how any citizen needs to understand what the proposed cuts mean," said Laurie Newsom, president of the Gainesville, Fla., Tea Party. "One of our members had figured it out and put it in terms of a household budget. If you ran a household with these numbers, you would see that it's simply not enough."

The group looked at some key figures, mainly tax revenue, the current federal budget, debt and budget cuts, and divided each figure by $100 million, in an effort to break it down into simple terms that most Americans can comprehend. The group posted its findings online and came up with a household with an average family income of $21,700. But that "family" spent nearly twice that -- $38,200 -- and has an existing credit card balance of a whopping $142,710.

"Everyone tries to keep things extremely simple for these things meant for general public consumption and of course there's a give-and-take with that," said Seth Rabinowitz, a partner with Silicon Associates, an economics-focused management consulting firm based in California. "I would make it clearer for the layman.They used the line 'Money the family spent'...but really that means, 'Money the family spent (last year and intends to spend this year again).' "

"However, when you remove those eight zeros, the $385 spending cuts obviously aren't even visible. They don't even make a dent," he said.

The bottom line, according to Newsom: "Cuts won't take care of it. You need business growth, which we wouldn't have in a regulatory environment."

Article by Perry Chiaramonte, Fox News