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Quote: "It's actually quite a smart move."

It's NOT smart. Giving away free money just makes prices rise. Those buying new cars will pay more. Why would a car company give a discount when the extra money is free?

The U.S. government has NO money. The U.S. government is DEEPLY in debt, more in debt than any organization has ever been in the history of the world. This bill would be funded by the Chinese, Saudi, and Dubai governments, among others, and eventually by inflation of the U.S. dollar. Inflation makes everyone pay more, forever.

Have you checked the prices of used SUV's lately? The prices for used cars have gone UP, because people don't want to spend the money for a new car.

Many people with old cars drive old cars because they drive very, very little. There's no yearly mileage requirement in the bill. The fuel economy will not be what the bill's sponsors say.

Someone who drives an "old clunker" now will not want to buy a 2004 or later model car, and probably would not be able to buy a car that expensive. Also, there are many small old cars that get close to the 18 miles per gallon specified in the bill, and many 2004 model year or newer "fuel efficient" cars that get not much more. Someone could, for example, trade in an old Toyota and buy a 2004 SUV or pickup that gets worse gas mileage, but still good gas mileage for that "class" of an SUV or pickup.

Someone who gives a 1998 car to the recyclers that runs fine but gets 16 miles per gallon and buys a far, far more expensive 2004 or newer car that gets 28 miles per gallon, and drives 5,000 miles per year, saves 133 gallons of gas per year. Under the bill, that person gets a $1,500 credit.

That 1998 car doesn't get "recycled" of course. If it runs well, it becomes part of illegal traffic in inexpensive cars for people who don't have jobs. Or, it becomes illegal traffic to Mexico. Cities and states will hire more policemen to prevent the illegal activity.

To get the $1,500 credit, the owner gave a car worth $3,000 or more! That's if the car was in a condition that it was actually being used. Obviously, no one will do that.

What will mostly happen, of course, is that people who want to buy a 2004 or newer car will first buy a damaged car in "drivable condition" that has been sitting in someone's driveway not being used. The buyer will give the junker to the recyclers and will use the free money from the U.S. government to save a little on the newer car. But the savings won't be much, because the prices of all cars will rise.

The biggest effect of that bill, other than lowering the value of the dollar and raising the price of newer cars, would be to cause the price of worthless cars in "drivable condition" to go up enormously.

What pocket change?

Lets not forget which president ended his presidency with a surplus.

Not Bill Clinton, that's for sure. The debt never dropped under his watch. Chart

You said, "The US government is in debt, but that's not a big problem..."

A lot of people think the unprecedented debt is a huge problem. The debt makes the price of everything go up, stealing wealth from the average person.

We in america don't actually believe in budgets...
National Debt Clock

Call me a dewey eyed optimist

I was that once, but it was so long ago.... :)

or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature

What do you mean by "anti-corporate"? I'd just settle for them requiring the banks and financial institutions to abide by the laws already on the books (but not enforced), and putting back the regulatory controls they've stripped away over the last 10 years (which would have prevented most of the excesses we are suffering from now).

"Oh, but we don't need government oversight, because the 'Market' is Self-Correcting(TM), just get government out of their way and everything will be hunky-dory!"

Yea, that self-correction seems to have worked out real well for all of us, don't you think? :)

Whose asking for anti-corporate? I'm just asking for Common Sense(TM). Greed is NOT inheriently good, it has to be regulated just like any other disruptive, base human emotion/tendency is.

will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere

They're already taking their jobs elsewhere (to any place where the labor market is even more exploitable then it is here), so their "business" is actually costing us more in the long run anyway (a net negative as wealth is leaving our country and NOT returning).

How long can the middle class go on buying their widgets without a middle-class level of income? So how long?

Our middle class is shrinking, wages have been stagnant for more than a decade while the cost of living skyrockets, but the government keeps spending money (to bailout the rich from their own greedy excesses, no less!) as if it were still the 1950's and our middle-class (and economy as a whole) was still in the post-WW2 boom cycle. So how long before the rest of the world stops buying up our debt, because they've lost faith in our ability to pay back the 10 trillion we already owe them? Try this if big numbers don't depress you (3.5 BILLION USD PER FSCKING DAY! - Just Incredible).

They're starting to fear we can no longer recognize Common Sense(TM) anymore even if it came up and bit us on the nose. We are ALL living a lifestyle paid for with *borrowed* money, a gravy train that can't last forever (its under severe stress now). So how long?

And certainly Palin has never expressed that belief.

Sure about that?

What's so smart about believing that democrats only want to tax those making over $250,000/year? They bring out that bedtime fairy tale every election.

And the Republicans have done that much better?

"Where does that leave its citizens?" $9,788 billion in the hole

Fixed.

I think that honor is shared among a long line of democrats and republicans.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/history.gif

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/inflation.gif

what the hell are you talking about..look at links you posted. The debt skyrocketed mostly in Reagan and first bush,..then started to slow down and even went down in clinton. GWB then took it to totaly new levels. How is it shared between democrats and republicans?

I think that honor is shared among a long line of democrats and republicans.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/history.gif

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/inflation.gif

what the hell are you talking about..look at links you posted. The debt skyrocketed mostly in Reagan and first bush,..then started to slow down and even went down in clinton. GWB then took it to totaly new levels. How is it shared between democrats and republicans?

Although I'm sure you and I agree on how big of a jackass GWB is, you can hardly say he *created* the national debt. I think that honor is shared among a long line of democrats and republicans.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/history.gif

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/inflation.gif

Although I'm sure you and I agree on how big of a jackass GWB is, you can hardly say he *created* the national debt. I think that honor is shared among a long line of democrats and republicans.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/history.gif

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/inflation.gif

a debt of $25000 per family

You're a little late to the party with that number. You're more than a hundred thousand dollars low for the canonical family-of-four.

Check the OMB's own numbers straight from the White House on when that debt was rung up. Don't forget to check what it looks like when you correct for inflation; they've got those numbers in some of those too, easy to find. A little cut and paste and fill-down arithmetic.

You might think you own your house free and clear. Not really. Rich people effectively hold a mortgage on it, and you and your children will be paying interest on it until you pay it off. Guess who's getting rich on the interest we're paying on over nine trillion dollars of debt. Is it you?

Don't forget to find out who mortgaged your children's future. Don't believe anybody, because you can damned well bet the people who actually did it are lying to you.

OMFG!

It normally goes without saying that Democrats will spend less than Republicans.

What? Did you get that backwards? I agree that republicans have lost a LOT of thier small government luster over the last 8 years but democrats still want to outspend them.

Take a look at the bar graphs of the national debt on this page:

http://brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html

Notice the change between 1980 and 1990. Compare that to the change between 1990 and 2000. Then notice the change after 2000.

Myth: Democrats in Congress created the deficit

There are some that would argue that the US is already broke. The creditors just hadn't started calling yet...

US National Debt is $9.5 Trillion. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ I have a real hard time seeing how US can ever recover from being so far in the hole.

Let me see if I can convert that to units I can understand [...] how about 0.02 Wars on Terror

In discussions about US government programs I often hear Iraq war comparisons. It's understandable - there are a lot of exciting things we could have done with the $500 billion we've spent in Iraq.

However, we've spent that money; we can't un-spend it. So we don't have $500 billion sitting around waiting for an application. What we have is a toilet that's had $500 billion flushed down it, a budget deficit and $9,410 billion in national debt.

Maybe we never want to pay off that debt; that certainly seems to be the view of our politicians. But if we want to get the national debt under control we have to realise that, to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, ten billion here and ten billion there and pretty soon you're talking about serious money.

$9.3 trillion and growing, brought to you by sober, enlightened representatives.

Of course, thats not to say that we shouldn't try to reduce the deficit. We should, but thats a different issue...

Sources: http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

We might still be screwed but certainly not to the extent that we are now. Estimates of what this war will end up costing - if it is ended soon with a complete withdrawal of US forces - are in the $3 Trillion dollar range. That used to be over half of our National debt.

No more. The US National debt is now $9.4 Trillion. Our debt is increasing by $1.6 Billion dollars every single day. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

The National debt was around $5 Trillion when Bush took office. As noted above, it's now approaching $10 Trillion. He has basically doubled it during his two terms. So, yeah, we would still be screwed without the war but we are especially screwed with it.

And 4,000 Americans are really screwed - they're dead. And another 30-40,000 suffer from various levels of injuries up to missing limbs, missing eyes, missing parts of their brains, extreme disfigurement, etc.

Any other comments are superfluous.

If we had taken the nearly 1 trillion dollars we have currently spent on the war and invested in this country's infrastructure we would not be in so many shit holes at once.

I have to assume you mean our energy infrastructure. Our raw materials and manufacturing capacity loss is more about pay scale than infrastructure. I think improving our energy infrastructure would be great, but it wouldn't have much immediate quality of life improvements for most civilian Americans. A different handful of people would be getting rich right now, but that's about it. One of the longer term dangers to our economy is the loss of the dollar as the international currency. That loss is largely caused by our ballooning deficit. A "New Deal" spending spree at home wouldn't help any more than the current military spending spree. Currently the national debt is about $30k per citizen, so assume you had a $30k lower quality of life and that is what we are likely to balance out at when China stops funding our spending habits.

I think we should be more worried about paying down our debt http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ than the trillion dollar budget. And even still $20b $1t. Especially considering that the dollar is down in value which makes that number look even worse when we pay out to foreign companies.

Layne

More recent information about U.S. government debt:

U.S. Government Debt Graph (2007 Budget data) (Good for a quick view.)

U.S. Government Debt Clock

U.S. Government Debt

Yippee! At 4.7B, we only need 2K of said blocks (give or take) to pay off the national debt!

(Or a little more sobering, 4.7B pays off 1/20th of one percent of our debt.)

actually, the deficit is only a few hundred billion per year, about 9 trillion is indeed the debt.

>The US is rich

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

> So I guess we're just totally broke?
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

because it owes far more than it could ever payback and the the USA has been bankrupt since at least 1971
http://www.energybulletin.net/12125.html
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

If you think thats not a problem i suggest you talk to an argentianian about what happens if all the banks
go bankrupt . Heres a hint , having a fat salary and swanky car won't mean sh*t anymore .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_debt_restructuring

Toodle-pip
Amias

And that's assuming that it ever came to war. I don't want to be blasé about the risk of conflict, but keep in mind that US debt isn't quite critical but has become very, very large. A good portion of that debt is to China (another big chunk is borrowed against the public via social security, et al). The US government has essentially mortgaged the country. There doesn't have to be a war before a US citizen finds she's working for a Chinese company and renting from a Chinese landlord.

Now the US has an enormous military (there had to be something to show for all that borrowing and it certainly wasn't in education and health care, yes?). You could say that the US could tell the rest of the World to go and fuck itself and renege on the debt. But that's extremely unlikely because (a) the richest people of the US who have the greatest influence to bring about such a thing are those who would lose the most in any sort of international isolation or chaos, (b) the whole economic structure of the US would go into freefall and (c) it would be hard to fund the US military in an economic crisis anyway, at least for any sustained period.

Besides, it's not in the USA's creditor's interests for the US to default on debt or go bankrupt or turn into a military dictatorship. The percentage is in keeping it just sufficiently under the economic thumb that it can be milked in perpetuity and nudged into selling off its institutions and resources group by group. That's one of the nice things about a heavily privatised society. It makes it convenient for the country to be sold without non-radical means of preventing it.

Well, if it was fabricated, then the entire world and UN must have been fooled by(sic) that hoax.
Wilson was "in" on the hoax and for his honest and decent service to his country, his wife, Valerie Plame was "outed" by the Bush administration as a warning to others that they'd had better toe the line and go along with the cherry picked "intelligence".

Please provide evidence of this
Hours after the UN endorsed Resolution 1483 (creation of the Development Fund for Iraq), Bush signed Executive Order 13303: in part. "..any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void", with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and "all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein."
This executive order means if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco, for example, touch Iraqi oil, anything they do with it is immune from prosecution in the US.
The fund is used by the by U.S. Export-Import Bank to back the financing of projects typically awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton subcontractors.
In other words, it is a slush fund for well-connected US corporations.
This adminstration has bankrupted the country while enriching favored insiders.

That's what happened in Gaza. The radicals won, and instituted their own pirate state, complete with oppressive laws and gangs of looting thugs. Same thing happened in Somalia and some African Islamic nations, too
So, why aren't we occupying those regions too? All of these are breeding grounds for OBL camps, right? Drain the swamp? No, nothing to pillage there. No enough ROI in monetary terms, security of the nation be damned.

Iraq is considered a quagmire by many, but perpetual warfare is exactly what this crooked administration wanted. We can't leave, ever, and this is exactly what the Bush administration intended. Pure evil.

How is this not like Presidential candidates promising tax rebates and such during campaigns? They are affectively buys people's votes with their own money.

The word you're looking for is "effectively," and that's the word makes all the difference.

There's a huge difference between buying votes with money and buying votes with promises. I know, this will probably get modded flamebait, but it's directly relevant to the comment.

The most blatant vote-buying scheme in recent history that I can remember was the Bush "tax rebate" scheme that he rode into office on in 2000. It basically worked like this: "If you elect me (Bush), I'll send you a check for up to $600." Unfortunately, that was perfectly legal, people got their checks from the government, and because of that and other foolish financial decisions, our country went from having a budget surplus to having more debt than it's ever had in history, over 9 trillion dollars and counting.

I'd love to see all elected politicians charged some percentage of the debt that the policies they enact rack up. If they rack up a few trillion dollars in national debt, they should rack up a few million in personal debt. If they end up with a surplus, they should get a bonus based on that same percent. If we could pass something like that, then and only then I think we would start seeing the start of real fiscal responsibility.

> Why?

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Any more questions?

"Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region has $3,500bn under management. They face an inflationary threat and do not want to import an interest rate policy set for the recessionary conditions in the United States" ...
"why bear the risk in these dramatically changed circumstances? We think that a fall in dollar to $1.50 against the euro is not out of the question at all by the first quarter of 2008," he said.

"This is nothing like the situation in 1998 when the crisis was in Asia, but the US was booming. This time the US itself is the problem,"

The Sub-Prime Market imploded, which has been very bad for US banks, like NetBank (which was just shut down by the FDIC).

The budget defecit swelled to 117 billion dollars in August. For those keeping track, that's up 80% year over year, with spending up 30% month over month.

Oh, and for icing on the cake - it looks like housing sales in some areas are down 46% year over year, or 25% month over month.

So, please, we have enough problems - let's not go deliberately taunting the biggest superpower in the world (at least any more - with our 9 trillion in debt, we're not going to be the "world police" much longer.) Also, the "but our GDP grows faster than our debt" argument doesn't cut it when the GDP is shrinking, the currency is in the toilet, and we still get to pay the interest on all that debt.

>>> with what money shall the US consume if it does not manufacture anything to sell for profit?

What are you talking about? You do what the rest of us do and put it on your credit card

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ .. America's all out of money but they still seem to be going

I attribute nothing to that republican congress under Clinton. Remember, they bitterly fought every move Clinton made, including TWICE completely shutting down the house/senate (http://www.cnn.com/US/9512/budget/budget_battle/i ndex.html) when they failed to approve a budget. They voted down dozens of Democratic bills that would have lowered taxes on the middle and lower class, raised taxes several times, and approved spending for programs that were unnecessary. Were it not for Republican roadblocks, experts estimate an additional 50-75% more would have been shaved from the debt, much of that carrying into Bush's first few years, every single one of which has increased our national debt at a record breaking pace (since WWII).

It took every effort Clinton and the Democrats had, a full 8 years, to change record breaking rises into a 3 year drop. The 2 years that dropped the most were bush's first 2 years in office, during which time, he undid most of the legislation previously passed (or simply ignored it) and we again have 5 straight years in a row of record breaking growth. In fact, based on information from http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html, each year a republican has been in power has seen a higher increase than a Democrat since the 1970s. Prior to that, the debt was basically flat back to 1945 where it in 3 years dropped almost $0.5T.

Comparing now to Clinton's early years, I pay significantly more in tax (property, sales, AND income), have fewer community services available, worse performing schools, higher fuel prices, and worse roads. Even in IT my salary increases are not out pacing my expenses year over year. They were in Clinton's time. I don't give a rats ass if the man had his cock sucked or not. He was a financial genius, was loved by other nations, and did more not only for the USA in his 8 years than any other president in 50, but also improved our overall image with the rest of the world. In 6 years, bush and his congress undid all that, and actually set us back to a worse state than before Clinton ever started the recovery process from Bush Sr. and Reagan's years.

I am NOT a Democrat, and may very well vote Republican for president this time through, but you can bet I'm not voting Republican for ANY single republican seat up in congress. It's really the congress that has been fucking us for the last 20 years. How many Republicans have been accused, investigated, or imprisoned for crimes in office in the last 20 years, and how many Democrats? Granted, Bush has likely been the worst president in our countries history, but other than the money blown on his Daddy's war, and a few bills he signed that CONGRESS passed, he really hasn't been a leader at all, and has not proposed any bad legislation that the Republican party didn't ask him to. He's simply a dumb puppet, and does what he's told. He's the Republican's perfect candidate. Some of the Republicans running now for president won't be so easily swayed. Of course, looking at the Democratic offering, there's a few there that, if they actually get a party nomination, I don't think anyone can stand against.

It looks like we might be heading towards a different sort of singularity than was previously envisioned. A world where the US self-destructs (just look at the debt clock), ripped apart by capitalizm mixed with profiteering and greed among the well-connected, and the RotW (Rest of the World).

Some of the economic projections for later this century are downright ugly - with a US with a population of up to half a billion, but a permanently wrecked economy, as we hit the upper limits of what's possible, and the rest of the world catches up, then surpasses the US in terms of GNP. Both China and India will have larger economies by the middle of the century - and less debt.

O RLY?

For those too lazy to click, every US citizen (man, woman, and child) owes $30,000 in unpaid debt to the US government to pay off loans made to keep their taxes so "low".

I'm hoping it gets back down to something rational, because otherwise it distorts the economy too much. We're already seeing layoffs in industries that were a big part of "adding fake perceived value", like the composite flooring crap; hopefully, when it all gets "sorted out" we'll be able to move forward again.

The real long-term threat is the undermining of people's confidence in the economy, and the government's ability to manage. Bush's latest "doing jail time for perjury is too harsh a punishment for my buddies" is just the latest kick at the can that started with Ford being duped into pardoning Nixon.

Couple this with unsustainable raises in the public debt, as well as rising interest rates (which will make that debt rise even faster), and you have the ingredients for civil unrest, possibly even a movement by "have" states to secede. What practical tools can a bankrupt federal government use against a state like California declaring independence, and taking a few neighboring states with it, especially if a pro-secession president is elected?

What you humourously call the "milkies" are not the only ones who profit from military expenditure. Because the military process is funded by expanding the US Federal Debt it creates (paid for out of our future tax burdens) even greater profits for the shareholders of the central banks . Read the whole book to learn who these shareholders are, and thus who effectively owns America, its government and its people (and also who is richer than Bill G). The "central bank" in the USA is of course the privately owned Federal Reserve. The bankers funded both sides in both World War I and WWII.

Attempting for the first time in our history to amend our constitution for the sole purpose of discriminating against a group of people based solely upon how they were born out of ignorant religious based hatred *is* pure religious extremism.

Sorry, I'm completely missing your reference here. I didn't know Presidents could amend the consitution, but that aside, what are you talking about?

Ahhh, the old tired "but Clinton" whine. You lose.

That is the whole POINT of this thread! You claim that it is impossible to cannot compare the parties, so I am showing you how they are essentially the same. To paraphrase Michael Palin, an argument isn't the automatic gainsaying of what the other guy says. You can't automatically ignore counter arguments just because they don't validate your postulates. That's silly.

Followed up with an idiotic lie

Oooh! A link war! Let me play too! How about this? Or this?

The fact that you can't pull your head out of your partisan hackery...

I did not vote for Bush. Either Bush. The last Republican I voted for was Reagan in his first term. I apologize for that, but it was my first election, and the giddiness of the moment overwhelmed me.

I'm only trying to point out that Democrats aren't the sacred angelic beings you pretend they are. I would not have even bothered responding, except for your stupid signature about murdering people.

I'm not now, nor have I ever been a member or supporter of any major political party.

Let me guess... you voted for Kerry?

Lucus must want money. He certainly wouldn't make another IJ movie because it would be interesting. It's pathetic when a billionaire is so addicted to money that he will do anything to get it, especially when what he will do to get money is sell people on the idea that violence is glamorous. We have the Iraq war because so many U.S. citizens are excited, not disgusted, by violence, any violence. And the war has made the U.S. poor and bankrupt.

--
My corruption summary. Please make your own.

The only way that http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ is going to count downwards is if the American government spends less or taxes more. This is an unppleasant reality that politicains don't want to raise because they'll get kicked out.

This is an unppleasant reality that politicains don't want to raise because they'll get kicked out.

the deficit is going down because of increased revenues.

      Excuse me, but in which parallel dimension is the deficit going down? Certainly not in this one. In this reality, the deficit is increasing 2.08 billion dollars per DAY. See for yourself: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

      Or are you under the misguided impression that the US is "winning the war on the deficit" just like it is "winning the war on terror"?

Bugger the costs, just charge it: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Anything that is unproductive ulimately ends up here: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Unfortunately most of the people in your group do the exact same thing and try to impose your values and beliefs on the Republicans. Gay marriage, abortion, freedom to practice religion, etc.

Where exactly are the liberals forcing Republican women to have abortions, or forcing heterosexual Republicans to marry gays? Sorry, they aren't forcing their beliefs on you. If the Republicans don't want to have abortions, don't have them. Don't want to be in a gay marriage, don't marry one. No forcing going on. Republicans are forcing their views on others by preventing everyone from doing things they disagree with.

Freedom to practice religion is a good thing. You are free to practice yours. Just don't try to force yours on me.

The Fed *SHOULD* be running a debt in the bad times, it should be running up lots and lots of debt, and in good times it should be making a surplus.

Then the only 'good times' we've had in the past 26 years was for a few when a DEMOCRAT was in office and rejecting crappy budgets by Republicans who were putting too much in them. The debt has been growing at an astronomical rate for the past 26 years. Anyone who thinks this is sustainable or a good idea is an idiot.

Maybe think a little for yourself rather than repeat partisan talking points.