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."
Atlas is shrugging, all right, but it's not the wealthy that are shrugging, it's the poor, who as they get more desperate are going to start reacting with force.
The poor? Those guys with government housing, free health care, food stamps, welfare, WIC and government cheese?
The guys with a PS3 and an Xbox on their 42" LCD TV?
The poor in the US live pretty fucking good.
Maybe the government with their "Screw the Constitution", Spend it all plus more, Let me wiretap you with no court looking, "Its a new year, Time for 800 pages of more regulations", I am going to seize your domains because I think I can, punish those who whistle blow, prison for modders plus another 80 pages of the same needs to go.
We need a full replacement of government officials. We need the destruction of public employee unions, We need to get rid of Corporate personhood, get rid of the corporation, Ever large company should be head by a human being that is held responsible for what that company does. We need to remove government backed monopolies and stop the government program to destroy the inner city families through the gifting of cash.
If the US took another $4 trillion over the next 10 years out of the budgets we would still be screwed.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Americans were whipped into a frenzy after 9/11, and backed a bunch of spending and government expansion. This was all "led" by the people in office at the time. The majority of those people were affiliated with the republican party. Now people (some of them the same) affiliated with that same party, are telling us the deficit is the other guy's fault. I'm sorry , I don't buy it.
We thought we got away with 2 wars and the largest expansion of government since the New Deal. We were wrong. The bill is coming due, and we're finding out we are going to have to pay after all.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
The TEA Party formed only as a reaction to the insane spending increases starting about ~3 years ago.
Which shows just how hypocritical they are. There was VASTLY more spending during the previous 8 years, yet no peep from these so called 'patriots'. They started complaining about spending the moment Obama came into office. He hadn't yet spent ANYTHING, yet they were complaining about socialist rampant spending. Go figure.
And when the economy is in a tailspin, the government HAS to spend money or things get much much worse. If they're complaint is things aren't bad enough, I sure hope they find takers for that line of BS. It does raise interesting points that perhaps they *want* things to be bad so they can blame others for the policies of their brethren (GOP). Talk about shooting the messenger...the GOP runs the economy into the ground and they want to blame the President who is cleaning it up, rather than the policies that got us there.
The TEA Party, rather than being a cause, was prescient in warning that such negative consequences were on the way, and did their best with their limited power to stave the downgrade off.
Seriously? Show me *any* credit rating agency that *ever* mentioned our deficit and warned about a downgrade, prior to the Tea Party quite clearly threatening to default on the debt. It was not until these moron's started threatening that very thing that the people who make recommendations decided, just maybe, they might not pay their bills.
Do we have a deficit problem? Sure, but their manner of "everything I want and nothing you want" negotiations is at best childish and at worst treasonous. Our deficit has literally never been an issue until they made it one.
There was also no chance the US would default on the national debt. There are enough revenues coming in constantly to pay the interest payments on the debt as well as SS, Medicare/caid, military/veteran pay, and more.
So who gets paid first? Seriously who? Are you going to pay foreign creditors before US Citizens who already paid for Social Security? How down right anti-american of you.
We simply don't know who would get paid first, and you know what that breeds? Massive Uncertainty. Which if I remember correctly was something of an issue for the GOP. Until it wasn't.
Keep drinking your kool-aid though...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people