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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.
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.
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.
You hate it because, your candidate is not "winning" in this metric. This is part of the problem, everyone is so partisan in this country, that they blind to anything that favors their favorite party.
You call what the Yankees are doing lately "playing"? That's generous.
Duh, both candidates lie. That is given, what they lie about is what matters.
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.
At least it is right now at 9:00 pm..
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.
I wonder how the debates are received in Alpha Centauri
rewriting history since 2109
http://gigaom.com/video/second-presidential-debate-live-stream/
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.
I wonder how the debates are received in Alpha Centauri
Four years too late, I would think.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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...
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.
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.
We can only hope.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
Not if they have quantum computers
rewriting history since 2109
Do they actually differ at all?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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...
"Four years too late, I would think."
Therefore still timely.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
$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.
He's nothing but an opportunist. He's a prick
You don't say who "He" is, but since he's a politician I'm pretty sure you're right on both counts.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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
I'm already outraged at the current 15% rate. Why should people who get richer by sitting on a big pile of money all year pay a lower tax rate than some of us who work our butts off all year?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's like they're very passionate about a bunch of things that I simply don't give a shit about.
Fascinating.
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
The best that can be said about Obama is that he didn't plunge the US in another needless
Really?
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/africa/us-expands-drug-fight-in-africa.html?_r=0
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/americas/honduran-drug-raid-deaths-wont-alter-us-policy.html
http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/20760-war-on-drugs.html
I mean, I guess this war was started before Obama, but it is not as though our military and paramilitary forces are not being utilized for pointless and destructive ends by the Obama administration.
Palm trees and 8
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.
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
Absolutely brilliant.
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.
what they lie about is what matters.
What they don't bother to talk about at all matters a lot more. Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that America has more prisoners than China? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that the TSA is currently operating outside of the law? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that we are using drone strikes to kill American citizens without a trial?
See, there are some issues (some call them "the important issues") that neither major party candidate is even willing to mention. Which is why I do not vote for the major parties.
Palm trees and 8
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?
I suspect that the top 5% gather a lot more than 60% of the income.
Also, last I heard neither he nor his campaign have actually listed any deductions they would eliminate that would have more than the most trivial impact on revenues. Mostly they say they're *not* going to eliminate some particular deduction, when asked about it.
You know the drill -
Democrat: tax and spend
Republican: tax less, spend more, and also balance the budget
That kind of mathmagics is what got us into the hole we're in now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Because they work in Congress?
...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
$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
I am not sure I understand your point. Are you saying he has a fake accent or that he does not? Or that either way it is a stupid thing to take note?
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.
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 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
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/
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 ($1,000 a year). They're nice enough to give us the deductible in a HSA account though each year. Even on the old plan we had pretty high co-pay rates, even for "in network" providers.
Actually, a well-run country maintains some amount of unemployment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
Palm trees and 8
Absolutely brilliant.
I suspect some of these (presumably) low-budget satires end up having more influence than most big-budget campaign ads.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You can say that Romney's plan is vague, but I don't think you can claim that's it's the "dead-on-arrival" plan that Democrats would like people to believe. Consider another reading that takes into account other factors: http://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/228rosen.pdf
In any case, a calculated vagueness is the part of the essence of challengers, and were you to scrutinize past candidates with the same lens with which you scrutinize Romney you'd find that same frustrating vagueness.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Mitt Romney was the governor of my state. He fucked us over and then quit to run for the presidency in 2008 in an attempt to FUCK OVER the whole country.
Why did you (as a state) elect him?
It's a serious question - did he renege on his promises or has he screwed up the implementation of what you actually wanted him to do or what?
Live feed was still running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jyf6RW1JqF0
A well run business employs as few people as possible
The strategy described by the post you're replying to hasn't got anything to do with running a business. It's about using a business a a consumable resource for a MAKE MONEY FA$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
Ah, now I realize it is a slight African American accent. I feel stupid to have brought it up now! I have never noted this in his speeches.
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?
Because they will take that money out of the funds and investments and horde it or put it into something else where no one but them has access to it. Economy stagnates. That money in investments comes with risk. Why risk your money that big chucks are coming out in taxes when you could not invest it, reduce the risk and pay the same taxes on any income you make with it?
You as a person that works your butt off all years can invest a percentage of your money in investments and pay the same 15% on money you make with it. Why won't you do that? Risk involved? Scared? If investments and capital gains are such a great thing, what have you got to lose? You'll make more than what you put in back, sacrifice something for one year. Not worth the risk to you is it?
Your prediction was wrong, they talked about the trade deficit.
The argument is that the rich will leave the country if you raise taxes, and you lose even the taxes you are currently collecting. The middle class and the poor are less likely to do.
I, personally, dont subscribe to this idea. The rich have very few places in the developed world to move to. I would say it is a bluff. Even if they move, the void will pretty soon be filled up someone else who starts a company (or whatever the rich were doing here).
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.
Er, I am not sure why you think it would discourage investments. It is only the gains that are taxed, not the principle. And are you saying that the govt should subsidized these risky investments by taxing them at a lower percentage?
I get your point, but one of the reasons US has more prisoners than China is because executions are more common in China.
Facts are better than comparisons, in my book.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
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!
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.
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..
Third candidates will never work in the USA, unless the entire electoral system is completely overhauled, which is not likely to happen. The people in power like the system the way it is.
Too bad all of the millionaires in Congress love NAFTA.
If the alternative is no jobs for all, i think you would welcome government jobs.
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
He didn't even finish the term he was elected to.
Im not sure if you are lying due to lack of scruples, or are ignorant. According to wikipedia (and, im sure, public record),
Romney filed to register a presidential campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission on his penultimate day in office as governor.[225] His term ended January 4, 2007. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney#Tenure.2C_2003.E2.80.9307 , last line before the next section)
Heres the real irony / hypocrisy: Barack Obama really DIDNT finish out his term due to the presidential election. He was elected in 2005, and resigned in 2008-- only halfway thru his term. Normally, this really isnt a big deal, and noone I know (even republicans) made a stink about that because its not unusual for presidential candidates.
But I point it out because of the hilarity and hypocrisy-- you accuse Romney of something that not he, but Obama did. Its actually kind of like how Obama blamed bush for "unauthorized wars" (despite them being authorized), and then launched an unauthorized military action of his own.
No, people would put the money elsewhere where there was less risk and or less taxes and that elsewhere would be in areas that did not encourage investment and growth.
Again, if capital gains at 15% is such a good deal, why aren't those complaining about it getting in on it too? Nothing is stopping them from participating. The tax laws are the same for everyone doing it.
Lets hear it for the 40-50% of working Americans that pay ZERO federal tax a year!
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?
As things stand, they're going to finish squeezing all the juice out of my country, and then leave anyway.
To squeeze another country, if there's another that's foolish enough to tolerate it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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"?
Please educate yourself... You need to expand beyond rhetoric and 30 second political commercials for your information.
Romney paid 14% in federal taxes. That was just over 3 million dollars.
Here is what the average american pays in federal taxes as a percentage of their income..
Bottom fifth of earners: -12.3 percent
Second-to-bottom fifth: -4.2 percent
Middle fifth: 4.1 percent
Second-highest fifth: 8.2 percent
Highest fifth: 17.3 percent
Do you know who paid a higher federal tax % then Romney? Not the bottom 80% of earners, the top 20% did. Who is sucking the juice? The bottom 80% of earners. Look at the negative percentages too.
Total payroll taxes instead of federal taxes s a little different but not much.
Here is the raw data:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=3277
Here is a story with an explanation of that data
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/09/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-most-americans-pay-higher-tax-ra/
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.
Distinctly Kenyan accent? With a hint of Muslim? :-D
Doesn't sound Hawaiian.
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.
Most middle class people who have money invested do so through their 401k and/or IRA, which don't have capital gains taxes apply to them.
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
The transcript is seriously incomplete. Watch the video. "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation"
Working for a living ain't a risk?
Play Command HQ online
We're way overbalanced towards investment.
Play Command HQ online
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?
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.
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.
Romney paid 14% in federal taxes. That was just over 3 million dollars.
Here is what the average american pays in federal taxes as a percentage of their income..
[...]
Do you know who paid a higher federal tax % then Romney? Not the bottom 80% of earners, the top 20% did. Who is sucking the juice? The bottom 80% of earners.
As it happens, *I* paid a higher rate than Romney. Why should he pay a lower rate than I do? Because he invests and I work?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I suspect that the top 5% gather a lot more than 60% of the income.
They don't. They make ~35% of the income.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
If they are able to get the economy expanding, create jobs, and widen the tax base, which will also help cut government spending for social services such as unemployment, the Republican plan can work, assuming some spending control.
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
Not just the electoral system, but if ever elected, congress will just do whatever without regard to them. They will be forced to follow or look a fool for the most part. A third party will have no support for thier initiative or policies in congress and will end up being worse then Jimmy Carter when the dems in congress abandoned him.
The pipeline in question will only bring oil into the US. It was halted by the administration suing over a few dead birds found near the existing parts of it. Nothing concrete has been determined to be caused by the pipeline but that doesn't stop them.
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
Romney was basically MIA for the last year of his term. He came, he shit, he screwed, in that order.
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
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.
Wow, that card is getting really played out by now.
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.
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!
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.
Technically Romney didn't resign, but as a resident of Massachusetts, I saw that after getting "Romneycare" passed, Romney pretty much blew off his job and and worked full-time to position himself to run for President. This really pissed off the residents of Massachusetts. Everyone would have understood if he'd resigned because he was elected to another position, because as you point out that's how elections often work. But blowing off the job you were elected for, because you're not taking it seriously but just using it as a "stepping stone" to your next job, was insulting. The original poster is right - in Massachusetts, the consensus is that Romney didn't finish the job he was elected to.
To address your second point, arguably the invasion of Iraq was unauthorized. Congress authorized the President to take action against whoever was behind the 9/11 attacks, which was the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and there was never any evidence of a connection - we now know that "connection" was all invented by the Bush administration without any supporting evidence or even rational basis (Saddam Hussein was the ENEMY of the Taliban) in order to provide a legal basis for an invasion that they had planned out well before 9/11.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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.
Who is getting squeezed?
2. What income group pays the most federal income taxes today?
The latest data show that a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shouldered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent—those below the median income level—now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes. These are proportions of the income tax alone and don’t include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.
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
The argument is that the rich will leave the country if you raise taxes, and you lose even the taxes you are currently collecting. The middle class and the poor are less likely to do.
I, personally, dont subscribe to this idea. The rich have very few places in the developed world to move to. I would say it is a bluff. Even if they move, the void will pretty soon be filled up someone else who starts a company (or whatever the rich were doing here).
France's proposed tax hikes spark 'exodus' of wealthy
In Maryland, Higher Taxes Chase Out Rich: Study
Caterpillar threatens to leave Illinois over taxes
Through the magic of commerce they can move and continue their business from a new location.
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
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.
If they are able to get the economy expanding, create jobs, and widen the tax base, which will also help cut government spending for social services such as unemployment, the Republican plan can work, assuming some spending control.
But alas, all the evidence shows that reducing taxes on the self-declared "job creator" class doesn't actually create jobs or increase the GDP. If you've seen the timelines that show tax rates vs those effects, you've seen that the correlation is actually somewhat negative.
The whole "job creators" mantra is just more propaganda for the decades-long attempt to spin greed as a virtue.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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 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
And Obama ducked out on the last 3 years of his senate term. Wheres your moral outrage with Obama?
Oh, right, it only extends to one half of the aisle. Way to stay unbiased and non-partisan.
But why go after Romney for "arguably" blowing off one out of his 4 years in office, and not after Obama who blew off 3 of 6? BOTH used it as a political stepping stone, this isnt unusual.
To address your second point, arguably the invasion of Iraq was unauthorized
Not at all, no it wasnt. Iraq had their own congressional authorization, distinct from the one for Afghanistan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists
Congress EXPLICITLY authorized both Iraq and Afghanistan. If you check the Iraq resolution, youll see that there were SEVERAL factors that (supposedly) led to its issuance. The idea that Bush had any "unauthorized" military actions is just stuff. Obama however had NO congressional approval for the deployment in Libya, despite complaining for years about the "illegal Bush wars".
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.
Who is the best alternative in 2012?
Since you say you voted for Nader, I'll point you here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Stein_presidential_campaign,_2012
Palm trees and 8
Sure, but the US also arrests more people each year, and the overwhelming majority of people arrested and subsequently imprisoned in this country never receive a trial (not that China is much better when it comes to court trials, but that is not really the standard we should be seeking in the USA). There is also the fact that China does not execute nearly enough people to close the gap, and that American prisons have an even greater profit motive than Chinese prisons (here in America, prisons are a "growth industry" that are giving big paydays to their investors; the Chinese are sticking to "selling organs and labor" when it comes to making imprisoning people a profitable activity).
Palm trees and 8
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
But why go after Romney for "arguably" blowing off one out of his 4 years in office, and not after Obama who blew off 3 of 6? BOTH used it as a political stepping stone, this isnt unusual.
Romney kept his job as governor and ignored his position and the commonwealth he was entrusted to protect for a year to run for president. Obama resigned his position to run. There's a big difference between those two courses of action.
Obama officially quit after winning the presidency. Romney just stopped working. There's a big difference between resigning and not showing up for work.
Besides that, Obama was a long-time resident of Illinois. Romney was a carpet-bagger.
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.
Does that mean that chinese executions + chinese prisoners > us executions + us prisoners?
And then the Libertarians come out to play.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think I'm doing just fine in remaining unbiased. I've voted for republican presidential candidates but never for a democrat. This one's different because I know that Romney is a liar and a thief.
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
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
He said the capital gains tax would be eliminated for those making under $250k, so no change for the uber-rich investors.
That said, I think if capital gains make up more than 50% of your income, it should get taxed at the standard income tax rate (excluding 401ks, IRAs, etc.). If you can make investing pay like a full-time job, it should be taxed as such.
My webcomic
I call bullshit unless you are in the top 1-5% of earners.
Call away. Single head of household, good job (for now), diddly for deductions, > 15%. It happens.[*]
And that's income tax as a percentage of my total income, not "all taxes", not percent of income after standard deductions.
And I'm nowhere near the top 1%-5%.
[*] And I'm not complaining about it. I'm just disgusted with the crybabies who want the benefits of living in a first-world nation without paying their share. We've become a country where the more you have, the stronger sense of entitlement you have.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
I agree these guys can just go and they can take their fucking money with them - but they can't unless they want to liquidate all their productive assets in the US which would cause the price of those assets to drop which would not neccesarily be a bad thing - real wealth comes from human knowledge and physical infrastructure, these people own the infrastructure and the _think_ they own the people who know how to do shit, what they would realize when they leave is the US physical infrastructure isn't going anywhere and that the people who know how to do shit are not going with them. Honestly, a lot of these guys are just human parasites who say whatever they think they need to say to get ahead, I see these guys every day where I work - they destroy and dismantle physical and human infrastructure to pay themselves at every opprotunity and nobody misses them when they leave.
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.
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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Also, the guy Nader has actually endorsed: http://www.voterocky.org/rocky_barack_mitt
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.
See, there are some issues (some call them "the important issues") that neither major party candidate is even willing to mention.
A damn good point...
Which is why I do not vote for the major parties.
...whereupon they are proven completely justified in ignoring you and your concerns, and will never have any incentive whatsoever to address this. This is precisely how things get so badly out of whack in this country. For better or worse, you can't win if you don't play the game.
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.
:(){
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.
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.
The problem with that reasoning is that the candidates have no reason or incentive to address major issues when people are willing to vote for them as a "compromise." The fact that millions of Americans living in communities that have been hardest-hit by the war on drugs voted for Barack Obama only proved to the Democrats that "business and usual" will not lose any votes for them. The fact that millions of fiscal conservatives vote for Republicans only proves to the Republicans that "business as usual" will not lose any votes for them. The fact that the same people who decry the loss of constitutional rights publicly endorse the major parties removes whatever incentive those parties had to reverse that trend.
If you need more evidence, consider the fear amongst both Democrats and (especially) Republicans over Gary Johnson (note that I do not actually plan to vote for him -- I am not a libertarian):
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/us/politics/gary-johnson-the-libertarian-partys-presidential-nominee-worries-republicans.html?pagewanted=all
Let's not forget the outrage over Ralph Nader in 2000, and the way the Democrats blamed him for Bush's victory (rather than saying, "Gee, maybe those people that support us want something other than what Gore had to offer").
Palm trees and 8
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.
He didn't say they were playing baseball...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
First, an executive order cannot change law or create laws. They can only direct the executive branch in how they operate. Second, Congress can at any time, create law rescinding any executive order. The president is not above the law and cannot ignore an act of congress. Third, if the administration does ignore an act of congress, it can easily be impeached- just ask Andrew Jackson.
So congress can do shit. They can do a lot of shit, and with a third party president in office, they are not likely to be muddled down by party politics and buck the impeachment process or anything. They will have no problem coming together and overriding a veto either. Congress can and probably will have their way with the third party administration because there is no party support in congress.
Sigh.. Are you saying that Canada doesn't have the capability to export it's own oil? Are you saying that somehow oil companies in the US can make money by buying Canadian oil at market prices and selling it again at market prices after transporting it 4000 miles instead of 1600 or so to a Canadian port?
It goes to ports because we have some refineries at ports. It really is that simple. If any of it is sold and shipped out, it would only be because it is being switched with much lighter sweet crude that doesn't cost as much to refine given US environmental laws. We have been doing that for decades by the way, selling US oil to Japan and China that doesn't have as oppressive environmental regulations as the US does in order to buy lighter crude that doesn't cost as much to refine into US products.
Texas and Oklahoma both execute a higher percentage of its population than China does.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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
As I do not live in massachussets, I am not on top of such assertions. The problem is, whether Romney slacked off in the last year is a matter of opinion, not fact. That Obama resigned early is not, and as the complaint was "political opportunism", that seems awfully relevant in my book.
But I appreciate the "wanker" comment right after complaining about (imagined) strawmen: answer fallacies with fallacies, thatll show em.
I dont really care who youve voted for. Busting out the name calling you did earlier in the thread and the one sided criticism you launched into here is absurd, and deserves to be called out as such.
Claiming to be "unbiased' after calling romney a "cocksucker" (earlier) and a "prick" (this thread)? Unbiased my foot.
Look give Romney his tax cut, he in turn will hire extra workers (Miguel the gardener, Juanita the cleaner).
No he won't.
Romney already has enough money that if he actually wanted to hir Miguel and Juanita, he would already have done so.
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!
No fear from Democrats, they love Johnson. He may help them win North Carolina.
The thing is, big issues like Gay Marriage, Abortion, and even Prohibition back in the day, only became big issues because one of the two major parties felt it was in their electoral advantage to take up the issue. That will only happen if it is something some of their supporters care about, (or better yet, some of the other guy's supporters might disagree with him on). If the only people who care about it don't vote, or are locked up by third parties (same thing really), then there's no benifit, so they can keep on ignoring it. And they will.
You can't win if you don't play.
No fear from Democrats, they love Johnson. He may help them win North Carolina.
Yeah but he may hurt them elsewhere, because he supports legalizing marijuana, which is a popular sentiment among young, college-educated voters -- the very group that Obama's campaign has been getting support from.
The thing is, big issues like Gay Marriage
Gay marriage is not a big issue; it is an issue, but one that has been played up as a convenient distraction that candidates can use to pretend they are more right or left wing than they truly are. Gay rights was the big issue several decades ago -- you know, back when men were legally prohibited from dancing with each other at New York City night clubs. The end of sodomy laws (nearly a decade ago) marked the end of the major gay rights battles in America; gay marriage is worth considering, but it is hardly as serious an issue as earlier gay rights struggles.
That will only happen if it is something some of their supporters care about
Thus explaining why Obama's administration stepped up the number of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries (more in half a term than in all the Bush years combined), why Obama failed to veto the NDAA bill allowing for indefinite detentions without a trial, why Obama continued the warrantless wiretapping program, why Obama has increased the use of drone strikes (including against Americans), etc., etc., etc. These are things that large numbers of Obama supporters were opposed to, things that the Bush administration was harshly criticized for by many of those same Obama supporters.
Obama's administration has a TSA that is operating in violation of the law, yet Mitt Romney has not bothered to call him out on it -- despite the fact that many Obama supporters and many Romney supporters (those with libertarian leanings) are opposed to the body scanner program.
What you are confused about is the difference between the Democrats of 50 years ago (who were left of center sometimes) and today's Democrats (who are right of center always). Today's Democrats will do things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Iraq_(December_1998)
Spend money on things like these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_combat_aerial_vehicle
And lie to Americans about this sort of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACTA
We can find a nice bijection with Republicans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA
Oh, sorry, that last one has some overlap (but so does ACTA).
Palm trees and 8
I'd say the same things about Obama if they were applicable.
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.