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From the Carbon Brief article

While some models projected less warming than we’ve experienced and some projected more, all showed surface temperature increases between 1970 and 2016 that were not too far off from what actually occurred, particularly when differences in assumed future emissions are taken into account.

So which model shows that since 2016 the temperature has gone down 0.56 degrees C? According to the same Goddard center, average global temperature since 1880 rose about .85 degrees C and in the last 2 years 65% of that increase went away. Show me the model that predicted that.

If taxes are, as you basically argue, a use tax/service fee - then let's structure it as such. The US Federal Government is spending about $4 trillion this year for the 320 million of us present. So let's go ahead and send every man, woman, and child a bill for $12,500. That's their fee for the service provided.

Many on the left want to use taxes not to pay for the goods and services received, but to redistribute wealth to "make it equal". THAT is the fundamental difference between Conservatism and Liberalism in the US: Conservatives want to see equality of opportunity - everyone starts the race at the same line. Liberalism seeks equality of results - we all cross the finish line at the same time. And for the liberal politicians, they see the tax code as a way to enforce their belief. All the while exempting themselves from such levels (for example, President Obama pays about 20% in taxes even though the typical 1%er like he is pays much more. Heck, he pays a lower rate than the top 5% even though he's towards the very top end of that group).

Bush didn't sit idly by. From a 2008 article:

Bush's first budget, written in 2001 — seven years ago — called runaway subprime lending by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "a potential problem" and warned of "strong repercussions in financial markets."

In 2003, Bush's Treasury secretary, John Snow, proposed what the New York Times called "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago." Did Democrats in Congress welcome it? Hardly.

"I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis," declared Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in a response typical of those who viewed Fannie and Freddie as a party patronage machine that the GOP was trying to dismantle. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," added Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.

Unfortunately, it was broke.

In November 2003, just two months after Frank's remarks, Bush's top economist, Gregory Mankiw, warned: "The enormous size of the mortgage-backed securities market means that any problems at the GSEs matter for the financial system as a whole." He too proposed reforms, and they too went nowhere.

In the next two years, a parade of White House officials traipsed to Capitol Hill, calling repeatedly for GSE reform. They were ignored. Even after several multibillion-dollar accounting errors by Fannie and Freddie, Congress put off reforms.

In 2005, Fed chief Alan Greenspan sounded the most serious warning of all: "We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk" by doing nothing, he said. When a bill later that year emerged from the Senate Banking Committee, it looked like something might finally be done.

Unfortunately, as economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, "the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter."

Had they done so, it's likely the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have occurred, or would have been of far less intensity. President Bush and the Republican Congress might be blamed for many things, but this isn't one of them. It was a Democratic debacle, from start to finish.

Am I?

Economic theories are not falsifiable, economic theories assume a human model (homo oeconomicus) that has nothing in common with real humans. Economists don't use scientific methods for experiments. Either you can't see it because you are an economist and was brainwashed to believe that economics is a science or you are misguided by applied mathematics used by them.

So according to this website, the device tax will bring in $29 Billion over the next 10 years.

That is a projection. The Medical Device Excise tax will harm the medical device industry leading to actual results much smaller than 29 billion. How many billion in income taxes will be lost because decent paying medical device jobs were lost due to this harm.

So according to this website, the device tax will bring in $29 Billion over the next 10 years.

So are they going to pass another tax to offset that missing revenue? Probably not. Any calls for repealing any revenue generating aspect of the ACA must be offset with revenue from somewhere else. As crappy as the ACA may or may not be, it is one of the few programs passed by Congress that have built in funding mechanisms.

That is why the ACA will work to some degree. But its still benefiting a particular industry (insurance) by allowing them to take 10% off the top of all healthcare spending. They have to be eliminated at some point.

Bill Gates is a college dropout. While less wealthy by many orders of magnitude I did finish college, and I took an economics course only because it seemed a less unpleasant or less boring of a limited list of choices in requirements for my (non economics) degree. Mr. Gates obviously hasn't checked Picketty's numbers, which are full of errors, many of which are documented by Financial Times here and further discussed by other financial websites such as Real Clear Markets and others. Actually, outside of picking good employees, marketing and business bullying, Gates wasn't really very brilliant at anything. Not even software development. It's no surprise he got sucked into Picketty's fictional account of economics.

it's not the bigotry, its the fact they have no zoning laws and some megacorp can build a fertilizer plant next to residential housing and kill people when it explodes
or build some oil refinery next to someone's home and poison their air and water

While I'm sure that Texas has totally managed to avoid the scourge of zoning laws, the California approach has its own drawbacks that are becoming apparent, especially as California is now practically speaking a one party state run by Democrats with super majorities able to pass whatever they want.

California: CEOs Rate It Worst U.S. Business Climate For 8 Years Running
Hundreds of Thousands Flee Democrat-Run California
Just How Bad is California’s Business Climate?
California, a bad bet for business - Why would new enterprises come to a state like this?
Texas v. California: The Real Facts Behind The Lone Star State's Miracle
State leaders closely watch migrating millionaires

1. As demonlapin points out, you don't understand how tax brackets work.

2. Tax experts have pointed out, literally hundreds of times, that the attacks against Romney's income tax rate were politically motivated sound-bites meant to outrage people like you, who don't understand how taxes work. Here are just a couple of links: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/01/19/media_promote_myths_about_romneys_15_99470.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/27/1137048/-The-myth-of-Romney-s-tax-rates

It took me ten seconds to google "Romney tax myths"

3. Your source includes no claim or evidence that Romney "cheats on [his] taxes." The ones who decide whether or not a person is "cheating on his taxes" is the IRS. To my knowledge, the IRS has never accused or indicted Romney of tax fraud. Please tell us all how you know otherwise.

lllll AJ

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.

- NYTimes, 2002

By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Red herring.com (1998)

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion

In July 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) "didn't do any subprime lending, because they can't: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn't meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income." (New York Times, July 18, 2008)
How did Krugman get it so wrong?

Exactly. Here's some reading for you.

Link

Varying valuations of silver and gold are the reason we left the Gold Standard. There was a time in the 1890's when a silver dollar face value was less than the silver content value, so the US Treasury stopped minting them (very exciting pieces for collectors as they have low mintages.)

Trust me, you don't ever want us to return to coins made of gold and silver.

Exactly. Here's some reading for you.

Link

Goldman (and JP Morgan?) don't owe the government anything because they were simply gifted enough money to stay afloat, free and clear. This was done by the government paying AIGs debts to Goldman, even though they were unregulated, non-FDIC arrangements. In other words, the banking industry set up a scapegoat (AIG) to receive bailouts for it and then die, which it did. So Goldman and the others get their cake ($$$ with 9 zeros) and eat it too (carping about how they never wanted and didn't need TARP).

So where do you live, exactly?

The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St Paul with a population of more than 3 million. Two block from me there's a privately owned convince store some of my neighbors work at, with many more small businesses on the same street. Several blocks in the opposite direction there's more small businesses. I'd say the area was Asian however there are also African shops, a cafe, and a German restaurant in walking distance. In a third direction there's more independent businesses. The fourth direction has nothing, the street ends in a "T". My sister has her own business, in accounting, with offices downtown.

However it's not just here with a large population. I moved here from Orlando, FL. There I knew people who owned their own business as well.

And there are a LOT more small businesses in Europe than in the U.S

Citation needed. Looking for myself, I found where the European Commission says "48% of Europeans agree with the statement 'You should not start a business if it might fail', compared with just 19% in the United States". According to the EC Europeans are more risk adverse that Americans not less. Continuing to look I found the article The United States Is the New Europe which says "While the government is hiring, the private sector is losing millions of jobs rather than creating them." It goes on about how Obama wants to make the US more like Europe, and that some of his policies harm small businesses. Continue... Again the EC provides something, Fact and figures about the EUs Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) says that more than 99% of Europe's businesses are SMEs.

Of those the average number of employees is 2, but some have more than 10 employees. A quick calculation says that for every one business that has 10 employees there has to be 10 businesses with only one employee, rounding error.

As for the business travellers--that was exactly my point. They shouldn't be flying at all, but the real reason they are doing it is not because they need to, but because they enjoy it

Some business has to be done face to face, and not via video. There's just too much communications that video misses. People may be just as unlikely to trust video conferencing for business as they would be for tele-surgery or remote surgery.

They want to "network," play golf and socialize ,and basically waste all of our money (whether as investors or customers paying higher prices for products). It's a pretty appalling practice in this day and age!

I knew one person who ran her own business as a web designer and she frequently flew. I find it highly unlikely that she, or most any other business owner, would waste money flying when video works. Fact is is video does not work all the tyme.

Falcon

Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan.

Sure — I agree with you... Actual income and the amount of savings are just parts of the picture — banks have spent decades figuring out their formulas. They already want to give mortgages, because it is profitable (in a Capitalist society anyway), so the bank, that overestimates the risk (and thus turns away some good customers) loses to competitors. In a free society, though anyone ought to be able to set their own standards and thresholds...

What the article was talking about was that lowering the requirements: ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

See, "many borrowers" are "a notch below", our standards, so let's lower our standards. This was not done to make money (a properly Capitalist mind would've rejected it in a heartbeat), but to "help people"... And, hey, it worked against soo well, one may suspect Clinton and the rest of the people pushing this in 1999 to have done this on purpose. Oh, and then — the masterminding brilliance of hanging this catastrophe around McCain and Republicans! Evil anti-Capitalist geniuses...

Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage.

$100k per annum is not poor. Average salary in the US was just over $42k (gross) in 2005. Your using this number suggests, you don't really have a grasp of facts...

there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores

Of course, there was, even if nobody said so outright. You don't need to explicitly demand lowering standards — it is much easier to simply accuse the lender of racism... Since the CRA's inception in 1977, it is estimated, the banks have given at least $10bln to the non-profit groups (such as ACORN) — to keep the pressure at tolerable levels. But $10bln is nothing — just "the cost of doing business", passed onto the rest of us.

The banks were paying these assholes off, resisted suicidal changes to their risk-assessment and remained profitable. Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load crappier mortgages to the Fannie Mae. When this happened, the banks caved in, because their risk went down dramatically — they no longer had to keep the crappy mortgage, which they wouldn't have given without undue pressure in the first place, on their own books...

And thus the bubble began to inflate. There were suddenly fewer homes, than people able to buy them, which increased the prices. Our efficient Capitalist economy responded immediately with feverish construction activity. There were some early warning signs, but they were ignored. People unable to keep up with payments could refinance for a while (because the market values of their homes kept increasing), but that's not indefinite either. Banks' attempts to foreclose were met with the same resistance from the same non-profits — including the brilliant idea of littering the lawns of bank-executives with plastic sharks, and more of the same race-

potential

It appears as if that ship has sailed. Krugman did some incredibly important work when it comes to trade, but his opinions over the last decade have certainly had a hint of douchebaggery. I haven't really followed him (I'm afraid I'm not really into hero worship when it comes to economics), but it certainly seems as if this choice was largely political.