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This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For
New submitter fractalVisionz writes "The White House has officially responded to the petition to secure resources and funding to begin Death Star construction by 2016, as previously discussed on Slashdot. With costs estimated over $850,000,000,000,000,000 (that's $850 quadrillion), and a firm policy stating 'The Administration does not support blowing up planets,' the U.S. government will obviously decline. However, that is not to say we don't already have a Death Star of our own, floating approximately 120 miles above the earth's surface. The response ends with a call to those interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields of study: 'If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.'"
A surprisingly good response. Perhaps they decided to answer this question to at least give one good answer on a petition no one took serious.
So: Thanks for the nice answer: Now please answer the serious petitions!
Why go through the expense of blowing up planets when you can kill civilians, citizens even, without any due process.
"His name was James Damore."
'The Administration does not support blowing up planets' that we are on.
rewriting history since 2109
"The Administration does not support blowing up planets"
Unless, of course, said planet was populated with opponents of Israel and/or in a position to disrupt status quo in hydrocarbon trade and acquisition.
Or tried to kill my daddy.
...blowing up planets, unless the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA tell us to.
FTA "Even though the United States doesn't have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs..."
Parsec is a unit of length!
Z
/wooooooooooooooooosh
Funny how they want to engage with the public when it is free and does not upset the interests of any multinationals.
My little Linux and tech blog
You're on Slashdot and you don't recognize this line?
Besides, the use of distance instead of time has been widely explained:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Parsec
Or, the put it in terrestrial terms, imagine that the Kessel Run has to cross a sea with a giant whirlpool vortex - a more capable ship (or a risk taking captain) can skirt closer to the whilrpool, so a captain could boast that he did the Kessel Run in only 12 leagues while others take the longer way around.
I, for one, applaud a little light-heared humor from the Machine that is the Government.
- Ubique, Tom Termini www.bluedog.net - WebObjects / J2EE SOA / iPhone solutions for knowledge workers
Apparently some dumb fucking fantasy is way more important than stopping the rape of children.
Is that what your petition is going to say "stop all the child rape"??? Perhaps you'd do more good in this world with less attitude and more plan...
Another one coming up the pipeline:
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/289919/news/world/white-house-petitioned-to-build-trek-starship-enterprise
Pundits, get your pens ready...
Given the existence of the Jedi religion, the White House's statement that the Force is powerful is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. *folds arms*
It's no worse than the President ending speeches with "God bless America", or opening sessions of Congress with group prayer, so it's unlikely to get spanked by the SC even if the author was serious.
[Although I'd love to see a bunch of right-wing cable TV anger monkeys getting their back up over the establishment clause if a non-Christian fringe-religion President started dropping references to his own wacky New Age religion everywhere. May the Earth-mother praise him.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
You're on Slashdot and you don't recognize this line?
That was from Star Trek, right?
The USA can't afford $471?
Forget Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. I found it on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Wars-Death-10188/dp/B002EEP3NO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358010617&sr=8-1&keywords=death+star
What the hell is this? A death star for ants? How can we be expected to deploy storm troopers to destroy planets... if they can't even fit inside the building?
I don't want to hear your excuses! It will have to be... at least three times as big.
The petition was insane, and so is the Administration's policy that it will respond to all petitions having a certain amount of signatures. It gives the U.S. citizen the illusion that this is a right (see the wording of the Constitution, fx, "to petition the government"); however, the right is easily exercised in other manners. More importantly, it deceives the citizen into believing that the White House is the primary and appropriate channel, and perhaps the very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters. This deceit can be exploited against the citizen. Observe.
tldr: It is a political tactic used to influence citizens to vote straight ticket and under erroneous beliefs about the function of the President. This is not anti-Obama or anti-DNC.
(1) A President signs a bill into law, and assumes sole credit for its positive outcomes, because the people already assume the President was the source of power.
The rammifications here are (a) Voters for a presidential candidate or party line are obtained by campaign promises from the candidate which really should only be achieved by legislative or judicial action. (b) The candidate can focus his campaign around those false promises (What he will do) and not around the realities: What he will sign into law, if Congress gets the bill to his desk. (c) It allows the candidate to neglect the more important function of the President which is what he will not sign into law.
(2) It directs attention away from our legislative representatives. They are first and foremost responsible to the voters. They are the ones to be petitioned. They are the ones to introduce bills to Congress. All this petitioning the President distracts the citizen from the fact that ultimately a handful of committee members are determining the course of the country. This petition policy of the White House discourages people to spend their time and effort by calling upon their state or district reps. The White House prefers us to think the demands of 100,000 people from 50 different states is how decisions ought to be made, not 500 people from a single district (the way it has been done until now). I.e. it's majority rule, no state lines, no representative in the equation, except the President.
(3) It encourages the President to blame Congress when he cannot mandate a petition the administration perhaps does accept. In other words, "Yes, we like your petition. Now balance Congress to my party line, voter, and it may or may not happen." (It doesn't mean the petition will ever enter consideration by the House, but that message can have a strong effect at the polls) It turns ordinary voters into single issue, straight ticket voters whether they realize it or not.
(4) It is a waste of resources, man hours, and staff time. It's just bad business. But apparently it is amazing marketing, I mean politics. It's not like even 1% the voting population will realize what I've said above.
"Mint a trillion dollar platinum coin." "That may sound crazy, but let's seriously consider this proposal."
I agree with the parent poster, minting a trillion dollar coin is a crazy/stupid idea; even if it is technically legal (which is debatable), actually doing it as a "solution" would make the USA look like they are playing silly lawyer-ball games rather than seriously dealing with their debt problem. First-world superpowers should be above such shenanigans.
That said, the only reason such a stupid idea is being debated is as a last-ditch alternative to what would (arguably) be even worse -- having the US government default on its debts. It's one thing to cut spending, but it's quite another for the US Congress to decide it's simply going to refuse pay the bills for money it has already spent. If the Republicans succeed in making that happen, the consequences for the nation will be similar to the consequences for anyone else who decides to simply stop paying their bills: disruption of vital services, a precipitous drop in their credit rating, endless legal red tape, and higher interest rates for the foreseeable future. Even the threat of that happening last year was enough to drop the nation's credit rating. Holding the nation's full faith and credit hostage to promote a political agenda is unacceptable behavior, and any legislators who stoop to such tactics should be summarily tossed out by the voters ASAP.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The point of the debt limit is that there was supposed to be this thing called a budget.... where expenses met income with most years running a surplus that could be used to pay off past debt or even build up a "rainy day fund". Most American states even have such requirements explicitly in their state constitutions.
It has been seen as standard practice now by the U.S. Congress to simply ignore the fact that a budget really should be "balanced" at the end of each year, and for the past several years they haven't even bothered with the fiction of even passing a budget in the first place (which by itself is a violation of the constitution). Frankly spending is so completely out of control now that it is laughably a joke that money needs to be spent for any program, where now trillions of dollars are being talked about as if it was petty cash. Just look at the trillion dollar coin debate if you think otherwise.
If the debt limit is hit, the government can still keep "paying the bills" as it were, but the debt limit law does do a "government shut down" as services deemed "non-essential" are cut. The problem comes when cutting the "non-essential services" aren't enough to even temporarily balance the budget so tax revenue can no longer pay the bills. That gets on to doing things like cutting Social Security monthly allotments or cutting the pay to active duty members of the military.
Ultimately the real problem is trying to balance the budget, which means that the spending spree has to end. What gets cut can be debated, but this debt is becoming so silly that eventually everything will need to be cut just to service the debt. Either that or the debt needs to be inflated away into meaninglessness... which seems to be more of what the Obama administration and congressional leaders seem to be pushing for (aka hyperinflation). Blaming the Republicats for the current problem is spot on... as long as you know who you are talking about.
BTW, the "credit rating" is meaningless as far as credit bureaus are concerned. That is why rating agencies haven't bothered being honest that T-bills really are "junk" value anyway or at least should be considered as such. Then again, I think putting money into any U.S. Dollar denominated bonds of any kind is a silly thing to do right now.
The crazy/stupid thing is the combination of: 1. The appropriations Congress has passed mandating the executive branch to spend money, and 2. The taxes Congress has raised that are insufficient to pay for the appropriations Congress has passed , and 3. The debt limit Congress has imposed and refuses to lift which prohibits the executive branch from borrowing money to meet the spending mandate. The trillion dollar platinum coin is just the one mechanism that has been identified which Congress which resolves the conflicting mandates. As the President is bound to faithfully execute the laws, if it is the only legal mechanism to meet the spending mandate Congress has imposed without also violating the debt limit mandate Congress has imposed (presuming that the debt limit is itself Constitutional, which is a matter of some debate), then it is legally mandatory. Its not crazy or stupid to do it, its crazy and stupid to impose the requirements which would require doing it.
I'm not that familiar with US federal law, but minting a $1tn probably is legal, and more importantly, it is no different from the quantitive easing that Ben Bernanke has been doing for the past 5 years or so.
Sovereign defaults are actually pretty common. There are only 11 countries in the world that have never defaulted on their debt. They are Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Malaysia, Mauritius, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland and England. Sovereign defaults aren't such bad news for a country, it marks the beginning of the end of the crisis, rather than the end of the beginning, and they generally recover quite quickly. Look at Iceland for example.
That thing your calling a "fact", is not a fact, its a preference, and a fairly ludicrous one. There's probably a fairly decent argument to be made that there are economically-desirable consequence if the debt:GDP ratio is kept constant in years of average conditions, allowed to expand in years of relative need (resulting from disaster, recession, etc.), and contracted in years of relative plenty, but for the proposition you make there isn't even a decent argument.
Federal spending as share of GDP is slightly higher than it was in 1983 (less than 1% higher), and down almost a full percent of GDP from its recent peak in 2009. Its much higher than it was at the peak of the dot-com boom at the end of the 1990s, but that's to be expected -- when the private economy is doing well, the need for government spending is at its nadir, while when the private economy is weak, that need is at its zenith.
No, the real problem is trying to restore economic growth, which isn't just a matter of the level of spending (or taxation), but appropriately directing spending and taxes.