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McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing
Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "Senator McCain decried Tea Party 'Hobbits' on Wednesday for their failure to support the GOP's debt deal, at times reading from a WSJ editorial that began the analogy. The Tea Party fired back, with a prominent member noting on CNN that McCain had been corrupted by the ring of power. The full text of his floor remarks should be in the Congressional Record later today."
... if the US Government had the same budget as a Peter Jackson movie we wouldn't be in this fiscal mess, now would we? ;-)
One does not simply walk into Metaphor.
Ok, which one of you hacked his teleprompter?
McCain was the last Democrat I voted for in a Presidential election
The Tea Party aren't Hobbits by any stretch of the imagination - hobbits are more like 1970's back-to-the-land hippie organic farmer types.
No, the Tea Party seems to be much more like the Easterlings, who's society has been thoroughly corrupted by promises of power regardless of the decency or lack thereof of the individual members. And Obama seems to be playing the role of Denethor, trying to hold back the tide but not really being able to do so and kinda ambiguous about where he's loyalties really lie.
I am officially gone from
I think we have to admit that McCain does bare some resemblance to Smeagol. I think the problem with the Tea Partiers is that they see it as being their way or nothing. I understand their perspective and conviction but I think the issue is that they want to do it ALL at once. No compromise, every vote they make must include everything they think has to be done for the next 20 years of government. I think the problem is if we do it their way the whole economy is going to come crashing down. People complain about government spending but then seem to forget that a large % of the US is employeed (directly or indirectly) by the government. You YANK that out all at once and I think we'll be reminiscing about the good old days of only 10% unemployment.
So with Tolkien done and Superheros on the way out what's next?
Krispy Kreme the movie?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
So with Tolkien done and Superheros on the way out what's next?
Crossovers! "Saru-man, Saru-man, does whatever a Saru can"
If you hate government so much, move to Somalia. Seriously.
If you love water so much, why not move to the middle of the Atlantic?
The problem is not government in general. The problem is TOO MUCH government, and too much CENTRALIZED government. You have much more power influencing your local and state government than you will ever have trying to influence the federal government. This should be obvious when you consider that 48/50 US Senators don't care about you or your state.
If we had more local control over our lives, your argument would carry much more weight. You could say, "If you hate government so much, move to Mississippi. Seriously." and you would know that the person you are talking to could truly move to Mississippi. Of course, if they are already in MS, you could tell them to keep their noses out of your state's business.
It's all clearly explained in the 10'th Amendment. Unfortunately, all three branches of our government seem to ignore it, even though they've all taken an oath to defend it. Clearly, the 10th Amendment means SOMETHING. I mean, the founders wouldn't have put in there for nothing. It's not like they had nine amendments and said, "Let's make up one more to make in an even 10."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
If citizens actually had free choice in which government programs to fund as well as how much to contribute, the size of the US government (measured both in revenue and power over the people) would be 1/10 the size of today's utter monstrosity.
And if citizens literally had to cut a check at the beginning of every year, rather than pay through deliberately-obfuscated systems designed to hide the true cost of government, the size of government would be cut again by 90%.
No. It would not, unless, of course, you have some facts to back up this remarkable assertion. No? Didn't think so. Please stop parroting stuff you've heard parroted by various Fox News personalities. Simplistic "solutions" like this sound attractive until one spends more than ten seconds thinking about them. Then their absurdity becomes obvious. And no, I don't mean fiscal responsibility is absurd. I mean that it's absurd to suggest that the government we want can operate on a tiny fraction of it's current revenue. Not even close. So this suggestion, one that is near and dear to Tea Bagger hearts everywhere, is nothing but an absurd distraction from the critical process of meaningful reform, reform that actually has a chance of solving the very real problems we are facing. It is the folly of indulging this absurd distraction that Senator McCain refers to, and (I can't believe I'm saying this...), he's absolutely right.
Everyone thinks some of government should be cut.
No one agrees on what that some should be.
That's the entire problem.
Do you really think this is the case? What I see is a lot of people saying: "Don't touch my Medicare, don't touch my Social Security, don't raise my taxes, and balance the budget." Which is sort of a ridiculous position to take. Even if we're allowed to touch defense (which a lot of people don't want either) that's not enough room to maneuver. Hell a strikingly large percentage of Americans don't even seem to realize that Medicare and Social Security are tied to the federal government and the debt. Remember back during the health care debate when the nice old lady stood up to President Obama to say something along the lines of "I hate socialized medicine and don't touch my Medicare?"
I don't think people are stupid, but much like with technology they often lack the bandwidth in their daily lives to learn as much about politics as they probably should. People want more responsible government, and smaller government until they see how it's going to affect them personally. Everyone's happy with the idea that we should cut "stuff" out of the budget, but when the "stuff" gets personalized to "My Medicare", "My defense industry job", "My road project in my town" or whatever the happy starts to wane. Then you start hearing the "Well don't cut stuff like that, cut stuff like funding for research on the affects of cow methane on the local owl population (or pick your ridiculous government project of choice)" crowd starts up; blithely ignoring that fact that a) some of that research actually is valuable, just not in obvious ways, and b) it represents a really small portion of the federal budget.
We have among the lowest taxes in the developed world in this country, and we have the infrastructure to prove it. I'm not saying we should move to the European model of 40% taxes (yes, I pulled this number out of my butt, your European taxes may be higher or lower than this figure), but we can easily balance the budget with some prudent and moderate cuts to spending, along with very modest tax increases to say, where they were just 10 years ago. I know that real "small government" people like you probably understand the cuts that would be needed for true "small government", I'm not saying that you don't full understand your position. I'm saying that if most people truly understood what it meant to cut government this way, far fewer of them would support the idea.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
... the result being that Congressmen will be people who either are independently wealthy, or are doing backdoor deals which will get them lots of pay, benefits, and retirement money.
Of course that happens anyway, but you really don't want to encourage it even more.
Great Depression is your answer to what? Because Great Depression was created by the Fed, who monetized UK debt (yeah, English debt). Fed was printing obscene amounts of greenbacks and buying UK debt to prevent UK from defaulting (sort of like Germany is doing with Greece).
The 1921 saw a depression that had higher unemployment than what is observed today, but by 1923 that depression was over. The difference? Government spending was cut by 70%.
1925 US Fed started monetizing UK debt, this inflated the agriculture bubble, which burst by 1929, similar to what Fed was doing starting with Greenspan and Clinton, when they set discount rate at 1%, and later Bernanke and Bush, who set the discount rate at 0% and since gov't was mandating that Freddie/Fannie and FHA subsidize 30% of substandard mortgages by 1992 and 50% of them by 1999 and 65% of them by 2006, it's not a surprise that the bubble that burst 3 years ago was in housing and not in agriculture.
The Great Depression started because the burst of the agriculture bubble inflated by the Fed was actively fought against by government bail outs and stimulus. I provided a time-line earlier on this topic, just like the bail outs and stimulus printed and given out by Congress and the Fed in 2008 and ever since. In 1929 this started the Great Depression. I am expecting the Greatest Depression this time around, because this time around USA doesn't have the savings and manufacturing (production capacity), that US of the twenties had and today USA is the biggest debtor nation with no savings and no understanding of economics on all levels and a enormous, all encompassing government, who completely abolished the idea of freedom by its mere existence.
So you are going to make smart ass comments, maybe you should try and understand the subject first.
You can't handle the truth.
That's completely incorrect. The Democrats have been willing to compromise; Obama's facing a backlash among his own party for being too willing to compromise. If you've been following the news you know where the Democrats started and where they are now and can see what they've compromised on. The Republicans still refuse to compromise at all on taxes. The trick to a healthy government is for the population to pay attention to what they do, don't just wave your hands vaguely in the air and say both parties are equally culpable.
I'm not convinced that it is the quantity of government, but rather its specific content. The government is doing things that it should not, and not doing things that it should. Reducing the size of government might reduce the number of things it is doing that it should not, but I assure you the other side of this imbalance will only get worse, because the government will likely also stop doing several things that it should be doing.
www.wavefront-av.com
What are you basing this on? In the 19th century the USA wasn't a super power and wasn't doing all that well with pretty much slave labor camps otherwise known as textile mills just to get started. In the 20th century we became a super power due to massive infrastructure investments giving us our highway system and DARPA helped us build the Internet as we know it today. Sorry, government played a huge part in all of that. Everything from establishing minimal wage to setting fire codes help improve the way of life of every American and not just the robber barrens of the 19th century.
I don't see anyone leaving this country because they feel the government is too oppressive, if they did I'm not sure where they would go since Europe has a lot of the same policies, Asia is even tighter on freedom of expression and Africa is filled with strike. I guess that leaves Australia? While full of nice people and hot aussie chicks, they too have been spying on their citizens and doing the same things as our government including failed regulation leading to a massive oil spill off of their shores. So I guess that leaves Antarctica? Of course there are our dear friends to the north but Canada has its problems too, the grass is always greener on the other side. So I guess I have trouble picturing what a freer nation is. There aren't many nations out there where you will pay less in taxes, usually twice as much and don't forget the artificially low cost of gas here.
The grandparent was referring to Somalia being in what we in the US consider a state of anarchy, but in fact most of the country has fallen under traditional tribal leadership and obeys tribal law for their various tribes and the central government has dissolved. No tribal leader has the influence or power to take control of the central government, so there is no central government, which has led to some areas being in a state of lawlessness. In some ways that is not necessarily a bad thing, because depending on who is in power, it could be a very oppressive dictatorship (think Taliban).
As for the 10th amendment, it is and pretty much always has been filigree with little substance - States are considered subordinate to federal law in all cases, which is understandable in some ways - for example, the South could potentially still have slavery if it weren't for the government stepping in. Before you argue that slaves are human and should therefore have rights under the constitution, remember that up until the end of the civil war slaves were considered more like an animal than a human (by the South).
Please don't mention Switzerland. Despite living there, you have no clue what "economic freedoms" means. The only economic freedom you care about is the one to reduce the taxes you pay.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The "lowest taxes in the developed world" isn't quite true when you take into account state and local taxes.
However, I would say that the real problems are in the "My road project in my town" group. While the states have broad powers to tax, for some reason the argument has stuck that only the federal government can come up with the money for certain things. The federal government should not be funding the states, and any such funding should be cut. The states should administer their own taxes. When the states have more power, state elections will be even more contested, and better representation will result.
Social Security should probably be in the federal realm, since plenty of people move after retiring (and thus there's an imbalance of retirees). Medicare/Medicaid is already 50% funded by the states. If individual states really need help with Medicare costs then we can implement a "transfer" similar to the system used in Canada.
Defense spending certainly does need to be cut. Britain ruled half the world with 125,000 troops. We've got 1.4 million active troops. However, the time would be best spent finding a few large defense projects that can be cut for quick savings, and leaving the rest to an independent committee.
The Social Security wage base should be removed, so that it applies to all wages, not just the first $100K.
My bet is that if all that was done, overall taxes would still go up, but federal taxes might actually go down. Some laws would also change, without the threat of losing federal funding, states might be less willing to implement federal programs (e.g. drinking age at 21, abstinence-only education, etc.)
Federal road tax shouldn't exist either. There are very few federal roads, even the interstates are maintained by the states. They can fund that themselves.
Direct Payment and Grants to the states total $2 trillion. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_spending_by_state.php?year=2010&chart=Z0&units=b&rank=t
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
The reason USA became the wealthiest country in the world in 19 century was capitalist free market and industrialization, which only became possible because the US was so free to do business in because the government was so limited, so small and so insignificant.
My, you are persistent. No, the reason that the US became the wealthiest country in the world is that it was able to harness enormous amounts of cheap resources without much interference by neighboring countries nor effective resistance by the native populations. The resources of the Western US (and various marine bodies) untapped (except by the locals who were rather quickly marginalized).
This behavior also had a number of deleterious effects - raping of resources, the environment (would you want to live in a 19th century urban environment?) and impressive social inequities.
So, government did step in and attempt to mitigate the hellbent robber baron / beggar they neighbor system. It was partially successful. Yes, we have problems that stem from going the other way - to much regulation, too much governmental control. But your slavish devotion to an anachronistic and time limited system (not much of the West available for plunder at bargain prices) suggests you really haven't looked at some of the finer points in American history.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why is it that all of a sudden reducing government (which has only grown over the years) is tantamount to becoming anarchy? Some nutjobs do believe in almost no government, most of us believe in a weaker federal government because what people in California want doesn't matter to people in Ohio, and what people in Ohio want doesn't matter to people in Florida. Example: Federal law has it that we can't use marijuana for medicinal purposes. California is in violation of that law, but most Californians don't care, and a lot of people outside of California would like to move there specifically for that. Wouldn't it make sense that people outside of California not have a say in what happens in California? This kind of bullshit happens all the time. It's about granularity. Small democracies work way, way better than big ones. It makes no sense to have the biggest, most diverse, least related group of voters doing the most powerful governing.
The federal government, as the least representative government of any specific person does a whole hell of a lot it was never intended to do. It's not a matter if government should do it, it's a matter of if a government so far removed should do it. If every single person in Montana wanted to opt out of Social Security in favor of their own locally run version, where do the assholes in the rest of the states get off telling them how to run their lives? If you want to be a dictator to the minority, instead of respect differences of opinion, maybe you should leave. Your ideas of how the government should be run are further out of touch with our laws than small government fans. You obviously don't have the support to change the laws or the constitution would have been ammended to make a lot of these illegal, overreaching programs legal, so you get out. There is nothing stopping any state from implementing any of the federal programs for themselves, they just want to impose it on everybody else whether they agree to it or not so they can get the benefit of other state's resources. That is the evil of strong central government, that is the purpose of the electoral college, and that is why changes to the constitution require more than a simple majority. But you can get around all of that by simply ignoring the constitution, and that's what we as a country have done. Somehow the people that don't support it want to send us back to a third world country? No, not at all. But I guess it's easier for you to cover your ears and scream than to challenge your own beliefs.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.