096 has breached containment

Not really. Its trees from a time before micro organisms evolved the ability to eat dead trees. These days, the solar energy collected by trees will get used to power the metabolisms of fungi before those trees can get buried and eventually become new coal & petroleum.

I suppose an impact from a sufficiently large asteroid could turn the entire crust of the planet into magma, sterilizing it and therefore opening the possibility that new oil might be created some day.

The value of stocks has no direct impact on the volume of currency that exists, and printing literal paper money is only a tiny fraction of the new currency generated by the banking system. The person you replied to is correct. Most new money is created by banks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

As banks hold in reserve less than the amount of their deposit liabilities, and because the deposit liabilities are considered money in their own right (see commercial bank money), fractional-reserve banking permits the money supply to grow beyond the amount of the underlying base money originally created by the central bank.

For example, if banking regulators set the ‘reserve ratio’ at 1:10, and you deposit $1,000 at your bank, then your bank would be able to give out loans worth $10,000. The effect on the volume of currency that exists is the same as if the US Mint printed an additional $9,000.

One of the problems with that system is that all that money is owed back to the bank + interest. However, there’s not actually enough currency in existence to pay back all the loans + interest, so the banks inevitably get to confiscate people’s property when they default on loans. Remember that the banks invented that money from thin air via fractional reserve lending - now they’ve turned that thin air into physical, tangible wealth at no cost to them.

Another problem with that system is that big loans - i.e. new currency entering the system - take time for their full inflationary effects to be felt. The “people” who get the big loans can spend the new currency at its full value, but by doing so they put enough new currency into circulation to devalue it via inflation.

One of the consequences of the fractional reserve lending system is that increasing the ‘reserve ratio’ will decrease the rate of inflation. Less new loans are issued, so less new currency enters the system. The banking lobby does not want this to become common knowledge, for obvious reasons. Federal taxes can be eliminated entirely, and the regulatory effect those taxes would have had on inflation can be substituted by taking it out of the banker’s profits by reducing the amount of new currency the banks are adding to the economy via fractional reserve lending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory

Ironic. We could afford more flags and guns if we had a single payer healthcare system and stopped overpaying for terrible insurance that doesn’t actually cover you when you need it.

what taking damage does to a mf’er

I wish the Democrats would lay off the gun control.

Regarding taxes, both parties fail in different ways. Democratic tax policy fails at the Federal level - low/zero taxes at the Federal level makes sense because the Federal government hasn’t needed to collect taxes since establishing the Federal Reserve banking system and moving off the gold standard. Republican tax policy fails at the State level - low taxes at the State level makes less sense, because the states actually need the money to pay for programs that market forces do not provide for.

Neither party is doing enough to make our military industry more efficient, less organizationally top heavy, and less corrupt. Spending resources on war is bad, but losing a war to tyrants like China or Russia would be worse. I want USA to have more weapons for less money.

Both parties fail when it comes to welfare programs. Republicans would implement sadistic and self-destructive abolition of all safety nets. Democrats craft welfare programs that pull the rug out from under people as soon as they start down the road toward financial stability, trapping people in poverty by removing the safety net too soon. For example, Medicaid is the only good healthcare available in this backwards nation, but you need to stay poor to get it - earn too much money and you’ll end up poorer than when you started.