Slashdot Mirror
S&P's $2 Trillion Math Mistake
Last friday Moody's S&P announced that they had downgraded the U.S.'s credit rating (leading to a pretty huge discussion on Slashdot I might add). Since then more interesting news has come out, suraj.sun writes "In a document provided to Treasury on Friday afternoon, Standard and Poor's (S&P) presented a judgment about the credit rating of the U.S. that was based on a $2 trillion mistake. After Treasury pointed out this error — a basic math error of significant consequence — S&P still chose to proceed with their flawed judgment by simply changing their principal rationale for their credit rating decision from an economic one to a political one. S&P incorrectly added that same $2.1 trillion in deficit reduction to an entirely different baseline where discretionary funding levels grow with nominal GDP over the next 10 years. Relative to this alternative baseline, the Budget Control Act will save more than $4 trillion over ten years — or over $2 trillion more than S&P calculated. S&P acknowledged this error — in private conversations with Treasury on Friday afternoon and then publicly early Saturday morning. In the interim, they chose to issue a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating."
You fail to see the truth. The fact is, ALL of the agencies are anticipating a downgrade of the US' credit rating specifically because of extremely poor budgeting, not actual plan for debt reduction, poor management, fear of inflation, so on and so on.
What you're calling, "emotion", and actually strongly supported analysis for an extremely poorly run country. The only role emotion has in doing this is the fact they did it now rather than six months from now.
Honestly, they did us a favor (after the fact that Rep's completely fucked us [I'm a registered rep] by making this an issue in the first place) by only one lowering our rating. Basically its a warning shot to fix the fucking country. We have roughly six months to a year before the run actually gets pull out from under us. If its not fixed, the Reps have completely destroyed our country while trying to blame dems.
You have to be a complete piece of shit to destroy the fucking economy just so you can have a scapegoat to blame dems in the up coming elections. The only sad thing, there appears to be a massive number of epically stupid people who actually want to blame dems for the total ass fucking reps have given this country.
Which is not to say dems are without blame. Honestly, kill them all and the world becomes a better place.
As someone that's actually been poor and lived in the projects
You mean those crime-ridden hell-holes that your wise and benevolent government built for you as part of the myriad of social programs that you're vehemently arguing against cutting?
And no, the alternative isn't poor people starving and dying in the streets, it's poor people getting married to support their children in low-cost private housing, instead of being raised by government-subsidized single mothers only to become bastards who commit rape, robbery, murder, and other mayhem.