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US Presidential Debate #2 Tonight: Discuss Here
The second U.S. Presidential debate kicks off in about a half-hour (9PM ET, 6PM PT, 0100 UTC) from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney will take questions from an audience of allegedly undecided voters. A live stream of the event will be available from a number of sources (C-SPAN, CNN, ABC, and PBS), and it will be broadcast nationally on the major networks. The flash-less and television-less can use rtmpdump to catch the debate from C-SPAN. It won't preempt the more important telecasts, like playoff baseball. Candidates from smaller parties again went uninvited (e.g. Gary Johnson from the Libertarians, Jill Stein from the Greens, Virgil Goode from the Constitution Party, and Rocky Anderson from the Justice Party). In fact, Jill Stein was arrested for attempting to enter without credentials (her side of the story). Assuming she's out of jail by Thursday, she and Gary Johnson will be participating in an online debate hosted by IVN.us. While tonight's debate is in progress, Politifact will be fact-checking the candidates in real-time (while CNN has demonstrated their journalistic capabilities with a debate drinking game). Feel free to weigh in with your commentary on the debate below — it would be helpful to provide timestamps or other context when referring to particular statements. As before, we're posting this here in a vain attempt to keep the political discussion out of other story threads tonight. If either of the candidates spontaneously concedes the election or catches fire, we'll do our best to update you.
Posted this last debate but, still relevant. Logical Fallacy Bingo
After watching the first debate, I couldn't explain either candidates platform. Cut taxes...increase tax revenue...doesn't make sense to me. I feel really stupid after watching these but I'm mostly just marking it down as both of them having muddled platforms...because after all....how could I be stupid. Impossible. I think this happens mostly because they draw their own conclusions about what effect their policies will or will not have. They rarely explain their logic, and even when they do, it doesn't make sense to me. I usually draw a different conclusion.
I'm looking forward to seeing both candidates clarify their platforms tonight.
As before, we're posting this here in a vain attempt to keep the political discussion out of other story threads tonight.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Look for Obama to come out swinging towards the end of this 3 round battle. Romney ain't no Joe Frazier. IMNSHO, he's a fucking black hole.
ALCS, baby. Screw the criminals on TV looking pretty and arguing over who is the bigger fuck-up ... I have important things to watch.
I hate when commentators discuss the live Tweet counts as a way to gauge "who is winning".
take that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU
The problem though, is Mitt Romney's "good-ole American capitalism" is part of why so many people are out of work right now. Bain Capital's entire business is buying up businesses, dismantling them, and selling them for parts to pay off debts incurred in said purchases. How is this good for the USA?
He may understand more about the economy, but I bet he's unwilling to fix it, because simply put, keeping it the way it is makes more money for big business.
Romney lies.
A well run business employs as few people as possible
will mitt romney flip flip on health care yet again
You just can't trust him on that.
What are your feelings on the merits or shortcomings of the theory of evolution, and what proof have you seen that supports your viewpoint?
At least it is right now at 9:00 pm..
Obama has nothing positive to offer
What power does the President have to actually enact any tax related policy they have on their platform? Surely for the most part they a legislative rather than executive issues?
The American system seems very weird. Well, on paper it seems reasonable but in practice it seems to operate in a way that ensures nothing 'difficult' gets done and that everybody has someone else to blame for the inaction.
Meanwhile.......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The debate isn't being showed across the pond.
The world barely recovered from letting Microsoft off the hook and hasn't recovered from the War on Terror yet so some of us would like to watch.
That is the question that the great majority of Americans need to be asking themselves
in the privacy of their own minds.
Most people get health insurance as part of a package of benefits from their employer.
If you lose the job, you lose the health insurance coverage.
Romney will let you die in the gutter. Obama is a genuinely decent man and he wants to make
sure that no one will suffer a lack of health care because of their personal circumstances.
If you think that you could never be "one of those people", you don't have much life experience,
because for most of us, the shit can hit the fan any time.
It sounds like he actually cares about people. It's very grating.
http://gigaom.com/video/second-presidential-debate-live-stream/
Save some money for a rainy day asshole. I have no sympathy for the people that run out every month, cash their paycheck and spend every last cent until it's gone and then complain about having no money.
I've love to see someone challenge Romney on the concept of tax cuts for the rich leading to Job creation.
A great example was this banned TED talk released by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer where he put in really simple, easy-to-understand terms the concept that giving money back to middle class families means they will buy more stuff leading to more job creation than giving tax breaks to a millionaire. This comes from the first non-family investor in Amazon by the way.
Considering this is Romney's whole ideology, I'd love to see an audience member nail him and get an on-record comment on the subject.
so let's sick kids be locked out is OK with you?
As that is the Romney plan when he kills the pre-existing condition law.
I wonder what the Vegas odds are on whether Obama or Romney will tell more lies.
CPI numbers rose in September by 6/10 of 1% (by government numbers), same as a month before.
Annualize and compound it, that's just under 8%, and that's excluding all the things that people actually really need to buy almost every day (food, energy).
That's inflation, will there be a question on this?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
http://www.creditloan.com/infographics/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/cl-regional-debt.png
And, do you think EITHER of these losers work against this?
No fu@*ing way.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Mitt Romney: going after birds, big and small.
a world in progress...
Is it just me, or does the president seem to have a fake accent. Some sort of a fake drawl?
You're lying.
No, You're lying.
No, You're lying.
Presidential debates are useless in modernity.
Romney has been perfectly clear about how his tax plan works. You can read all of the details here: http://www.romneytaxplan.com/
there is jail / prison care where under the us constitution they must give you health care.
And the ER must take care of you.
$12,000 a year for health insurance if unemployed. So my rainy day fund for 1 year just to live is somewhere in the neighborhood $18,000-$20,000 on an average salary of $35,000. So you're right. Out of the $35,000 I made before getting laid off I should have a surplus of $17,000 a year. $5,000 for room and board and $12,000 for health insurance. Heck, why work more than 1 year on and one year off? But in the richest nation and self professed best and coolest nation in the world, the US still has people living on the street? Impressive attitude asshole.
Much as he comes off as the nicer guy, I can't see how Obama can win on Nov. 6. The best that can be said about Obama is that he didn't plunge the US in another needless war. He'll probably go down as a transition president, muich like Jimmy Carter in between the Watergate scandal (Gerald Ford doesn't count) and the rise of Ronald Reaganomics. For better or worse, however, Romney is no Reagan.
You're a liar! No, you're a liar! No, *you* are! Yakity yak, blah, blah, blah, argue, argue, talk over eachother ...
No actual substance, just sound bites and hot air.
T'was EVER THUS:
Secret Society
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
We can only hope.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It is so nice to hear the middle class does not need to pay tax on our non existent saving!
Can somebody help me with this question I have had regarding the Romney Tax Plan?
From what I understand, Romney's tax plan is to drop everyone's marginal tax rate and then eliminate deductions, credits etc.
In his debate speech just now, he noted that the top 5% of people are still going to be paying 60% of the taxes.
If his plan is revenue neutral (meaning they still take in as much as they currently do) doesn't that mean, the lower 95% are still paying the same 40% of taxes that they are paying now? If so... how does that tax plan change anything? Whether you say it's through deductions or just a lower rate everyone is still paying the same amount of taxes no?
Thanks again for the rtmpdump command syntax -- I'm only watching/listening because of it; because I like the method. Now, if you could show me how to do this with Jerry Springer, I'm game for some more honest, dynamic and civilized debate, with prettier scenery and more credible opponents.
PS: Dear Anonymous*, if you can manage to hack 30 seconds for Ron Paul (or anyone else with a measure of consistency/integrity), many Americans starving for common-sense would be very grateful.
Sincerely,
Terrified
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
By that logic your completely wrong, who spends more someone in the middle class or in the top 5 percent. That top 5 percent pays 60 percent of all income taxes.
The best part about this shit is that Republicans apparently really believe that Bob Jobcreator will refuse to make $500,000 if he can't make $1,000,000. No, he'd rather do nothing at all and get $0 and let someone else who isn't allergic to paying taxes have the $500,000. Yessirree, welfare is so awesome Bob would rather live on foodstamps and sleep in the slums than work half a million dollars because he can't keep all of it.
Romney mentioned no taxes to be paid for mutual funds and capital gains tax. Well guess what? Most middle class folks who have money invested in mutual funds and other investments have small actually irrelevant gains to pay taxes on
He didn't even finish the term he was elected to. He bailed out to go run for president in 2008. He's nothing but an opportunist. He's a prick.
Oh wait... the debate isn't actually over yet? Well, this is how we *want* it to turn out
That's what the news outlets said about WTC7 minutes before it fell.
Do they actually differ at all?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What is wrong with diversity in the audience? Who are these people? Are they representative of which town?
How is it Obama can't give a straight answer but calls Romney out for not having a plan when he isn't the president?
Both candidates have the same platform: make sure corporations continue to run the show, make sure the people being exploited continue to believe the system is working for them, and make sure the people being exploited are too distracted with minute details about issues that do not really affect them (gay marriage) to question policies that really do affect them (the war on drugs).
Don't listen to what the candidates major party say, it is just a side show. Look at what they actually did in the past, and look at what they don't say. Has Mitt Romney criticized Obama for failing to demand that the TSA actually follow the law (seriously, how much more effective of a criticism can one make than pointing out their opponent's failure to uphold the law while serving in the highest political office in the country)? The debates are a waste of your time, designed to reinforce the view the the Democrats are "liberals" and the Republicans are "conservative" (both parties, in fact, are fascist, hawkish, and pro-corporate).
Palm trees and 8
If he is so good at making money why would you vote for someone that only seems to be able to spend money. Obama has only put us deeper into debt funding social programs just like the ones that put California under. I would rather put someone into office that knows how to make money than one that can only spend. Maybe he can make the Federal Government more efficient by getting rid of some of the many slackers...
how many middle class folks will lose the ability to do a long form by getting rid of the deductions they presently can take? Those reductions will not affect the 2% at the top, they still continue to take those deductions, everyone else goes to the standard deduction due to not cutting it. Not good.
$1k per month for health insurance? Jeezus, what kind of policy is that? I'm in my 40's and BCBS quoted me about $250 per month (actually slightly less) for a moderate ($2,500 deductible) policy with prescription coverage. I could cover that with unemployment insurance, and not even have to touch the $30k plus in my savings. Do you have an artificial heart or something?
More politics!!!
I sure am eager for November 7 to come around. Meanwhile, can I just forward all the robocalls I'm getting to this discussion?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Democrats: Keynesian stimulus designed to jump start the economy assuming it will be enough for the public to start buying things and hiring workers.
Republicans: Tax cuts so business can hire more people.
The Democrats' stimulus won't work because the middle class has less income than before meaning they can't/shouldn't be buying things to stimulate the economy. The Republicans' tax cuts won't work because businesses won't hire people unless sales go up. Sales won't go up because the middle class has less income than before.
If Romney wins. Women get back in the kitchen and start breeding. That's all he thinks women can do.
It's a complex problem, but for the government's role, the best thing it could do is reduce the deficit substantially and lower taxes. Anything that would bolster the dollar would help as well. Liberals like to talk about the middle class tax cuts they plan, yet I don't see details as to how beyond getting some bones thrown our way for the money they bilk from us. What I need is more of my money at my disposal, thanks. This is true of anyone in the 15-40k/year set. Right now, when all is said and done (fed, state, local, sales tax etc), about 1/3 of our income goes to the state. Meanwhile, how much of that really benefits that set? Most of it benefits the elite (bank bailouts, loans/preferential law to large corporates, funding for self-guilt ridden social programs for people based on their color and gender etc) and not the middle class as a whole. A single guy who is not married, has no kids, but who only makes 20k a year gets no breaks, so he doesn't buy that new car, that new house, or travel. meanwhile, the fools who pump out 3 kids before they realize they have no money for it, get subsidized by him. The programs pushed by the left only give certain castes a break while causing them to become more dependent (which creates more 'justification' for more funding next time ad nauseum). Tax breaks need to give almost EVERYONE a break for them to be worth anything! The organizations who took the money should pay it off. Here's a thought..
tally the amount of tax funding spent by wealth of organization.. this includes government departments, corporations, social/political movements etc who have taken substantial subsidies over the last 50 years. These subsidies aren't just limited to money, but also include law-backed false markets for specific entities that hurt the rest of us. These organizations should be the ones paying off the majority of the debt because they are the ones who've benefited the most from it. After all, they're what we've all been borrowing against the future for! You know, the incomes of people who haven't been born yet?
Obviously, the mitt romneys would love reaganomics.. it's in their interest, and this solves nothing either. it saddles the majority of the debt with the people who are least able to make a dent, and they are the ones running the organizations mentioned above. Corporate welfare is as bad for the economy as socialist mass-welfare citizenry.
It's like they're very passionate about a bunch of things that I simply don't give a shit about.
Fascinating.
The moderator, Candy Somebody, is so obviously in Obama's pocket. Can not believe how she is guiding him through the questions!! Sickening.
Nick Hanauer interview (part 1, part 2) with Peter Schiff was THE reason why I bought a premium subscription to Schiff radio show.
Let me be absolutely clear on this: Nick Hanauer is the kind of an idiot that can make money while being absolutely ignorant on economics.
Consumers do NOT build businesses, businessmen build businesses. Consumption is the trivial consequence of production, and just like the case with every other business and product, the product has to be invented and built first and there is absolutely no clear way to know that the product or a business will be a success.
Growing an existing successful and profitable business into a more profitable one is much simpler than starting a new business with a new idea and an unproven track record. The only thing that can be said about demand is that if a business is already successful and profitable, then there is at least money to attempt and expand capacity.
Nick Hanauer is an absolute moron when it comes to economics, he thinks that the consumer appears first. As if the people appeared BEFORE the Sun and the Earth was here.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
That one happens to be true, and has been true for many years. Easy to fact check, see here:http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
Not American / Debates are just that / All politicians talk more and deliver less - PICK ONE
A well run business employs as few people as possible
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
This year I decided to make a better attempt to understand "politics" and watch the debates.
What I see is one candidate who seems to be holding back - & I'm not sure if he is trying to keep from losing his composure. But I want more straight-forward answers, without deviating off the subject.
And then there's the other candidate who continuously breaks protocol & won't abide the guidelines of the debates. What's up with this continued INTERRUPTION??? This "I must have the last say so" antic bothers me. I see a person who won't listen to the masses, but instead will make decisions without any regard as to whether there is another way.... a better way.
I'm at the point where there should be a third candidate - who'd I consider without ever hearing him say a word. The more these candidates open their mouths, the more discouraged I become.
I'm pro-Romney, and that was kind of bogus. If you drop the rates on the middle class, that means they pay less, or at least overall they're supposed to pay some amount less today. If high net worth individuals also receive tax cuts, how do you keep them at 60% of the total? You either reduce the total (to keep the relative percentages the same) or you have to increase taxes on higher worth individuals.
Captcha - Decide
So far, outside of agreeing and disagreeing with things both candidates are saying, is - Ms. Moderator, This is not all about you. As much as you want it to be, it isn't. Back off, MODERATE and let us hear the opinions of the candidates instead of your voice saying what they should be saying. This debate will be most noted for how poor the moderating was done by the showboat moderator, not in how much information was provided from each candidate. So far, the moderator has made this a nearly useless debate.
Absolutely brilliant.
It would be ... good if Obama could ... learn to Punctuate ...
Periods and paragraph breaks do not belong in the middle of a sentence. People talk about how poor Bush's speaking ability was but quite frankly, Obama is much hard to listen to with his constant pausing to catch his thoughts mid-sentence.
ROMNEY Is rude as hell, He has no manners, he interrupts the president. He needs to learn manners
Yes, but it should also grow. Meaning that while your statement is true for any given point in time, a well run business should employ more tomorrow than it does today.
so let's sick kids be locked out is OK with you?
As that is the Romney plan when he kills the pre-existing condition law.
I thought that was the American way? you can't afford it well f*^k you, thats true capitalism, none of that socialist crap..
...to earn my vote...That is the question that needs to be asked over an over.
I think at this point I would vote for any candidate who would just answer the questions that are being asked...or at least address them tengentially.
There also needs to be a buzzer or something to shut them up whenever they want to discuss their opponent's plans, i.e., put words in their opponent's mouth.
Talk about following his Party line. If he said rewriting the ethanol rules and re-evaluating it than sure but those current laws requiring ethanol mixtures in fuel have food based corn requirements. Clearly another farm subsidy.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The best part about this shit is that Republicans apparently really believe that Bob Jobcreator will refuse to make $500,000 if he can't make $1,000,000. No, he'd rather do nothing at all and get $0 and let someone else who isn't allergic to paying taxes have the $500,000. Yessirree, welfare is so awesome Bob would rather live on foodstamps and sleep in the slums than work half a million dollars because he can't keep all of it.
It also assumes rich people will use the money they don't pay in taxes for something constructive, rather than sitting on it, gambling it on the stock market, or slipping it off to another country to avoid paying tax on it at all.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...who will work against this:
http://cdn.theweedblog.com/wp-content/uploads//Raid-21.jpg
Palm trees and 8
Obama for Life. Obama for a better Roman Imperium!
$1k per month for health insurance? Jeezus, what kind of policy is that? I'm in my 40's and BCBS quoted me about $250 per month (actually slightly less) for a moderate ($2,500 deductible) policy with prescription coverage. I could cover that with unemployment insurance, and not even have to touch the $30k plus in my savings. Do you have an artificial heart or something?
Anthem Blue Cross health insurance for a 50 year old male:
$288/mo = $3500/year
$6000/year deductible
$3500 out of pocket maximum (after deductible)
As long as you don't need healthcare services, it's "only" $3500/year. But if you need to use your insurance, then you could be paying $9500 just to get to the deductible where insurance starts paying... then you could be paying up to $12,500 for the year.
This is a farce. 2 sides of the same exact coin are arguing about who is made of a purer metal. Give a fucking break, if you have half a brain cell for each 10 people, you still should be able to see through this charade.
Gary Johnson 2012.
Only an idiot would think that who you chose on election day doesn't matter. Neither side is "good", but that doesn't mean that they're equally bad.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What is up with Fmr Governor Romney talking about the pipeline from Candada when the oil companies would not sign the agreement allowing it which required them to keep the resulting fuel inside the US? For months and months now they have been over processing oil in the US and shipping _excess_ out to South America and Europe and thereby lowering the US _supply_ and keeping prices high.
Maybe Fmr Governor Romney should talk about how many jobs were created by the Gulf oil well disaster and cleanup and use it in his plan.
Romney looks tired.
The only democracy in the world where sociopaths have their own party is the United States. Even better, that party has groups within it that variously argue both Jesus and the Founding Fathers approved of sociopathic policies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seriously?? Obama is so full of it!!! He knows that he denied the Canada to Cushing, Ok to refineries to the gulf pipeline because that WOULD make jobs & make USA more energy independent!!!
Also Obama wants to say was raised by single mom---No, he was sent to his grandparents!
He says don't tolerate discrimination --but why then, is Obama endorsing black organizations & Muslim groups over the general public!-- yes I think there is white discrimination today!!
And the fact of the matter is, Socialism just can't stand up face-to-face against pure free market capitalism.
What do you mean, "stand up". Win in an election? Provide a better economy? (For who?)
Also, it would be good if you would define Socialism, just to make sure we're all talking about the same thing. I know undefined terms are the bread and butter of American political discourse, but if you want us to take your post seriously we have to know what you actually mean.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I love me some Fark. But Slashdot's server is still up, and Fark's is ... farked!
He may understand more about the economy, but I bet he's unwilling to fix it,
As someone had pointed out in a different /. discussion, there is a vast difference between running a business and running a government
From a business perspective, it would make sense to execute the disabled at birth. And stop all non-beneficial payments (food stamps, unemployment, etc)
Even assuming Romney knows everything about business-running, that doesn't necessarily make him the best candidate for president...
I guess you missed that part of the post you were replying to. Who you choose on election day does matter, which is why I vote third party.
Palm trees and 8
giving money back to middle class families means they will buy more stuff leading to more job creation
You need to do both.
Middel class people need jobs and better pay, so as you say they can afford to spend more.
To get more jobs though you have to remove some risk from businesses. Currently there have been a LOT of new regulations piled atop all kinds of businesses, and they will not hire also when they are worried about a debt overhang. Anyone can see that a ton of new taxes are inevitable, and that if the federal government cannot get spending under control ALSO then taxes are going to go sky high in the not too distant future. It's a really bad idea to hire into an environment like that when each employee is going to mean a ton federal taxes to pay.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A well run business employs as few people as possible
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
Errr....gov't jobs for all??? Hell no.
A well-run country maximizes incentive to provide sustained employment for as many of its citizens as is possible.
IIRC, he said he'd cut the loopholes, etc but give them tax breaks so they pay the same as they have been paying.
I do doubt his ability to get his Party and/or any of the Democrats behind tax code reform such as cutting all the holes out. Only a flat tax will do that otherwise it's just more rules and more/new holes.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
A well run business employs as few people as possible
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
Errr....gov't jobs for all??? Hell no.
A well-run country maximizes incentive to provide sustained employment for as many of its citizens as is possible.
I never said the government needs to provide government jobs to citizens, but running a country is fundamentally different than running a company. When you need to cut costs in a company you can shed employees and trust that some other company or the government will take care of them. When you need to cut costs in a country, you can't simply shed citizens to save money - you're going to end up taking care of them one way or another. And sometimes cutting costs in obvious ways doesn't save any money at all. You can slash military spending by cutting expensive weapons programs and reducing troop levels, but then you have to find jobs for all of the ex-soldiers and ex-military contractors that are suddenly out of work.
Wow! That is the most definitive documentation of Romney's plan I have seen yet.
The amount of effort it took to craft such as plan must have been astronomical.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Which evil wizard do you want to ravage the kingdom?
I want the one where the press reports which areas of the kingdom are being ravaged, not the invisible wizard that ravages without notice.
Just look at the moderation of this and other debates. The mainstream press is liberal almost to a (wo)man, and it has showed in the debates. The moderators are literally feeding the democrats talking points, while sneering at Republican candidates.
The press has ignored all kinds of major debacles from the Democratic administration that it is plain to see would have been pinned firmly, with a repeating nail gun, to the chest of a Republican president. From the invasion of Libya which really was war for oil (otherwise we'd be in Syria too since the same reasons we supposedly went into Libya apply only moreso), to sending guns to mexican drug lords (operation Gunwalker) to terrorist attack killing our ambassador in Libya, the press is trying to stay as quiet as possible instead of looking under rugs and in closets.
Look at how many reporters were way in out Alaska looking for anything on Palin, compare to zero interest in Biden and what he has been up to over the years.
The one way democracy really works is if you have a body of people watching over the politicians. That's not been happening for four years now and we are all the worse for it.
If you are undecided at all on any candidate for any office, just ask - which person will be under greater scrutiny if elected?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That is, Romney's tax plans..
http://www.romneytaxplan.com/
A smart non-partisan FBriend of mine wrote this
Business Doesn’t Create Jobs
The misconception everyone seems to have is that businesses create jobs. That’s true in the sense that business provides the mechanism for people to contribute to making goods and services. But businesses don’t create jobs.
A good businessperson tries to reduce costs and run as efficiently as possible. That’s why automation so revolutionized the world—we could do more work with far fewer people. That’s why businesses pursue productivity, so they can scale up their production faster than they need to scale up their headcount.
Any businessperson who is acting in the interest of the bottom line should be trying to slow job growth or actively shed jobs within their company.
Jobs are created when a business experiences so much demand that it has no choice except to hire more people to cope with the demand. The demand drives the business to create more jobs.
Someone with the business experience of presiding over a growing business does not know how to create jobs; they know how to create demand for their specific products and services. This is a great skill for growing an individual business.
Growing a business isn’t the same as growing an economy. As Apple grows demand for its products, it grows demand in no small part by taking business away from its competitors. Apple does well, but Microsoft does less well that it otherwise would. Getting one business to do better is not the same thing at all as growing an overall economy so everyone does better.
http://www.steverrobbins.com/blog/2012/10/business-finance-and-jobs/
Shh... don't tell them the secrete of being successful in this country. Next I suppose you will say high energy costs and high taxes is bad for businesses.
Let us live our fallacies for crying out loud.
Unfortunately $1k a month is pretty standard from what I understand. I've been told my employer pays about $1,000 per month per employee. A family member is on the board of a small local telephone company and he's said that they pay $1,200 per employee. I think my employer was paying close to $1,500 a month per employee before they switched us over to a high deductible plan ($1,000 a year). They're nice enough to give us the deductible in a HSA account though each year. Even on the old plan we had pretty high co-pay rates, even for "in network" providers.
insert lame partisan comment here
captcha agrieve
Actually, a well-run country maintains some amount of unemployment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
Palm trees and 8
Person: My question is Blah.
Candidate A: Blah Blah Blah!
Candidate B: Candidate A is a big fat liar!
Candidate A: No I'm not! B is the liar!
Candidate B: Nuh uh!
Moderator: Sigh. Okay, next que-
Candidate A: BLAH BLAH!
Moderator: Yes, but the time is o-
Candidate B: BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!
Moderate: I hate my life, and I hate you both, why am I here?
It's a complex problem, but for the government's role, the best thing it could do is reduce the deficit substantially and lower taxes.
You do realize that these two things are not directly compatible, right? They're actually quite contradictory.
Conservatives like to talk about reducing the deficit, and the tax cuts they plan, but I don't see any details beyond getting some bones thrown our way, and vague promises of a growing economy.
Tax breaks need to give almost EVERYONE a break for them to be worth anything!
Wrong, because that means they mean nothing, whereas tax policy often has specific intentions.
The organizations who took the money should pay it off.
Good luck getting any conservatives behind that idea.
Here's a thought..
tally the amount of tax funding spent by wealth of organization.. this includes government departments, corporations, social/political movements etc who have taken substantial subsidies over the last 50 years. These subsidies aren't just limited to money, but also include law-backed false markets for specific entities that hurt the rest of us.
Good luck getting that objectively calculated.
Let's say that we have schools that teach students. Who benefits from that?
Anyone else get a blackout while Romney was discussing the executive order preventing further investigation of Fast and Furious? Just as I was getting interested...
Absolutely brilliant.
I suspect some of these (presumably) low-budget satires end up having more influence than most big-budget campaign ads.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Good ole American capitalism is why you can sit on your butt and type into a computer we can all read, stuffing yourself on beer and chips, while your pre capitalist and noncapitalist forebears and other nationalities steal food from each other to live. Those companies made the real stuff that you are currently not starving on. But reality is such a faint thing to you.
You can say that Romney's plan is vague, but I don't think you can claim that's it's the "dead-on-arrival" plan that Democrats would like people to believe. Consider another reading that takes into account other factors: http://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/228rosen.pdf
In any case, a calculated vagueness is the part of the essence of challengers, and were you to scrutinize past candidates with the same lens with which you scrutinize Romney you'd find that same frustrating vagueness.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Mitt Romney was the governor of my state. He fucked us over and then quit to run for the presidency in 2008 in an attempt to FUCK OVER the whole country.
Why did you (as a state) elect him?
It's a serious question - did he renege on his promises or has he screwed up the implementation of what you actually wanted him to do or what?
I liked this debate format far better that I did the first one. I also felt President Obama was much more aggressive, and I think his performance was much better overall. I've been following this poll on who won the second debate overall. What do you guys think? http://www.mapyourvote.com/Poll/Debate-Two-Winner/?rf=2
Romney isn't going to let anyone 'challenge' the conventional garbage that the Republicans have championed since they became the party of privilege. Money generally seeks its biggest return, regardless of where it is to be found. That's why Romney has so much of his wealth invested outside the U.S. and its why the largest corporations, banks and hedge funds keep so much of their money offshore until they can get Congress to give them a tax break to 'repatriate' it.
There's no obligation to create jobs here if they can be operated more cheaply outside our border. If there was, the Bush Tax Cuts would have cushioned the blow that bad domestic tax policies and the conservative repeal of bank regulation have wrought on the wealth of the middle class. The failure to adequately regulate derivatives like colateralized debt obligations (CDO's) and credit default swaps is also a conservative, market fundamentalist ideal, and they nearly brought the world's banking system to a halt, not just ours.
Romney represents the worst that Republicans bring to politics. It's the politics of failing classical right-wing economics where responsibility to people, the environment and freedom all take a back seat to profit, hereditary advantage and corporate greed.
the debates everything is pretty much stupid about getting the economy up again its simple kill NAFTA raise import tax goods like crazy to the point were its cheaper to build in America than china or equal or start vamping up taxes and head in that direction over a given period of time then you can pay off the debt and create jobs the same time. You keep the flow of cash in America. Face it NAFTA just sent the jobs over seas and didn't improve standers of living just made corporations pocket more cash.
A well run business employs as few people as possible
The strategy described by the post you're replying to hasn't got anything to do with running a business. It's about using a business a a consumable resource for a MAKE MONEY FA$T scheme.
That's why we use such flattering terms as "vulture capitalist" for people who operate that way.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
[CITATION NEEDED]
While your statement is colloquially accepted as true, there are lots of cases where increased employment is a bad sign.
Imagine for a moment a government using income from natural resources to invest in foreign assets, and then distributing the dividends from that investment as income for their citizens so none actually have to work for a living. Would that be a failure? Look up the Alaska Permanent Fund and the policies of Saudi Arabia for some real-life examples of governments aiming for that goal.
Similarly, it's not productive for governments to manipulate the job market to create inefficient jobs just so that they can come closer to 100% employment. Digging holes and then filling them up again doesn't produce anything of value. Spending $10M to build a rocket to destroy a mud-brick hovel in the Afgan desert isn't exactly "value for money" either, but lots of politicians and even some oxygen-deprived-at-birth economists would have you believe otherwise.
My own government here in Australia regularly goes on TV to proclaim how wonderful it is that some new mega-project will create "thousands of jobs", as if it's a good thing that my taxpayer dollars are wasted on inefficient bureaucracies. I would give all my votes to a party that would go on TV to proudly proclaim how few people it will require to complete a new project under their direction, not how many!
Think of the super-long-term vision as well. Do we really want a future society where 100% of the population has to work? Why can't we aim for a post-scarcity society as envisioned in Star Trek and the like? Wouldn't you want to live in a world where automation produces all material goods, and people work only because they want to?
Don't have the same meaning "i think X is good" from "None is good", nor "Anyone is good", or "X is less bad", not even "i don't care, anyway will win X". If the election should transmit the intention of the people of the US, then be sure to express your opinion, i.e. where is available picking some sort of "none of the above".
The alternative is giving your explicit seal of approval on anything that tried to do or did the government this or the previous government, SOPA, DMCA, Cyberwar, invasion of foreing countries, a lot of variations of privacy violations, and a lot more. Picking one over another will get a different puppet but the same master, but if enough people shows that don't want that things have a chance to change.
>The problem though, is Mitt Romney's "good-ole American capitalism" is part of why so many people are out of work right now. Bain Capital's entire business is buying up businesses, dismantling them, and selling them for parts to pay off debts incurred in said purchases. How is this good for the USA?
Sooooo... what explains the worse unemployment rates in much further-left Europe?
Two statements from Romney: "I will create 12 million new jobs during my first term." "Government doesn't create jobs."
The President's self-described record: creation of 5 million new jobs since the end of the recession.
If you look at employment growth at Calculated Risk: http://www.crgraphs.com/ this recovery looks a lot like the last 2 recoveries under very different administrations. I didn't hear anything about how the country gets back to recovery rates typical of post-WWII recessions prior to 1990. Does anyone think any candidate's proposal fix the problem?
Romney isn't a businessman, doesn't know how to run businesses, has never run a business, and doesn't have much of a clue about "creating jobs", fixing economies, governing, or anything other than financial wizardry. I think this is the most empirically accurate article I've read about who he is and what he's done, simply by analyzing his career at Bain Capital, the decisions he's made, and the deals he's crafted:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/david-stockman-mitt-romney-and-the-bain-drain.html
Your prediction was wrong, they talked about the trade deficit.
Am I the only one that saw Will Ferrel rippin' the Ragin' Cajun every time Candy cut in?
You do realize that these two things are not directly compatible, right? They're actually quite contradictory.
Sure it is, if you cut spending and get the people who benefited from the handouts to pay the bill. If this is not possible then we're fucked. The only way this gets resolved is when society becomes too top heavy and collapses not unlike the roman empire.
Wrong, because that means they mean nothing, whereas tax policy often has specific intentions.
'They'? if you mean taxes, well a lot of what's on the books is meaningless, passed under circumstances that no longer apply. Then there are the ones intended to modify behavior. Those should go if for no other reason that they piss people off and make them anti-tax in general. There are A LOT of these on the books. What's left depends on the situation. For example, I don't mind some public education, but the system needs serious resharpening. It's loaded with ineptitude, apathy, and wasteful spending (kids don't need wifi for their state purchased ipads, they need quality teachers in buildings that don't smell like latrines). In many cases, schools are run more like prisons than educational institutions. Until this is fixed, I see little reason to throw more money its way. It gets enough, but the expenditures need to be reprioritized.
Good luck getting any conservatives behind that idea.
or liberals, if the organization is left wing. I mentioned this. The elite are not interested in paying back society. The democrats put up a good front, but they're just as full of shit as the republicans are. This has to happen. it's the only place the money exists. The bottom 90% or so will NEVER be able to level off, nevermind pay off the debt.
Let's say that we have schools that teach students. Who benefits from that?
In theory everyone does, but like I said above, we should not just throw more money at organizations that are clearly incapable of change from within. We should freeze the education budgets until administrators quit blowing money on stupid shit like needless computer equipment, student tracking systems (like in texas), highly tangential extra-curricular programs (athletics, arts, multi language) until the core curriculum scores come back up. I have no problem with extra-curriculars, but they shouldn't be funded from the school budget. Schools are not day camps.
Seriously, that's how I feel about all this.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
http://www.barackobama.com/truth-team/entry/romneys-tax-plan-adds-up-to-a-middle-class-tax-hike/?source=20121015_rtp
Romney won on economic and foreign policy issues. Obama won on social issues.
This highlights the problem - you're projecting citizens to be employees of the government. They are, in truth, both owners and customers of government.
It is not the place of government to "find jobs for all of the ex-" whatever. Instead, by being as minimal and clear as possible, government helps create the sort of conditions and marketplaces where people can thrive doing business.
I'm in my 40's. I see the numbers for my large employers 4 available plans. ~1k/month sounds about right from what I've seen.
Air support and soldiers on the ground advising rebel forces and helping to call in air strikes...
A military action by any other name is just as significant, and the fact remains that whatever term you use for what we did in Libya is not being done in Syria where the same reasoning applies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
[CITATION NEEDED]
While your statement is colloquially accepted as true, there are lots of cases where increased employment is a bad sign.
Why did you cut off the post I was responding to? A well run business employs as few people as possible. I was responding to a one-liner with another one-liner. Both have a kernel of truth, but it turns out the reality of the situation is much too complicated to explain in one sentence, or one Slashdot post, or a presidential debate.
Think of the super-long-term vision as well. Do we really want a future society where 100% of the population has to work? Why can't we aim for a post-scarcity society as envisioned in Star Trek and the like? Wouldn't you want to live in a world where automation produces all material goods, and people work only because they want to?
I really don't see how such a society could survive - even on Star Trek, people have jobs. Someone still has to clear the sewage pipes (or endlessly monitor the dilithium crystal mixture on the warp engines). You can't count on a highly skilled job being done by someone who only works if he feels like it. If the dilithium crystal polishing guy is in the bar and drunk on synthehol (or he decides that he no longer loves that work and instead wants to clean windows) when the warp engines go offline, who's going to take care of the problem? Even if the captain is willing to take care of it because he loves his job, he may not be trained for it and he'll h quickly get tired of having to do every menial task that no one else feels like doing.
But even if we really could have robots take care of our every possible need - what will the humans do? What possible sense of purpose will there be in a world where you are not needed... for anything.
The only problem is doing that is very expensive. It sounds great when you first think of it but in the end the math does not work out.
Without health care coverage you have lower worker productivity and higher costs. You also have higher costs from crime related to people trying to get the money to cover their healthcare. You also have higher costs at the emergency room and if the person dies or is permanently damaged you lose a large investment society has already made in the person.
It is cheaper overall to cover everyone and continue to invest in technology to cure diseases over treatment. It is not socialist, capitalist, liberal, conservative etc it is just a pure cost vs expense argument that makes good financial sense.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Your employer is nice. Mine pays 50%.
I get about $270 taken out each month for my employee-only insurance with $1000 deductible. If I ever get married and have kids, they can work for their own.
Depending on your perspective they could be equally bad, but they are certainly not the same. Anybody who doesn't see a difference isn't looking.
Sooooo... what explains the worse unemployment rates in much further-left Europe?
Austerity. Europe has actually been doing what the Republicans (Ryan in particular) have been wanting to do, and it's made things much worse for them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a bug. Running this code in your JS console should resolve the problem.
$('button').unbind();
$('button').click( function() {
window.location='http://www.mittromney.com/issues/tax';
} );
If I were tired of lies, I would vote for the one that lies less frequently by atleast an order than the competitor. You decide who I am taking about.
...but at least he's being honest about what he wants to do.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
In America, one serious illness in the family will destroy your finances unless you're very rich or have good insurance. I can see why Romney could think of having enough money saved to get him through a rough patch but for most of us, a medical problem is a financial disaster of epic proportions without insurance. Besides, where is it written that young people who have never had time enough to save up for the cost of an expensive medical problem don't get sick?
I don't know what's funnier, the original link I posted or the fact that Romney's real link you posted is no more useful in understanding the real numbers.
They need a mechanism like a chess clock . When a candidate presses his button, his microphone turns off and his opponent's clock starts running. If a candidate runs out of time on his clock, then he can't talk for the rest of the debate.
-Dave
We pay for it somehow.. It might not be noticed, but we do. The money has to come from somewhere.. in lower wages, higher costs in goods/services, higher taxes..
Well firstly it isn't a tax cut, the money comes from somebody at sometime, so its a tax delay, credit or a tax shift to other people. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FREE MONEY.
I notice that Republicans talk about tax cuts for the middle class, while actually meaning tax cuts for the super rich. So that leaves the poor 47% to pick up the tab later presumably. That seems to be what Romney was saying, that the 47% would pay the cost of the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
If you give rich people a tax cut, what they heck more CAN they spend it on? Not more food? More XBoxes? More cars per person? What? All that happens is they compete to pay more for the same stuff, in the Bush era that was houses. So they pumped up the price of housing to an insane amount, inflating their mortgages to match. They'll buy French perfumes at $100 a bottle instead of mass market stuff at $10, Brut Champagne, instead of sparkling wine. Foreign holidays instead of domestic ones.
Then the slightest little problem and they can't pay these inflated mortgages anymore -> crash.
The smart ones, they build their nest egg, buying unproductive but safe assets. Again you've wasted the money in dead assets.
The dodgy ones, well they ship it offshore to tax havens and lock it up in foreign assets. Cheney did this when the US was inflating its currency. I've no doubt Romney is hiding something similar by hiding his tax returns. This is not productive use either, it just takes the money of the US.
If the alternative is no jobs for all, i think you would welcome government jobs.
I saw Dumb and Dumber a long time ago. This debate feels like the same $#it different day.
So this Economist goes to China and his guide takes him to where they are building a new hydroelectric project.
Observing the the scene, the Economist says, "All your workers are using shovels. Why aren't you using heavy machinery to excavate this site?"
His guide says, "This is China. By using shovels we can employ more workers and provide more jobs."
The Economist says, "Oh, you want jobs! And I thought you wanted a dam! If you want to create more jobs you should issue all those workers spoons."
Look, Dummy, Anyone who has studied any Economics knows that there is a difference between wealth and jobs. Jobs are only a way of extracting some of the wealth for individuals. In the process of turning capital investment into profits, productive businesses create wealth by creating goods and services that people are willing to pay for. There is no other way to logically create wealth. When you steal capital and distribute it to non-producers you are depriving the wealth machine of fuel.
I can't give an adequate explanation here on /., but if you want to overcome your ignorance you could read, "The Myth of the Rational Voer"by Bryan Caplan.
http:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKANfuq_92U//www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/07/09/070709crbo_books_menand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKANfuq_92U
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa594.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies/dp/0691129428
But even if we really could have robots take care of our every possible need - what will the humans do? What possible sense of purpose will there be in a world where you are not needed... for anything.
Well I suppose you might consider this an existential crisis and conclude you should just kill yourself. But then, if all you're needed for is work - why don't you do that already?
Worrying about what we might do with too much leisure time seems similar to worrying about what one might do if they won the lottery.
At some point Americans are going to have to face the fact that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Higher taxes, one way or another, are going to be required. Surely by now there is no one out there that seriously believes continually cutting taxes is somehow going to produce this well stream of economic productivity.
One of the chief reasons this is such an idiotic idea in the current climate is that a good amount of the economic uncertainty has little to do with the US domestic economy, and a good deal to do with the still present risk of some sort of a Eurozone meltdown. This is having widespread economic effects just about everywhere, and yet you will find almost no mention of it in the US. It's as if Americans somehow magically believe that the US has a only thin economic connection to the rest of the planet, that global economic troubles cannot be blamed for domestic fiscal problems, and instead it must be the fault of the guy in the White House, or Congress.
You cut taxes and government services radically, you will not produce some new economic glory, you will basically blow a hole in the bottom of the US economic situation. You will create a deep recession where the country is managing to almost tread water.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In other words, if everyone just follows your ideological leanings, as opposed to the ideological leanings of someone else, everything will be okay.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Thanks for that lesson in edifying political discourse. Im sure if more people in congress stopped insinuating that they hate each other and simply adopted your tack on this, things would all be so much smoother.
Thanks for making slashdot a better place.
Why does anyone give a flying fuck what Romney or Obama plan on doing. They're the executive. Better to ask all those busy little Congresscritters seeking (re)election what their plans are.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Depending on your perspective they could be equally bad, but they are certainly not the same. Anybody who doesn't see a difference isn't looking.
Yes, they could be bad in different directions.
Although unless you feel the same about both of those directions, you'll probably think the one that's bad in the worse direction is worse.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is what's hilarious. The presidential candidates discuss issues that the president has no fucking power to change... like taxes. Has any president ever changed taxes? No... Congress does that and then the president vetoes it or signs it. That's it. It doesn't matter what Romney or Obama think the tax code should be because they don't get a vote. If either of them were real men they'd make some commitments like "I'm going to veto every bill that crosses my desk that doesn't also have provisions to pay for itself" That's a fucking argument I could vote for. But no... we're going to listen to them make idiotic arguments like "The rich should pay their fair share" What the fuck does that even mean? or "Everyones taxes should be lower" Ok yea, we can all agree with that... but you also want to increase spending? Jeasus H Christ! How the fuck can you people continue to vote for these idiots?
That's a rather unreasonable interpretation of what hawguy says, which was:
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
Now I suppose you might argue that it would be better expressed as "A well-run country ensures as many of its citizens as possible are gainfully employed" but that's NOT what you're saying, and as noted by hawguy already, he was deliberately being pithy by responding to another short remark.
You're basically taking the notion that he's saying something which you are projecting onto him.
If you want to criticize him for the less than ideal expression of the concept, fair enough, but don't put so many words in his mouth that you're basically inventing an entirely new strawman to argue against.
Also don't complain about somebody putting words in your mouth when that's what you're doing.
Because "executive orders" have basically made declarations of war obsolete, and the President gets to decide who he wants to bomb or invade at will.
And second, these days those Congresscritters basically flock to whatever peacock in their party shines brightest.
Finally, have you ever heard of the "veto"?
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT ELECT ROMNEY
ALSO FOR THE HATE OF GOD OR APATHY TOWARDS GOD OR WHATEVER
He has ruined this state. He is the worst governor we've had as long as I've lived here. It is official Mormon doctrine to use your beliefs in your politics. As a theologian and pastor-to-be I do not say these words likely: he is a crazy ****-twat that will ruin the country.
This is not a matter of Republican vs. Democrat. This is not a matter of liking Obama. I voted for Obama but I would rather vote for George Bush Jr. again than Romney.
Romney's leadership style is to do what he wants, how he wants it, without taking the input even of his cabinet of advisors. He does this based on what he believes God tells him to do, and what the Mormon church tells him to. He is ruthless, stupid, and doesn't even understand the concept of the separation of church and state.
As a resident of Massachusetts,
and a theologian well versed in Mormons and their politics,
PLEASE PLEASE
DO NOT ELECT ROMNEY
If you feel you can't vote for Obama because you hate him, just don't vote. Seriously. Stay home.
Indeed. I can clearly see that they are different colors. Beyond that, I think there is little difference of any significance.
He's a fucking liar. He just said it and Obama is about to put the prick in his place.
Both sides stretch the truth. I'm guessing because if they were straight up with the American people, they wouldn't stand a chance in an election. It must be effective, which is depressing. However, you should probably check your facts and lay off the emotional response. I suspect you are part of the problem.
Romney is correct when it comes to federal income tax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivity_in_United_States_income_tax#Tax_burden_by_household_income
The problem though, is Mitt Romney's "good-ole American capitalism" is part of why so many people are out of work right now.
I would argue with you, but you have so little idea of what you're talking about it would be foolish.
but I bet he's unwilling to fix it
Maybe- its entirely possible... but we've already seen Obama is unwilling even when he had a super majority in congress for 2 years. Its been 4 years and Obama hasn't even started, but "trust me i'll get to it." In addition, he has a record of being a horrible leader, and has to let Biden clean up his messes. (Ironically Biden is a good negotiator- despite how dumb he is)
He's spent a lot of money- way more money than any other president, while in the meantime raised the unemployment (referring to the true U-6 #), and collapsed a lot of the middle class into the lower class.
Whatever he's doing isn't working... and if im not mistaken what Romney is proposing is similar to what Regan did which brought us into the 90's prosperity from the economic disparity of Carter. I think Obama is another Carter honestly- but history will tell.
If tax cut is applied to the taxes the middle class mostly pays, would that benefit the economy more? Republican tax cut sounds like it targets only corporate and investment related taxes. Democrat stimulus sounds like giving money to those who have already lost in the free market. Perhaps there needs to be a more powerful tax payers association lobbying for income tax moderation to encourage employment and that little income boost.
Actually, corp. profits are very high right. However, those are world-wide profits, and so they come from expanding business in India and China, not here in the US. The cost of labor, materials and regulations in the US is too high for most companies to make large investments here. Also, small businesses find that banks aren't lending to them much right now.
Socialism has a history of "shedding" it's people to cut costs due to economic failures and "backwardness" of socialist/communist style governments.
Collectivizing agriculture creating a distribution nightmare, developing fake sciences for medicine and agriculture production, intentionally failing to adopt known ways to feed your people, industrialization of large regions of self sufficient rural communities etc. were just a few of the ways socialist countries ground their own populations into dust and bones when they needed to have fewer mouths to feed. It's unfortunate this history is not taught routinely for the scary reality it must have been for these people.
Oh come on Alien Being, quit being so politically correct and tell us how you really feel!
Persecution fetish much?
That's overly simplistic. Most major tax bills are proposals by the White House sent to Congress. Bush proposed his signature tax cuts. As did Reagan.
Ignoring all the taxes that aren't federal income taxes...
Why would a flat tax do that? There's nothing inherent about a flat tax that says that loopholes can't be added to it.
Zimbabwe? There's probably plenty of others.
And how are the Democrats sociopaths anyway? Just because they want to take money you earn, and spend it on others doesn't make them bad. I know it's annoying having money taken from you for silly social projects but that's the price of living in a society.
Their obsession with sucking up to Hollywood is quite annoying though. All those laws protecting media companies and persecuting civilians, plus the fact the they dangle "free-trade" agreements in front of other countries to get the same laws written - I'll agree that that is sociopathic. I'd say the Republicans are probably slightly more into arguing Jesus approves of their policies than the Dems, but you'll hear Obama talk about "God", "faith" and other bullshit all the time.
Republicans don't believe this. They believe tax cuts to the rich will bring more money to the rich. They don't care that money to the poor and middle class is more effective, because the rich have almost no chance of being truly hurt by the recession. All recession means to them is lower relative labor costs and lower sales which they can ride out by firing people.
This is also leads to such a weird turn of phrase as "Causing pain" for austerity measures that wreck people's lives. At the very most, the rich feel a bit of heartache out of sympathy.
Play Command HQ online
Survival of the fittest. The government does not owe me or anyone else a single thing. Stay out of my business. I have been unemployed for 8 months without insurance and I do not blame anyone but myself. Stop being a leech on society and provide for yourself. I bet you believe that the government "owes" you a retirement also? If you do not save enough for your retirement, then you don't deserve to retire. The government does not owe you a retirement or social security. Start saving for your own damn retirement and give back your free obama phone.
The transcript is seriously incomplete. Watch the video. "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation"
then you have to find jobs for all of the ex-soldiers and ex-military contractors that are suddenly out of work.
Maybe those jobs could instead go toward BUILDING our infrastructure instead of DESTROYING others'?
HOW BRILLIANT of you to assert that defense contracts "create jobs" while you OVERLOOK the DEATH and DESTRUCTION ELSEWHERE that INVARIABLY results.
Virgil Goode, the jackass who assumed Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, was some kind of foreigner? The one who tried making a law stopping him from taking the Oath of office on a Quran, and insisted that all Americans use a bible? He decided to run for president?
Wrong. A well run buisiness should do everything in its power to constantly raise revenues while minimizing expenditures. Have a server farm with 2000 computers from 15 years ago requiring 20 techs to monitor? Consolidate into the latest generation of hardware and run it all on 200 servers and cut headcount with the greater ease of maintaining fewer RAID and scripting in a visualized environment.
The Luddites may not have been right - but they were on to something insofar as being afraid of the ravages efficiencies can bring.
ANY well-run business will have EXTRA LABOR CAPACITY.
If EVERY PERSON in your company is working FLAT OUT, ALL THE TIME, then there is NO WAY to respond to unforseen circumstances.
YOUR company would TURN DOWN new business because you are TOO BUSY.
Tax Code is Government inefficiency at its best (or worst). Cutting rate and loopholes is good for the economy, because we (collectively) will spend less trying to avoid taxes, and just pay up (hopefully). Streamlining government is not something government wants to do. The bureaucracy resists. Just try to fire 10% of the government ... it cannot be done, yet this would be the best thing we could do.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Obama is putting tax payer money into "Green" jobs, only to have many many many of them go bankrupt less than four years into his run. Obama as a businessman is even more laughable. Where are the 5 million green jobs Obama promised four years ago? Where is 10% of that? He hasn't produced shit, and yet all you lefties complain about is Bain Capitol. WHERE THE FUCK is your record?
Please, don't read into my comment as supporting Romney, because that is not what I am doing, I am comparing your candidate against the one that you are lashing out at. The "He is worse" type shit I hear from Democrat liberals like yourself is just finger pointing away from your own (and greater) failures.
Government should not be trying to run businesses. It can't even fucking run a whore house for profit. Vote Libertarian (or other third party) and get rid of the mindset that your party is better because it is less worse than the one you hate.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It is expensive because it is essentially guaranteed coverage. The company I worked for (50 employees) from 1998 to 2010 tried to set a cap at $10,000 per employee per year. At first, it was no problem even with a low deductible policy, by 2007, they had to go to a $5000 deductible and by 2010 they raised the cap to $12,000 per year and kept the 5000/10000 deductible. My wife is on guaranteed coverage now because she has Mild Gastritis, treatable with OTC medicines and a slightly painful shoulder, possibly from a lousy Rotator Cuff repair, that needs cortisone shots 3 or 4 times a year at approximately $200 per visit. "Normal" ins for her is around $400/mo. and guaranteed coverage is almost $900. Except for the year of the surgery, she has never met the deductible but still, is deemed unsuitable for "normal" coverage.
Uh, why do you think that's a lie? Because the top 5% really only pay 58% of the tax load? I guess that's kind of inaccurate, but could be considered a rounding error. Look it up here or any number of places where data is to be found.
Look this stuff up before you start calling people liars.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That completely ignores the payroll tax (among others), which amounts to as much as the income tax itself .
Another bald-faced lie from Romney. What a surprise.
You should try listening to Japs speak. They completely crap out about halfway through the sentence and then release the rest in a quick burst. It's terrible.
As a percentage of income (which is all that matters in this case), the middle class family by far.
I guess we have it on your authority then that personal liberty is overrated and limited government is a horror? Yep.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I've love to see someone challenge Romney on the concept of tax cuts for the rich leading to Job creation.
Frankly, anyone who fails to understand how stealing less from productive people leads to more productivity isn't just failing Economics 101, it's amazing that this person manages to put his pants on in the morning! Your political masters had to build a very intricate religion in order to prevent you from seeing the absolutely obvious... Every single pixel of human economic history confirms that the moral argument for free markets is the practical argument as well!
Let me explain in a way that even a 4-year-old could understand it. You have a lemonade stand A, and a lemonade stand B. Lemonade stand A charges $1.15 for a glass of lemonade. Lemonade stand B charges $0.42 for an identical (or even slightly better) glass of lemonade. Which one do you prefer? B? Well, guess what - in an analogy to real life, you've just picked Hong Kong over New York City as a place to start the next Pfizer or IBM!
USA's economic freedom (and thus its competitiveness to retain its brains and capital, and to attract more from abroad) has has experienced rapid decline during the Obama administration. If he is reelected, it is likely to fall further. In spite of all his political vagueness, Romney is clearly a lesser evil in that regard. A few more years of Obama means more lemonade stands offering a better deal than USA, which means Uncle Sam's lemonade simply won't sell.
Productive people don't just create jobs, they create products and services that separate us from cavemen, as well the investment opportunities that give people an incentive to save. They are the pillars of civilization, paying for things like security and scientific research. There is a reason why USA became rich, and why those rich people you want to rob are here in the first place - USA used to be the most economically free country in the world at that time, but it is no longer. The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of competent people to tax!
--libman
Higher government revenue doesn't necessarily require higher tax rates, just as increasing tax rates isn't necessarily going to lead to a sustained revenue increase. I don't claim to know if taxes are too high or too low, but government spending is certainly out of control. Its burden on the citizens is too high to sustain.
The only thing that will ever get us out of this mess is to be competitive in the global market. This means lowering the cost and risk of doing business in the US. Creating jobs through government manipulation of the market is not a good thing. Not due to bad intentions, but due to the fact that it is extremely difficult to do right. If I'm creating wealth working for the private sector, the government takes a portion of my earnings and reallocates it to 'stimulate' the economy, and if this turns out to be a poor investment of our resources, it's detrimental to the overall health of the economy even if it did create jobs. The key is wealth production, and allowing the market to work. The government should be there to promote the market, not rape and pillage profits. This is particularly important in a global economy. There are absolutely good investments that government could make in the interest of the people, but we better be certain that it is in the best interest of the citizens before we remove resources from the private sector to fund a government program.
Some regulation is obviously necessary due to the fact that sometimes a decision made by an individual or business puts a cost on society which is external to that individual or business. When this is the case the wrong 'big picture' decision would be made in a purely capitalist system. A good example is environmental impact. We should make an attempt to quantify the impact that, for example, China has on the environment in its production of goods and impose a tariff proportional to that impact and do the same via taxes for goods produced domestically.
The direction the Obama administration has taken us in is fundamentally wrong in my opinion. If there is more wealth creation, people will have more opportunity to thrive. Global economic circumstances are definitely having a negative impact, but we could pull out of this and help to drag the rest of the world out given the right leadership. Unfortunately today's political environment doesn't seem to be very conducive to selecting competent leadership.
I can't explain how he got elected. Despite being a fairly liberal state, we do tend to choose Republican governors. He screwed us with Romneycare, increased fees and taxes, and he cut the hell out of the state college system's budget. He made the state books look better by burying the towns and cities. i.e. typical creative CEO accounting methods.
I'm glad that you appreciate the value of plain speaking.
A well-run country maximizes incentive to provide sustained employment for as many of its citizens as is possible.
Hmmm, or: A well-run country maximizes incentive to produce goods and services for as many of its corporations as is possible.
Or maybe: A well-run country maximizes incentive to purchase goods and services from as many of its citizens and corporations as is possible.
But really: A well-run country maximizes the productivity per capita in the long run.
Maximizing GDP per capita depends on the entire economy; capital investment, productive work, and efficient consumption. Each feeds on the next. Claiming one of them is "the important one" displays a lack of comprehension of the circularity of the free market. Maximizing GDP per capita maximizes all three in the long run.
Maximizing one of the components at the expense of the others in the short run reduces all three in the long run. It is not just theft from the other two, it is theft from the future self. It is the purest form of sociopathy; stealing from your own identical future twin.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I don't understand why something like the occupy wall street caught on and got a lot of traction, but we are still stuck with "lesser of the two evils" bipartisan politics type stuff. There are people like Johnson out there who, if given a chance, may do good or just may be as good as either side of the same coin that is currently in effect...
Look give Romney his tax cut, he in turn will hire extra workers (Miguel the gardener, Juanita the cleaner).
They in turn will spend their money on Tacos at Taco Bell, who will build more Taco Bells stimulating the property market.
Not only that, there's indirect benefits too! CEO Romney, refreshed from his new garden will be in a better mood to hire more people in the USA. These are better jobs too, an off shoring manager, an outsource expert, import manager bob.
So it's a win win situation. Quit complaining, just give him his tax cut.
Oh it works perfectly with trickling down the taxes to the general population.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Greek debt: Bailout concessions not nearly Spartan enough
Under the bailout, Greeks must now work until they are 67 years old. Up until now, they have been able to retire with pensions at -- take a guess -- 65? Nope. 62? Lower. 57? Keep going! 53? Bingo!
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
would help get better discount from labs..
why do you think "Health care can form a significant part of a country's economy. In 2008, the health care industry consumed an average of 9.0 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) across the most developed OECD countries.[2] The United States (16.0%), France (11.2%), and Switzerland (10.7%) were the top three spenders." france and germany spend less and get an overall better system (life expectancy) then the US.
The said "US republican" (i don't recognize them as republicans, but rich greedy and selfish people whom know nothing of the life of joe average, but pretend to tell him who to vote), the said "US republican" just tell you the Wealthiest nation in the world can't afford what france or germany can afford !
Stop enslavement, rich entrepreneurial people at work and gov to let the system work smoothly for all to benefits of it, and at first THEIR PEOPLE !
said "US republican" tell you, you can spend billions if not trillions on a war for bullshit WMD in iraq (which didn't exist at time of the war), but can't afford to improve their overall healthcare system.. bullshit again ! but i guess that's all they have to offer
Co-ops can. Govts can. Neighbours and family can.
This is rather a side issue anyway. The oversimplified main point is that businesses don't create jobs, demand does.
If I wanted rabidly extreme one-side political rants, I'd go to Reddit.
It's only a matter of time before a better, more informed, less rabid social cummunity arises -- when that happens, this place will be gone.
Wow, that card is getting really played out by now.
Why so worried? These methods worked wonders for Bluestar Airlines. Support your country! Vote Gordon Gekko!
Moreso, if in a company a branch doesn't get profitable, you try to sell it to someone who might get it running or close it down. But the U.S. can't just go and sell California (back to Mexico?) or close down Connecticut.
I live in Portugal, I'm middle class, I live way better than I lived 10 years ago. So ya... Austerity is crippling a over luxury generation which by no means MEANS things are really bad. They are just not what they were.
Except, of course, that the data confirms the Keynseian approach, and contradicts the "Republican" economic model. Stimulus spending clearly boosts a troubled economy, while the tax cuts for the rich don't. It's easy to see why, when you follow the money.
If you give a rich person a tax break when the economy is down, they (primarily) save it for later, because they want to insulate themselves from the economic uncertainty, so it doesn't enter the economy. Note that, in practice, low top marginal tax rates discourage investment in business, because the executives can suck the money out of the business and keep almost all of it. High top marginal tax rates, in real life, discourage executives from paying themselves extremely high salaries, so they invest in their business and pay their employees better. The result of the decreasing top marginal tax rate since the 1970s has been, in real terms, for the executive salaries to skyrocket, while worker salaries have dropped over time, while the reverse was true when the top marginal tax rates were higher. Since 80 years of data confirms that cutting taxes on the top incomes is bad for the economy as a whole, there's not much reason that *this time* it'll work out better.
If you hire a bunch of construction workers to work on roads and bridges, those people use their salaries to pay rent/mortgages, buy food, etc., so all of the money immediately circulates into the economy. And, of course, you have more/better roads and bridges, which broadly boosts the economy because people can get to work, shop, etc. Similarly, hiring police and teachers, etc., all goes straight into the economy, as well as providing services of value to society. And those consumers with jobs create demand that drives additional business.
And, for what it's worth, 80 years of data supports the Keynesian economic model - governments should save money (e.g. under Clinton) so that they can spend more money (e.g. under Bush and Obama) when the economy turns down, evening out the economic booms and busts. Whenever country try the opposite (spend more money when the economy is strong, and cut spending when the economy is weak) it invariably turns out to (1) wipe out savings (Bush Jr), and (2) eaggerate the boom/bust cycle, making recessions worse/longer (e.g. the 1930s, Austerity in the EU now).
That's why the concensus of economists before the stimulus was passed was that there needed to be more government spending (average 2x the stimulus) and that it should be focused on the most effective types of spending (direct hiring, infrastructure). Unfortunately, politics in the US is such that the stimulus spending was 1/2 what economists said was needed, and 1/2 of that was wasted on tax breaks that didn't boost the economy, so the stimulus was, in effect, 1/4th what economic models said was needed, causing the recession to be deeper, and drag on longer, than it should have.
It could have been worse - the same kind of "austerity" thinking took stronger hold in Europe, where it did more damage.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Well, you could decrease taxes (slightly) by merely reducing the rate of increase in spending.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The same way he's trying to get elected now. He ran on his having "saved" the Olympics and saying that he was a successful businessman, and pretty much said whatever he thought voters wanted to hear, and had so much more cash than his opponent that he could drown out the fact checkers and buy the election. So he claimed to be a life-long, committed believer in gay rights and pro-choice, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, which is a combination that's pretty popular in Massachusetts. While Massachusetts is perceived as wildly liberal, like any state there are people across the political spectrum (e.g. Boston is largely liberal, the suburbs more conservative), and there's a tradition of individuals reaching across the aisle to get things done, so there have been a number of Republican Governors who worked out pretty well, so his campaign was pretty plausible.
Of course, after one term Romney was widely considered a failure, and it was obvious that he'd run on a pack of lies, and treated the Governorship not as a real responsibility but as a stepping stone to the Presidency, the result was that he was unpopular to the point where he didn't even try to run for re-election.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Why do Americans even bother to continue with the illusion that their sham elections actually result in any real change.
There is no substantive difference between the Republican/Democrat factions of the ruling junta.
I was going to predict that in this slashdot discussion, roman_mir would recite his religious mantras using multiple accounts while ignoring the reality of the situation entirely. Looks like I win.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There's a more fundamental reason why giving a tax break to a rich person doesn't result in money entering the economy in the way it does if you give the money to poor people:
- If I earn $250k a year and have say $400k in the bank, then an additional say $30k from a tax break makes no material difference to my life. I could *already afford everything I needed*
- If I earn $25k a year and have say $4k in the bank, then an additional say $3k from a tax break makes a huge material difference to my life. I can now afford things I really need -- more food, better housing, more clothes, etc etc.
Hey genius, try and look up some facts before you open your stupid yap. The numbers are correct.
I won't provide a link as they are easily found.
You support your assertion or admit that you are a drone and a moron.
We the people understand the truth while your little subculture continue to engage in class warfare and wealth redistribution. Admit it drone, you want to steal the other guys shit and that's all there is to it.
Well here's a wake up call drone. When it *really* comes to stealing the other guys shit time, we are generally well armed and ready. Perhaps it will be me coming after you for whatever shit you have.
The story of a misogynist looking for a token woman.... Sad.
On the other hand, the reponse on tumblr made it all worthwhile:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc0o62KulO1rj8amio1_1280.jpg
And yes, I know the Mormons haven't preached polygamy for a very long time, but it's still funny.
All the things they go on and on about are things I don't give a shit about, and the things I do care about, they have the same stance on, which I am opposed to.
So they are bad, in the same direction.
And their differences are so trivial to me that they don't matter.
I don't doubt that, i think he's just leaving out details... how much of the wealth of our country is held by that 5%? 60%?
Something smells fishy here, smelled like that 4 years ago too.
GDP per capita is a pretty terrible metric for gauging the success of a country. In fact, I'd say it's only slightly less awful than the idiots in climate change discussions who run around saying that the more energy a country uses, the more successful it is.
Certainly, there's a minimum GDP beneath which you can't provide a decent quality of life for your citizens. But every industrialized country is well above that threshold already. Beyond that minimum, distribution of the GDP among the various capitas seems to make a lot more difference to the overall quality of life. By most any metric, European nations have much lower income inequality, and they also score better on many quality of life metrics.
For example, France has a much lower GDP per capita than we do. Is it because their economy is less efficient? Partly. But a good chunk of the difference was a conscious policy decision. French citizens generally only work 35 hours a week, and get five weeks mandatory vacation. If they started working themselves to exhaustion the way we Americans do, it would close the GDP per capita gap significantly. But would France's quality of life go up? Doubtful.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Would that I had mod points, good sir.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'm confused by your comment. First you say you want someone to challenge Romney's plan to give tax cuts to the rich (which he has repeatedly stated he doesn't want to do).
Then you say you want tax cuts for the middle class. Which Romney has repeatedly stated he does want to do.
Your last line then says this is Romney's ideology, which it is. But you end by saying you want to see him "nailed...on the subject".
So what exactly do you want Romney challenged on?
I think you're talking about different things. Stripping a business for short-term profit happens frequently under cutthroat capitalism, but it's not what the GP is talking about when he says "a well-run business."
Businesses by nature try to maximize profits. It can do this by reducing "expenses," one of which is labor costs. To delve a bit further, you can reduce those costs by getting the same work done with fewer people (automation, making processes more efficient, etc.), or by hiring the same (or more) workers at a lower cost (offshoring, cutting salaries).
But there's unresolved tension here. Corporations benefit society when they provide wages to workers. They benefit themselves when they reduce the need to pay wages. The solution is simple: transfer ownership of the company to the people doing the work. Once wages are moved from the "expenses" column to the "profits" column, much of the tension disappears.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Errr....gov't jobs for all??? Hell no.
How about government jobs for people currently unemployed? After all, we're already keeping them alive by paying them unemployment insurance, so why not pay them to do something instead of paying them to do nothing? Really, how I look at it: There's a ton of work that needs to be done in this country (e.g. highway bridges nearing collapse). There are millions of people who want to work and can't get jobs. Why are we not hiring the people who need work to do the work that needs to be done?
I am officially gone from
"many many many?" My understanding is that perhaps three out of the thirty or forty clean energy companies that the government made loans to have failed. Can I get a citation?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The "green" jobs investments were in approximately 300 companies, 13 of which have gone bankrupt. That's a better batting average than most venture capitalists.
I am officially gone from
I'm sorry, could you elaborate? If I'm an undecided voter, I'd like to know what Romney did to your state.
All I hear is groupthink-modded slashdot rage at the moment...
Well if you don't like your healthcare plan just wait until it kicks in for the whole country because Obama said it's essentially the same plan.
OBAMA: Well, let me first of all talk about our diplomats, because they [...] aren't just representatives of the United States, they are *MY* representatives.
Phrased that way because Obama thinks he's bigger than the United States. A real president would have reversed the two "not just my reps, they're US reps". He's not a president, he's a tyrant in the making.
If the Keynseian approach worked:
1) the draw down of the military post-WWII would've driven the country into recession
2) "saving" money from ending wars, and using that money to say, pay off debt, would drive the country into recession
Keynes got it right about one thing - the inability to lower prices/wages causes a great deal of our economic problems: instead of adjusting quickly to new economic realities, we adjust poorly. Some of this is just human nature (a business who adjusts to economic conditions by lowering wages will end up losing productivity from employees as they feel disgruntled, and of course people have a hard time selling things for less than they bought them for, simply on an emotional level), but regardless of the cause, these are the "rough spots" of economic cycles we need to deal with.
The assertion that government expenditure is the proper way to respond to sticky prices is a dangerous misperception of reality, based in the Broken Window Fallacy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3AKoL0vEs
In the end, we have two competing classes of people - borrowers and savers. Savers want to lend their money to borrowers to grow it reliably. Borrowers want to borrow money from savers because they bet they can grow it more than they'll have to repay. But monetary policy cannot be neutral in this matter -> inflation screws savers, making them less willing to lend, and deflation screws borrowers, driving them to bankruptcy which screws savers too.
As it stands, the U.S. federal government is a massive debtor, and so it's no surprise that it's incentive is to inflate the currency, destroy the power of the dollar, and pay off its debt with cheaper greenbacks. Unfortunately, what is in the self-interest of the U.S. government is something that retards economic activity, and makes savers less willing to invest.
Honestly, if liberals truly believed in Keynesian economics, they'd militarize the entire nation, and hire everyone as a military contractor. Increased defense spending would be seen as economic stimulus, rather than some sort of black hole for money. I think what the liberals don't quite realize is the same way they see galavanting around the world with M-16s and F-22s as wasteful, fiscal conservatives think the same thing about various welfare and entitlement programs.
In the "Guns, Butter, Jobs" equation, the Keynesian model would suggest that guns means more jobs means more people can afford their own butter.
Money in the bank isn't removed from the economy - it's what banking institutions use to lend to borrowers and stimulate economic activity.
If you get an additional $30k, but don't need it to make a material difference to your life, that $30k sits in a bank, which can then lend to a small business who needs that $30k to invest in their store to create another say, 10 jobs. Or maybe that $30k sits in a mutual fund, which becomes an investment in a wide range of companies that now can create jobs. Unless you actually take that $30k and bury it in your backyard, it's working *somewhere*.
Now you can argue that $30k of spending on goods and services (10 people with $3k all making a material difference to their lives) is better than $30k of investment in companies and jobs, but I think that's an open question rather than a given.
The agents of the left, having already misappropriated the term 'liberal', have moved onto the term 'progressive'
Of course they are neither liberal in the classical sense of the word- spreading liberty (unless you mean sexual permissiveness and 'liberty' from the predictable consequences of ill considered acts), nor are they 'progressive'- not advancing the nation, but advocating policies that led to the European implosion we are watching.
Anyway, leftists will seek out a new label as soon as the old one is tarnished (Liberal being abandoned for Progressive nowadays)
You can apply whatever conceitful definition you wish to the current label of those of you on the left.
That label will in short order become a derisive term for those who wish to create a voting bloc by making folks dependent on the government.
As you've seen, I don't use liberal or progressive to describe the leftist, as the use of those terms implies things that aren't so. I wish my fellow right wingers ('liberals' in the classical sense) would abandon the label as well, and simply use 'leftist', 'socialist', or 'communist-lite', as these are accurate definitions using the actual meaning of those words.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Broken Window Fallacy again - asserting that because we have infrastructure to build (our broken window), that we should look upon this as an unvarnished good ignores the opportunity cost. If you take money from the populace (or the future generations of the populace) to build expensive bullet trains, or unreliable wind farms, or uncompetitive solar farms, you've stolen the opportunity for them to decide to do something different with it - maybe what they really wanted was more clothes, or more food, or new musical instruments.
And in fact, if you believe that infrastructure projects are a good thing, then our death and destruction elsewhere should actually be a *double* bonus -> it stimulates the economy with government spending on the military, and then further stimulates the economy of the places we destroyed because we need to rebuild infrastructure! In fact, we could just skip the whole traveling overseas part, and have the military re-enact Sherman's march, destroy cities en-masse, and then we could justify even more the required infrastructure projects to rebuild! :)
Starting from 100 years ago
1912 Theodore Roosevelt 27.4%
1924 Robert M. La Follette 16.6%
1968 George Wallace ran 13.5%
1992 Ross Perot 18.9%
These are results of actual elections, not peek polling numbers that would get one into a debate. That list would be longer.
--Anon
The latest tax figures shows the Top 5% pays 58.7% of all income taxes. Seems his statements was pretty accurate to me.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0#table1
Sorry, you'll get no sympathy from me, as those tax payer funds are not voluntary, while normal investment is. And it wasn't just the number of firms, it was the dollar amount "invested", and how quickly after giving the loan guarantees they went belly up.
Venture capital, which is what the government was doing, is a dangerous game. And the government is NEVER going to recover the losses from all their "investments" making it a very poor investment. Venture capital makes money or goes away, while your government investor never loses heart playing with other people's money.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
a country that is run, implies by your very wording, centralized, top down, management.
a country that is "run", is doomed.
people, will naturally, and pragmatically, NOT choose to be employed, when they have better, more useful duties.
such as raising children.
educating themselves.
assisting the infirm and elderly.
people will best decide. not those who would RUN, the country.
a country where everyone feels the need to be employed, shirking other more necessary duties, is one that has lost it's way.
a country that employs everyone is one that is mired in debt, and living above it's means.
sacrificing necessary social responsibilities, in order to service the all mighty dollar.
you sir, should be drawn and quartered.
Obama is a pretentious asshole.
Good luck to the USA in November, if you vote him back in, the fall of the USA will be complete well before he takes his vaunted Star Value home to reap the big bucks awaiting him on the Public Speaking Circuit (and the Talk Shows).
I see your point. Yes I agree, it's shocking that more Republicans aren't in Federal jails. We need a war on fraud or some such.
Only then can convicted felons who've served their time, fairly represent the Republican party.
And then the Libertarians come out to play.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
By most any metric, European nations have much lower income inequality, and they also score better on many quality of life metrics.
They also score quite well on GDP per capita. :)
Link to a chart I made. (note: PPP = GDP Per Capita, Gini is a measure of income concentration)
Roughly speaking, GDP per capita is inversely related to Gini down to about Gini 0.30. We are about 0.42, and a pretty extreme outlier in the first world. Below 0.30 there isn't enough data to say if/where the inflection point is. To me, that means we should be running some tests down there (at a flatter income distribution level, maybe Gini 0.20 - 0.25). Not because I believe flatter income distribution is right for some personal moral belief, but because the data shows that it is more productive -- that it would benefit everyone, rich and poor alike.
France has a much lower GDP per capita than we do.
They are only about 10% below us, higher than England, and well into the "first world" class. Our edge over France is small enough that it can easily be explained by greater natural resources per capita (same reason Australia is running so high right now). France has also been chasing us on income tax distribution policy (see Piketty/Saez 2007), so their income distribution is not as flat as most of the highest PPP countries.
If they started working themselves to exhaustion the way we Americans do, it would close the GDP per capita gap significantly.
I do not immediately find that statement credible, but if you have evidence to support the claim I would like to see it. Based on the limited data on the topic that I have seen, I think overwork leads to inefficient production and hence reduced PPP.
The purpose of maximizing PPP is to give all citizens as much resources as possible with which to do as they please. Giving them the freedom to use their resources as they please is what gives them quality of life. I do fairly well, for example, and choose to spend less hours working for a paycheck and more hours working on my own projects (and posting on Slashdot, haha).
Quality of life metrics, however, must inherently reflect what the person setting up the metric feels is "quality of life". My Dad is in his seventies, has more money than he knows what to do with, and still works sixty hour weeks because he loves his work and believes it is important (he's a corrosion engineer). To him that is quality of life. Who am I to judge?
I think you may have assumed that I am a right winger because I believe in maximizing PPP. That is not the case. I believe in maximizing PPP because it helps everyone in the long run. I am a hard-core everyone-winger. Right now, as it happens, that means we should decrease Gini (and I have a lot more data to back that statement up than just that one chart) -- but that doesn't mean I'm left wing either. If we go too far someday, and the data shows that we should increase Gini to benefit everyone, I'd be on the other side of the argument.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
All of the liberal companies are having their HR departments scour their departments for "binders full of women" and getting rid of them. It is no longer politically correct to store employee information in binders. That is disrespectful to them, most especially to women.
Think of all the temp/part time jobs this has created!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I have no mod points, so wanted to say this is an exceptionally straightforward and sensible explanation. I tend to end up with a very similar analysis when I try to work through the issues. I was disappointed there aren't any rebuttals, because I'm bad at arguing with myself, and I'd like to hear counter-arguments to determine their merits.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
The neat part is that military members don't count in the employment numbers until they leave the military and register as "unemployed." Reducing the size of the military isn't a good way to game the unemployment statistics.
Not a lie technically, but "5% pay 58%" results from cherry picked figures that only count income tax and ignore FICA taxes, which make up almost as much of federal government revenues (income is 42%, FICA is 40%. Corporate taxes are 9%, 3% excise, and another 6% of miscellany.).
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I don't know what's funnier, the original link I posted or the fact that Romney's real link you posted is no more useful in understanding the real numbers.
You are putting too much thought into it. I never even read the link. I just wanted to fix the button.
We'll outsource the unemployment! GENIUS! ...
Oh, wait, that'd just bring jobs back here, which means less money for the higher ups due to increased employee pay, so it'll never happen.
Read Ian Bank's Culture novels - the entire society is run by superintelligent machines and everyone can live a life of liesure if they choose - in any event what is the point of improving productivity if you don't get to use some of that extra productivity to do what you want when you want? Right now after 30 years of increasing productivity we got basically zip for it except for an extremely rich ruling class.
But the Republicans have their own legions of mindless partisans.
Yes they do. But those partisans are not in control of every media facility for the entire U.S.
How many Republicans, after Obama's election, were suddenly shocked, shocked at the wasteful government spending and relentless attacks on our civil liberties...
Almost none? There was huge conservative outcry at the stimulus bills, and things like the Bridge To Nowhere.
But it didn't matter since even if they were ignoring those issues before, they were not avoiding writing columns in the New York Times about them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nice straw-man. It always annoys me to see people define what an opposing viewpoint holds. It is always skewed, and in this case, a pure fabrication.
Nice link. Now look at the source. Payed for by the DNC. Next time before go on a veiled bash of Romney, find an independent source.
For an average person, saving money is a sure-fire way to lose money - the interest rates are less than the cost of living. Not a wise suggestion. Only way is to invest, and I'm not so sure I'd do that either. May as well just spend it all.
Of course, this affects the rich, but the impact is much higher on an average person.
Everyone should be able to vote, felons included. How else do you change the system if not operating within the system gets you disbarred from participating int he system?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/budget
Also, here is Obama's Jobs Plan
http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobs
http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobs
Also, here is the Obama budget...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/budget
Will you guys let the Republican Voters now that I am having trouble viewing PBS after Mitt Romney made a statement of getting rid of PBS and FTA(Free To Air). PBS is part of an educational process for all ages. Can we really have a Democratic Process during voting season if we can't watch it on PBS?
Here are some theories.
to sending guns to mexican drug lords (operation Gunwalker)
Perhaps you should read this investigate journalism.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
To give you the brief version: the government did not send guns to Mexican drug lords. All the guns that "walked" across the border were bought by straw purchasers with their own cash from private businesses.
The ATF agents in question (the leader of which is a former Marine who got an award for taking down two violent gangs in Minneapolis) tried to identify the straw purchasers. When they went to prosecutors for an arrest warrant, the prosecutor would say "nope, you don't have enough probable cause" even though one of the guys bought $300,000 worth of guns in six months while on food stamps.
The guns that killed Brian Terry were purchased by a man name Jaime Avila in January 2010. By July 2010, the ATF agents had sent prosecutors the names of 20 straw purchasers, Avila among them. By December 2010, the prosecutors dropped Avila's name from the indictment due to lack of evidence. Later that month, Mr. Terry was murdered. Avila was arrested within 24 hours of Mr. Terry's murder.
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The top 5% pay a little under 60% of income taxes. At least they have skin in the game. All the boo-hooing from the poor cause they have payroll taxes, well guess what, so does the top 5%. The difference is that they pay more into those social hammock programs then they will ever take out.
Mitt: I am going to lower taxes, grow the economy and shrink the government
Obama: I am going to raise taxes on the rich and let everyone else keep paying what they already pay but call it a tax cut, shrink the economy and grow the government
China, on the other had, implemented the largest stimulus the world has ever seen, and came out of their recession almost immediately. Their economic growth last year was somewhere in the vicinity of 7%.
Shame they didn't listen to the Republican pseudo-econmics and throw millions of government workers out on the streets, huh?
And, for what it's worth, 80 years of data supports the Keynesian economic model - governments should save money (e.g. under Clinton) so that they can spend more money (e.g. under Bush and Obama) when the economy turns down, evening out the economic booms and busts.
Governments "should" save money, but don't. Even under Clinton, for a short time we had a budget surplus but the magnitude of the surplus is much smaller than deficits we have run before and after. There's simply no political will to pay off the debt when times are good. Instead we make projections 10 years out and say "Oh wow we can spend much more money than we thought!" Look at this old article: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=88866&page=1#.UH71_MV2xCc
President Clinton today projected that the United States will have a $1.9 trillion budget surplus over the next decade. He said the increase in the expected surplus means the government will be debt-free by 2010.
Funny huh?
It could have been worse - the same kind of "austerity" thinking took stronger hold in Europe, where it did more damage.
The good thing about austerity is it doesn't depend on projections. If you save money by cutting spending, that money is saved right now, not 10 years from now. Then later when the economy is doing well you can bring back the programs that were cut. In the end, the process is more fair and makes more sense to people. There's not much that upsets people more than when times are tough and then the governments picks certain groups to lavish with spending while everyone else suffers.
Entrepreneurship doesn't count for anything if your brilliant new idea doesn't have a block of consumers who have the disposable income. It doesn't matter how much someone wants something if they can't afford it.
But wait, there's more!
Imagine the total cost of R&D that it takes for e.g. LG to make a new flat-screen HDTV model. Probably in the millions, let's say $10m to make the math easy. Further, let's say that only the 10 richest people have enough disposable income to purchase these TVs. That means each of those TVs will be at least $1m just for the R&D, probably more for the associated components. With 10 people who have HDTV, do you think the cable company is going to even bother offering HD content? Maybe, if the wealthy are willing to pay thousands of dollars a month in service fees.
Now let's take a look at this example, but with a vibrant middle class that has tons of disposable income. Now let's say a million people have enough income to buy this flat screen TV. That means the R&D costs are amoritzed to $10/TV. And now that there are a million potential customers, the cable company is much more likely to offer HD content.
Without the middle class, you don't have economies of scale. And when you don't have economies of scale, there are a lot of technological innovations that will just not happen because there is no market, and even if there was a market economies of scale would lead to reduced prices. This example is seen all over the place, from the screws that are used to build products, to the plastic molds which enclose those products.
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Um...one perfectly justified emergency hospital trip will blow right past your puny $10K cap.
Honestly, $10K in a year would be finincially painful, but if it didn't happen every year I could deal (maybe). It is for exceptional cases that go well past that which I need insurance for. So what you just described doesn't even constitute "insurance" in my book. I could do the same damn thing you're doing for myself by self-insuring with an IRA and some monthly deductions.
Yeah, they should just print more money and take everything from their wealthy. That'll work forever.
It's amazing how delusional the snowflake technologists really are.
Funny you say I'm wrong when you don't even understand what I'm saying. You're assuming a static production leading to decreasing labor as a result of increasing efficiency. I'm assuming increasing production and increasing labor along with increasing efficiency. So in your example you're assuming that the server farm maintains a static function whereas I am saying it should have a growing function if it's successful. So while a Wal-Mart should run with as few employees as possible it should also continue to expand and open more stores requiring more employees.
You're server farm example is stagnant. Instead of upgrading 2000 computers to 200 computer and reducing staff with the same workload. A successful business will upgrade 2000 computers to 2000 newer computers and produce 10 times the workload with the same staff. Or even better, 3000 computers to produce 15 times the workload with a modest increase in staff.
Cutting costs has a limit. Even if you were able to get the cost to zero. Increasing production on the other hand has no mathematical limit.
My main prediction was about inflation, did they talk about it? (I didn't watch).
Of course you didn't watch it, ron paul wasn't in it. You don't watch anything that doesn't have ron paul in it, or wasn't endorsed explicitly by him. It would be like asking David Koresh to read the Quaran.
Why would I care about an independent source when I want to bash Romney? And what was veiled about it? I thought it was pretty clear bashing, and pretty funny as well.
You're applying logic to the american public at large. That is an exercise doomed to failure
Which is actually above the poverty threshold, if that gives any idea how out of balance things are. For those who make enough to not qualify for any special programs and is on such a plan, you're losing an entire "living income" out of your paycheck.
Survival of the fittest. The government does not owe me or anyone else a single thing. Stay out of my business. I have been unemployed for 8 months without insurance and I do not blame anyone but myself. Stop being a leech on society and provide for yourself. I bet you believe that the government "owes" you a retirement also? If you do not save enough for your retirement, then you don't deserve to retire. The government does not owe you a retirement or social security. Start saving for your own damn retirement and give back your free obama phone.
You sound bitter; you should do something about that ... that said FTFY.
Considering that I paid into the Social Security system my entire life, you're damn right I expect something back. And I get very offended when anyone suggests that I'm asking for a hand out; what I expect is that a system that I supported be sorted out so that I'm going to get back what I was 'promised' in the end.
Believe me if I could save for my retirement I would, but right now I'm too concerned with keeping a (now rented rather than owned) roof over myself and my child's head and food on our table. I'm struggling to survive, and all 'trickle-down' is doing for me is raining poo on my head, weighing me down further.
Again, FTFY.
Which country in Europe actually has a plan to manage its debt? None of them. Spain's plain is entertaining: hope people will still loan them money. I'll bet that'll work in the long term.....
Obama and Romney are both corporate party scumbags, but Obama hasn't declared war with Iran which is a good job because if USA (and it's pet UK) went to war with Iran the global economy would be double fucked (oil price explosion), Romney is a sociopathic nutjob and I wouldn't put it past him to go to war with Iran, something Obama hasn't done and I don't think he will do.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Their obsession with sucking up to Hollywood is quite annoying though. All those laws protecting media companies and persecuting civilians...
Agreed. Fortunately, in the "lesser of two evils" list, being unable to get an unencrypted copy of some movie or song ranks pretty well near the bottom. And I say this as someone who detests the RIAA/MPAA.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Wow, that is one wild way to skew the facts, do you think anyone is going to forget how China economy is pretty different than the Wests to begin with?
Ah, thanks for the analysis, I was trying to figure out how those numbers worked.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Now what I'd really like to know is how the top 5% pays that much. Aren't most of them making their money from capital gains? There must be something else going on there....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think you're talking about different things. Stripping a business for short-term profit happens frequently under cutthroat capitalism, but it's not what the GP is talking about when he says "a well-run business."
Yes, but look at what the GGP said, and see what the GP was trying to twist around with an irrelevant response.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He is going to cut spending. Duh!
Campaign promises to the contrary are just lies.
Lying in this context is ethically justified.
You see, democracy is a shitty shitty system that allows shitty shitty thugs like Obama to bribe the mob with stolen loot. Lazy unprincipled idiots will always be in a majority. A political candidate running on a rational platform would only get around 10% of the vote. So, as a means of self-defense against socialist thuggery, we have the Republican Party, which attracts the more functional of the idiots by lying about things like: respect for religion, patriotism, and not really wanting to eventually drown the government in a bathtub.
If you didn't already know this, then you're one of the idiots.
If you want to vote for honest politicians, vote Libertarian.
If you want more mob rule, move to France.
--libman
We're being steered and Bowser is at the wheel, drunk, in one of those awful ghosthouse stages
Thank you for an outstanding and interesting response. I apologize, as I was mostly focusing on differences within the set of industrialized countries, a la The Spirit Level. I should have made that clear.
Now, the Great and Powerful Wikipedia is telling me that the PPP GDP/capita is $48K for the US and $35K for France. (PPP vs. Nominal is an important distinction, one I wasn't really thinking about, so good catch there). If correct, that's 37%, not 10%. The difference seems fairly stark, though it's not clear to me what that extra 37% purchasing power is buying us, since both countries are plenty wealthy enough to provide for their people, and France seems like a much nicer place to live.
I don't have any data to back up my statement that France could close the GDP gap by working longer hours. It makes intuitive sense to me, though my model is probably overly simplistic. The argument here reminds me of the (problematic) Laffer Curve. There has to be some point where working an additional hour actually diminishes the quality of work to the point where you're actually less productive over the entire labor period.
Extreme example: Say I'm working 154 hours a week and getting two hours of sleep each night (the minimum amount of sleep Navy SEAL trainers are required to give trainees, IIRC). Now move one of those hours a night from the "sleep" column to the "work" column. At that point, it doesn't matter what the nature of the work is, you're going to be way less productive at it.
Like the Laffer Curve, the actual shape of the Work/Life curve varies tremendously from person to person, by working conditions (if your work is inherently rewarding, or extremely hard on the body), by life conditions (if you're in a bad marriage, work might be where you go to unwind, to feel useful), whether a change in hours comes from vacation time or a longer work day, and probably by a dozen other factors that aren't coming to mind. So it's impossible to say which side of the "traditional" 40 hour work week the ideal falls on, even as a society-wide average. Maybe I'm too hung up on 40 hours a week as "the norm," but I suspect that adding a few hours to France's work week would result in increased GDP. If my math's right, and you assume the additional hours were as productive as the original hours (probably not the case), it would lead to a 25% increase in GDP, significantly closing the gap.
Which is kind of suggestive to me. Perhaps at this point in the evolution of the economy, we should be trying to maximize GDP per hour of labor, instead of GDP(PPP) per se, with some mechanism to keep Gini from straying too far from the ideal.
Quality of life metrics are indeed somewhat subjective, but I think a rough consensus can be obtained. For example, self-reported happiness is certainly a better measure of quality of life than, say, average educational attainment or per-capita hours spent playing video games. The Spirit Level makes the attempt by taking the unweighted average of several different indicators, which seems like a good start. It seems incomplete, because they only included those indicators that they found had a statistically significant relationship to inequality (educational attainment, drug abuse, obesity, life expectancy, levels of trust, etc.), and while they avoided weighting in order to avoid making value judgments, I think you could dig in and select some weights that make more sense than the unweighted version.
Your dad makes an interesting point. What do people do when money is no longer a big factor in their decisions. I assume people are generally more productive when they're doing what they're passionate about. Say you could become a doctor, which inspires you, or a job on Wall Street, which sounds like a boring job that would add nothing to the world. If you can make $80K/year as a doctor, and $110K/year on Wall Street, it seems like a pretty obvious decision. But if instead you could make $1.1M/year on Wall Street, suddenly "following your p
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Now, the Great and Powerful Wikipedia is telling me that the PPP GDP/capita is $48K for the US and $35K for France. (PPP vs. Nominal is an important distinction, one I wasn't really thinking about, so good catch there)
My chart shows Nominal PPP -- Production Per Person, not Purchasing Power Parity. Confusing, which is perhaps why some use PPC to mean GDP per capita instead of PPP. Now that you bring it up, perhaps I will start doing that.
I am not a fan of the purchasing power parity metric. From the world economic perspective, measuring a country's production is about how much they produce at the nominal exchange rate. It's not like ten pounds of steel from Switzerland is worth more than ten pounds of identical US steel because Switzerland has lower purchasing power internally.
Purchasing power parity needs lots of context numbers to give it any solid meaning, and it is so often stated without those numbers. In a society with lots of social services (eg: transit, police, trash removal), the citizens could have low purchasing power but still have lots of stuff because they aren't spending as much of their paychecks on transportation, security, and waste management. If those details aren't accounted, I don't think purchasing power parity is very substantive.
If correct, that's 37%, not 10%.
When I made the chart I used 2006 numbers, IIRC. US nominal PPC was about $41k, France was about $37k. France is 10% below the US using those numbers. Using your numbers, the US is 37% above France.
there's little incentive for Wall Street to offer those economy-distorting salaries, and less incentive for workers to take them
Yes, absolutely! I've been pondering the same thing. One of the people I have discussed that angle with is a former investment banker, now private investor. He agreed, and asked if I thought my kind, software engineers, were becoming subject to the same forces and would suffer the same fall from grace. Having spent half a dozen years in Internet advertising, and now working for one of the beasts, I could do no more than wince my assent.
I suspect that is the most significant reason that progressive taxation is correlated with higher long-term GDP growth and flatter taxes are correlated with a stronger boom/bust cycle. The analogy also works in other industries at organizational levels above the individual. Patents have become a collosal distorting incentive causing corporations to engage in GDP-harmful behavior.
I believe that 96% of people are fundamentally good (4% are sociopaths, if I remember that stat right). Getting the 96% to do antisocial things requires incentives. Sex is the oldest one, money is a relative newcomer. Some have a lower barrier than others, or can more easily trick themselves that they are not doing harm. So you get a sliding scale -- the higher the reward differential, the more people defect.
But the other side is also true -- money is a motive to do productive work. So it's not about seeking flat income distribution, and it's not about seeking extreme concentration -- it's about finding the right balance. There are many measures of what is the right balance. To me, fair is making sure everyone winds up with the maximum amount of resources with which to do as they please. That can only be achieved in the long run by maximizing the GDP growth rate.
It is true that a society which has too much income concentration will suffer the ills lamented in The Spirit Level -- and those ills can be measured in a reduced GDP growth rate in the long run. Crime costs GDP. Poor health care costs GDP. Disenfranchisement costs GDP. So you don't have to measure disenfranchisement, crime, and untreated illness. You don't have to try to assign a price to those problems. You don't have to judge whether the woman who doesn't have health care is more satisfied than the man who got mugged, or which one has done more for his fellow citizens to have earned more satisfaction. Much as the silent hand of the free market assigns re
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"13 of which have gone bankrupt"
Ummm 14 now (another today 2 in the last week). The question is now how many more.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Hum. You're kind of assuming that the bank holding the savings is in the same economy, rather than being in say Bermuda. And given that banks operate on a fractional reserve basis and have done forever, I'm not sure that there's much benefit to the economy in you lending another 30k to a bank. Spending the money is a much more direct method of stimulating economic activity.
Well, you can chop off, say, 10% of the 30k as a fractional reserve requirement, and still end up ahead of the game if the remaining 27k is being used to invest in profitable enterprises that create jobs. And of course, if you live somewhere like Kalifornia, you can chop off, say, 10% of each 3k given to ten people for sales tax on any goods and services spending :)
I still think that we've got an open question as to whether money invested in a company has a greater effect on economic growth than money spent by consumers. Yes, fractional reserve requirements will tinge the equation, as will sales taxes. Yes, money in Bermuda is more distant from our economy, but the same can be said for remittances sent back to home countries by recent immigrants. There are doubtless dozens of other minor factors that can come into play on either the "I spent my 30k investing in a gas station" or "I spent my 30k buying 5 used import cars", but I haven't seen it demonstrated that investment is quantitatively worse than direct spending.